Some of the most significant policies of the government under the leadership of Tony Blair are outlined below: High profile policies during the Blair premiership include: Making the Bank of England independent (therefore allowing it set interest rates without political interference). Tony Blair led Labour to general election victory on 2 May 1997. In addition to Europe and economic policy, the issue of increased levels of immigration into Britain after 2000 further divided the Conservatives. Labour’s landslide victory in 1997, which undoubtedly benefited from the inspirational leadership Blair seemed to offer, nevertheless may have been less the result of an unbounded belief in New Labour than of the discrediting of the Conservative Party. The battle for the soul of the Conservative Party was joined with growing fervour with the election of David Cameron in December 2005 as its modernizing leader. Twenty years after Tony Blair was elected as Labour leader, his former political secretary considers how history will judge him He said the action was necessary "to prevent Slobodan Milosevic from continuing to perpetrate his vile oppression against the Kosovo Albanian people". If the popularity of the monarchy survived, it was largely the result of the queen’s persona; the royal family as a whole—itself the idealized media creation of late Victorian times—frequently had become the object of ridicule. Just listen to Blunkett shouting down the microphone! He was the Member of Parliament (MP) for Sedgefield from 1983 to 2007. Since 1997, we have: Taken a lead internationally, as at Kyoto. However, the Labour Party’s implementation of the Social Chapter was at best halfhearted, and its goal became to influence as much as possible the EU itself to moderate the operations of the chapter. Although large amounts of public money had been spent, particularly on the health service, much of this went into elaborating the new and highly evolved structures of management that came to characterize Labour administration of the state. Blair quickly attained unquestioned authority as leader, which was further underlined by Labour's landslide victory in the 1997 general election. In a more globalized and war-ridden world, the burgeoning flow of asylum seekers into Britain added to this climate, as did the “war on terror.” Asian Muslims, many of them long-standing British citizens and British-born, were nonetheless frequently lumped with immigrants and asylum seekers as part of an undifferentiated external threat to Britishness. Blair’s government was also more and more taken up with the question of whether Britain should stay in or remain outside the European monetary union. However, it was on the Conservative side that Britain’s relationship with Europe was most urgently a party issue. VAT reg no 816865400. Blair did not want the UK to leave the EU. 'Tony Blair has refused to apologise for the Iraq war, and periodically pops up to argue that he was right all along.' The 1990s were a period of transition and controversy for the monarchy. It was perhaps symbolic of the contradictions of this modernity that the dome was dogged by controversy regarding its cost and design and the bridge by the fiasco of its opening, when it was found to move alarmingly above the waters of the Thames when in public use. In 1997 the then PM Tony Blair established the Referendums (Scotland and Wales) Act, which allowed the countries to vote on devolution. Notwithstanding widespread and enormous public protests against war, the resignation of several government ministers, and the support of some one-third of the parliamentary Labour Party for a motion opposing the government’s policy, Blair remained steadfast in his conviction that Saddam was an imminent threat that had to be removed. This process had been started before 1992 by Neil … Nonetheless, the difficult and what came to be the increasingly troubled task of combining aspects of Thatcherism with the idea of a “social market” gathered momentum. Unter seiner Parteiführung gewann Labour 1997 die britischen Unterhauswahlen und beendete damit die 18-jährige Regierungszeit der Konservativen Partei. Company Reg no: 04489574. devolution, freedom of information, Lords Reform, etc.). The need for fundamental reappraisal had been urged as early as 1981, with the founding of the Social Democratic Party, when prominent Labour Party politicians, led by Roy Jenkins, seceded from the party in an attempt to “break the mould” of British politics. The system that Labour inherited after 20 years of Conservative rule was, according to former government health adviser and professor of health economics Julian Le Grand, “creaking at the seams”. Boston House, As with financial deregulation, the emphasis in labour affairs was on the market. Blair … Clips from April 1995 and January 1997. This report examines the record behind, rather than the rhetoric around, these claims. Mon 14 Apr 2014 04.28 EDT. There was also to be increasing attention to the importance of the media, an attention