Premiership of Tony Blair
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The Premiership of Tony Blair began on 2 May 1997 and ended on 27 June 2007. While serving as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Blair concurrently served as the First Lord of the Treasury, the Minister for the Civil Service, the Leader of the Labour Party (until Gordon Brown was declared Labour leader on 24 June 2007), and a Member of Parliament for the constituency of Sedgefield in County Durham. He remains a Privy Counsellor having first been appointed in July 1994 when he became Leader of the Opposition. Blair is the Labour Party's longest-serving Prime Minister, and having led the party to three consecutive general election victories, the only Labour prime minister to serve two full consecutive terms.
Blair is both credited with and criticised for moving the Labour Party towards the centre of British politics, using the term "New Labour" to distinguish his pro-market policies from the more collectivist policies which the party had espoused in the past.
In domestic government policy, Blair significantly increased public spending on health and education while also introducing controversial market-based reforms in these areas. In addition Blair's tenure saw the introduction of a minimum wage, tuition fees for higher education, constitutional reform such as devolution in Scotland and Wales, and progress in the Northern Ireland peace process. The British economy performed well, Blair kept to Conservative commitments not to increase income tax in the first term although rates of Employee's National Insurance (a payroll levy) were increased.
Blair strongly supported US foreign policy, notably by participating in the invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003.
On 7 September 2006 Blair publicly stated he would step down as party leader by the time of the TUC conference in September 2007. On 10 May 2007 he announced his intention to resign as Prime Minister on 27 June 2007.
[edit] First term 1997 to 2001
[edit] Independence for the Bank of England
Immediately after taking office, Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown gave the Bank of England the power to set the UK base rate of interest autonomously, as agreed in 1992 in the Treaty of Maastricht. This decision was popular with the British financial establishment in London, which the Labour Party had been courting since the early 1990s. Together with the Government's decision to remain within projected Conservative spending limits for its first two years in office, it helped to reassure sceptics of the Labour Party's fiscal "prudence".
[edit] Domestic politics
| Styles of Tony Blair, British Prime Minister |
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| Style | Right Honourable (Rt.Hon.) | |
| Post nominals | MP | |
In the early years of his first term, Blair relied for his political advice on a close circle of his staff, among whom was his press secretary and official spokesman Alastair Campbell. Campbell was permitted to give orders to civil servants, who had previously taken instructions only from ministers. Unlike some of his predecessors, Campbell was a political appointee and had not come up through the Civil Service. Despite his overtly political role, he was paid from public funds as a civil servant.
A significant achievement of Blair's first term was the signing, on 10 April 1998, of the Belfast Agreement, generally known as the Good Friday Agreement. In the Good Friday Agreement, most Northern Irish political parties, together with the British and Irish Governments, agreed upon an "exclusively peaceful and democratic" framework for the governance of Northern Ireland and a new set of political institutions for the province. In November 1998 Blair became the first British Prime Minister to address Dáil Éireann.
Blair's first term saw an extensive programme of changes to the constitution. The Human Rights Act was introduced in 1998; a Scottish Parliament and a Welsh Assembly were set up; most hereditary peers were removed from the House of Lords in 1999; the Greater London Authority and the post of Mayor of London were established in 2000; and the Freedom of Information Act was passed later in the same year, with its provisions coming into effect over the following decade. This last Act disappointed campaigners[citation needed], whose hopes had been raised by a 1998 White Paper which had promised more robust legislation. Also, whether the House of Lords should be fully appointed, fully elected, or be subject to a combination of the two remains a disputed question. 2003 saw a series of inconclusive votes on the matter in the House of Commons.
Significant change took place to legislation relating to rights of lesbian and gay and transgender people during Blair's period in office. During his first term, the age of consent for gay sex was equalised at 16 (see Sexual Offences (Amendment) Act 2000) and the ban on gays in the armed forces was lifted. Subsequently, in 2005, a Civil Partnership Act came into effect, allowing gay couples to form legally recognised partnerships. At the end of September 2006 more than 30,000 Britons had entered into Civil Partnerships as a result of this law.[1] Adoption by gay couples was legalised, and discrimination in the workplace (Employment Equality (Sexual Orientation) Regulations 2003), and in relation to the provision of goods and services (Equality Act (Sexual Orientation) Regulations) were both made illegal. Transgender people were given the right to change their birth certificate to reflect their new gender as a result of the Gender Recognition Act 2004.
Tony Blair's touch was less sure with regard to the Millennium Dome project. The incoming government greatly expanded the size of the project and consequently increased expectations of what would be delivered. Just before its opening Blair claimed the Dome would be "a triumph of confidence over cynicism, boldness over blandness, excellence over mediocrity".[2] In the words of BBC correspondent Robert Orchard, "the Dome was to be highlighted as a glittering New Labour achievement in the next election manifesto".[3]
[edit] Foreign policy
In 1999, Blair planned and presided over the declaration of the Kosovo War. While in opposition, the Labour Party had criticised the Conservatives for their perceived weakness during the Bosnian war, and Blair was among those urging a strong line by NATO against Slobodan Milošević. Blair was criticised both by those on the Left who opposed the war[citation needed] in principle and by some others who believed that the Serbs were fighting a legitimate war of self-defence. One month into the war, on 22 April 1999, Blair made a speech in Chicago setting out his "Doctrine of the International Community".[4]. This later became known by the media as the "Blair doctrine".
