Leadership Reflections with Steve Richards - 4 Tony Blair

Comments · 59

• CA

  @CaiLife · 5 years ago

  This series deserves many more views - really informative and well constructed!

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• TE

  @teddybeddy123 · 7 years ago

  I'm no Blairite but I do think, given his electoral success, that he and his policies, in concert with Gordon Brown, were the right thing for the time. However, it is incredibly reductive and hubristic to think that any one set of policy ideas can be the right answer for all time, no matter the facts.

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• SA

  @saikicae · 3 years ago

  slay

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• ER

  @erickleefeld4883 · 3 years ago

  The whole New Labour project was in many ways an inferior imitation of the changes that had occurred decades earlier in the Australian Labor Party, as it had evolved from being an older socialist party toward modern social democracy. (Ironically, they were in power during nearly all the Thatcher/Major years, and lost office a year before Blair’s first election.)<br><br>A key difference is that the ALP’s evolution had occurred naturally, headed up by various leaders and grassroots activists who pursued social democracy for the middle class as a genuine vision. New Labour was imposed from above, and without its principal leaders it was soon held in disgrace and overtaken by the left wing.

• RO

  @robin_verona · 9 years ago

  His support for the Iraq was not merely, or even primarily, born out of a desire not to be seen as anti-American, but because he felt this was a fundamental battle between right and wrong, good and evil. This came from his religious beliefs.

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• BR

  @brucemclennan9715 · 2 years ago

  Mr. Richards does not like Tony Blair. I have just watched his video of Gordon Brown and the attitude difference is stark. Starting even with Blair’s picture on the screen: it almost looks sinister, like a Nuremberg photo, despite the fact that Blair was always smiling in public and genial. Also, it’s ironic that Blair’s preference to join the Euro currency was cast aside by Richards, as Brexit couldn’t have happened if there had a shared currency. UK shares defence (NATO) with Europe, and Blair was right to consider joining the Euro.

• EA

  @eamonnrogers508 · 4 years ago

  I love your analysis but I do think with respect to Iraq you are too forgiving. His zeal to appease the US outweighed his responsibility to the British public and more pertinently to the young men and women he sent to war and to Iraqi citizens who perished. You make a positive about getting the UN involved and then brush over the fact that when he didn’t get the newer out if the UN he and the US wanted he just overrode it. This was the as David Owen has eloquently stated the biggest failure in British cabinet government and foreign policy disaster since Suez.

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• BO

  @BossySwan · 6 years ago

  3 words to sum up Blair in retrospect: snake oil salesman

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• BR

  @brucemclennan9715 · 2 years ago

  Dear Mr. Richards, your summary of Blair’s time in politics must be tempered by the fact that Blair won: not one, not two, but three elections by the people of UK. How fortunate to be able to reflect back, in a ‘cherry-picking’ style, to try and denigrate Blair- like someone roaming a battlefield after the fact, to shoot the survivors. Your throw-off line: ‘he had some success in Northern Ireland’ , is laughable, in that it ignores the significance of the moment, and your whole ‘raisin d’etre’ is to provide CONTEXT……

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