This was written in the early hours of the morning so be kind

Blair's Legacy.

Its very easy to reduce the last ten year's of labour government under blair to a serirs of Sucess's and Failures. Among the success's are the minimum wage, bank of england independence, reductions in child and pensioner poverty, flexible work hours for mothers, maturity leave double in value and triple in time off, hospital's and schools no longer in rack and ruin after 18 years of conservative failures, 70% more teaching applicats ,increased nursing numbers , children able to read at 11 from 59% to 79% in just ten years , also in 1997 283,866 people waited more than 6 months for an operation now there are only 199, Tax credits for the unemployed, families, pensioners. Civil partnerships, the human rights act, devolution in wales and scotland and peace in northern Ireland. All of which fundamentally change the way we live today and would not have happened under an other government. But the problem with progressive politics is that people always want more and better. they elected you because they want change , and so they should thats why im a member of the labour party because i believe that people's life's can always be improved and if you stand still in politics you get left behind. Despite all this there have been mistakes , domestically tuition fee's have been unpopular , personally i feel ID cards and the attempt to have 90 day detention of terror suspects where invasions of our civil liberties. Iraq cannot be ignored and for the near future it is how Blair will be remembered. He will be remembered as the man who took the country to war on evidence which was wrong and led iraq onto the brink of civil war. Whislt i marched against the war and believe it was a grave error, this is not an error i put entriely at Blairs feet. When all is said and done he acted on the advice of the sucuirty services who got things wrong, personally i feel the claims that tony blair willfully mislead the country and knew that iraq posed no threat have as much validity as the various 9/11 conspircy theroies ... in short, poppy cock of the worst kind. I do not belive he knowily lied, however the decision should not have been taken and the williness to follow the American administration in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks was misplaced and has cost many lives.

However possible the most important part of Blair's Legacy is the modern day conservative party. They voted against the mininum wage , extra spending on helath and eductaion, gay rights, the human rights act, devolution, Climate change policy. all things they now claim they support and are intrgral the mordern britain. the blair has changed the face of british politics to the point that the conservative party are being forced to be progressive because thats what the public want , no longer will people accept hospitals that are falling down and pay thats is next to nothing. A conservative party which talked about supporting civil partnerships and in favour of the mininum wage is a unheared of 10 or 5 years ago. If you want to gauge how sucessful the goverment has been just look at how much the conservative now accept, and this is not because they are right wing policies ( just look at the spending in public services) its becuase they are sucessfull and progressive. But just a word of warning, when Tony blair took over the leadership of the party in 1994 he changed it because he believe it needed to change to meet the new challenges, yes he wanted to win elections but the change was made with firm policy and ideology, david cameron is going back on everything he has ever said or believed in because he wants to gain power.

Whislt this may be hard for many to take, i am not a blairite however i do feel that britian is a far better place now than 10 years ago and alot of that has to do with the leadership of Tony Blair.


This was a totally un-bais party political broadcast by Dan Taylor ( well ok maybe a little Bias) next time Gordon Brown and what the new prime minister means for britain