Also in 1999, Blair was awarded the Charlemagne Award by the German city of Aachen for his contributions to the European ideal and to peace in Europe.
[edit] Second term 2001 to 2005
In the 2001 general election campaign, Blair emphasised the theme of improving public services, notably the National Health Service and the State education system. The Conservatives concentrated on opposing British membership of the Euro, which did little to win over floating voters. The Labour Party preserved its majority, and Blair became the first Labour Prime Minister to win a full second term. However, the election was notable for a large fall in voter turnout.
Following the 11 September 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, Blair was very quick to align the UK with the United States, engaging in a round of shuttle diplomacy to help form and maintain an international coalition prior to the 2001 war against Afghanistan. He maintains his diplomatic activity to this day, showing a willingness to visit countries that other world leaders might consider too dangerous to visit. In 2003, he became the first Briton since Winston Churchill to be awarded a Congressional Gold Medal by the United States Congress for being "a staunch and steadfast ally of the United States of America",[5] although media attention has been drawn to the fact that Blair has yet to attend the ceremony to receive his medal; some commentators[citation needed] pointed to the unpopularity in Britain of his support for the U.S. as the explanation for the delay. In 2003, Blair was also awarded an Ellis Island Medal of Honor for his support of the United States after 9/11—the first non-American to receive the honour.[6]
[edit] Iraq war
Blair gave strong support to US President George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq in 2003. He soon became the face of international support for the war, often clashing with French President Jacques Chirac, who became the face of international opposition. Widely regarded as a more persuasive speaker than Bush, Blair gave many speeches arguing for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in the days leading up to the invasion.
Blair's case for war was based on Iraq's alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction and consequent violation of UN resolutions. He was wary of making direct appeals for regime change, since international law does not recognise this as a ground for war. A memorandum from a July 2002 meeting that was leaked in April 2005 showed that Blair believed that the British public would support regime change in the right political context; the document, however, stated that legal grounds for such action were weak. On 24 September 2002 the Government published a dossier based on the intelligence agencies' assessments of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Among the items in the dossier was a recently received intelligence report that "the Iraqi military are able to deploy chemical or biological weapons within 45 minutes of an order to do so". A further briefing paper on Iraq's alleged WMDs was issued to journalists in February 2003. This document was discovered to have taken a large part of its text without attribution from a PhD thesis available on the internet. Where the thesis hypothesised about possible WMDs, the Downing Street version presented the ideas as fact. The document subsequently became known as the "Dodgy Dossier".[7]
Forty-six thousand British troops, one-third of the total strength of the British Army (land forces), were deployed to assist with the invasion of Iraq. When after the war, no WMDs were found in Iraq, the two dossiers, together with Blair's other pre-war statements, became an issue of considerable controversy. Many Labour Party members, including a number who had supported the war, were among the critics. Successive independent inquiries (including those by the Foreign Affairs Select Committee of the House of Commons, the senior judge Lord Hutton, and the former senior civil servant Lord Butler of Brockwell) have found that Blair honestly stated what he believed to be true at the time, though Lord Butler's report did imply[citation needed] that the Government's presentation of the intelligence evidence had been subject to some degree of exaggeration. These findings have not prevented frequent accusations that Blair was deliberately deceitful, and, during the 2005 election campaign, Conservative leader Michael Howard made political capital out of the issue.
Then Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, stated in September 2004 that the invasion was "illegal", but did not state the legal basis for this assertion. Prior to the war, the UK Attorney General Lord Goldsmith, who acts as the Government's legal adviser, had advised Blair that the war was legal.
British armed forces were active in southern Iraq to stabilise the country in the run-up to the Iraqi elections of January 2005. In October 2004, the UK government agreed to a request from US forces to send a battalion of the Black Watch regiment to the American sector in order to free up US troops for an assault on Fallujah. The subsequent deployment of the Black Watch was criticised by some in Britain on the grounds that its alleged ultimate purpose was to assist George Bush's re-election[citation needed] in the 2004 US presidential election. As of September 2006, seven thousand and five hundred British forces remain in Southern Iraq, around the city of Basra. After the presidential election, Blair tried to use his relationship with President Bush to persuade the US to devote efforts to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
In an interview with David Frost on Al Jazeera in November 2006, Blair appeared to agree with Frost's assessment that the war had been "pretty much of a disaster", although a Downing Street spokesperson denied that this was an accurate reflection of Blair's view. [8]
[edit] Domestic politics
After fighting the 2001 election on the theme of improving public services, Blair's government raised taxes in 2002 (described b