that the Tories had developed into something of a fine art under Thatcher, with her press secretary Bernard Ingham. The 9/11 attacks on America and the controversy surrounding Blair's subsequent foreign, defence and security policies have drawn commentators who might otherwise have reflected on Blair the interventionist to concentrate on Blair the warmonger instead. Divisions not only between the right and left in the party but also within the left of the party itself added to the chaos that was the British left in the 1980s; the insistence of the radical leftist and former Labour minister Tony Benn on running against the former Labour chancellor Denis Healey in the party election for deputy leadership in 1981 effectively split the radical democratic left and disabled the possibility of an early riposte to Thatcher. The new path of the party was to be a middle one, in the phraseology of New Labour, a “third way,” supposedly embracing both social justice and the market. It is certain that Blair was helped into power by the parlous state into which the Conservative Party had fallen under Major after 1992. Blair was able to assert his authority over the cabinet by appointing key supporters. Blair let Brown have his way on pension and welfare policy too. The immensely popular Diana (dubbed the “People’s Princess”) died in an automobile accident in Paris in 1997, prompting an outpouring of grief, or at least hysteria, throughout the world. He remains a Privy Counsellor, having first been appointed in July 1994 when he became Leader of the Opposition. Tony Blair was the leader of the British Labour Party from 1994 to 2007, and prime minister of the United Kingdom from 1997 to 2007. Zusammen mit … Moreover, Elizabeth’s daughter, Anne, divorced, and a fire gutted the royal residence of Windsor Castle. The House of Lords, previously dominated by hereditary peers (nobles), was reconstituted as an assembly composed primarily of appointive life peers, with only limited representation of hereditary peers. Following referenda in Wales and Scotland, the National Assembly for Wales and the Scottish Parliament were established in 1999 and granted powers previously reserved for the central government. Credit: PA. Promising that “we ran for office as New Labour, and we shall govern as New Labour,” the Blair government in fact began in a rather conservative fashion, by accepting existing government spending limitations. It has become commonplace to label the New Labour governments of 1997–2010 a neoliberal project that inflated the property market and financial sector, entrenched inequality and privatised the public sphere. With the British economy already shaken by the spreading worldwide recession engendered by the financial crisis of late 2008, a scandal broke involving many dozens of members of Parliament who had extravagantly abused their government expense accounts, including members of Brown’s cabinet. Blair is t… The latest cover of Private Eye has Tony Blair peering through a magnifying glass exclaiming “Oh look – it’s my legacy”. The understanding that the party would have to rethink the market (not only in economic but in social terms), embracing it in a way foreign to many of the unions and the traditional Labour left, grew increasingly after 1992, until, after the Labour victory of 1997, there was a clearly marked path for New Labour. Blair claimed that his policies were designed to enable social democracy to respond to the challenges of the worldwide market economy and to equip citizens to cope with what Giddens called “the major revolutions of our time,” including globalization. Tony Blair's conviction that he was right to invade, to support the will of the United States, not the United Nations, divided Britain utterly. European Union. Tony Blair - Tony Blair - Second term: Facing a deeply unpopular opposition, however, Blair was easily reelected in May 2001 to a 167-seat majority in the House of Commons—the largest-ever second-term majority in British electoral history, though voter turnout was the lowest since 1918. The most symbolically important marker of the change from old to New Labour was the repeal of the party’s Clause IV, engineered by Blair in 1995. British foreign policy since 1997 Three key motifs of British foreign policy during the premiership of former Prime Minister Tony Blair were the pursuit of an activist philosophy of ‘interventionism’, maintaining a strong alliance with the US and a commitment to placing Britain at the heart of Europe. Tony Blair: His legacy will be debated but not forgotten. What have social policy professors made of Tony Blair? Lords reform: removing most of the hereditary peers from the chamber, Controversial public sector reforms (including foundation hospitals and academies). Letters: Labour can’t deny Tony Blair’s achievements This article is more than 11 months old It is shameful that none of the party’s leadership candidates is brave enough to give him credit Be on the lookout for your Britannica newsletter to get trusted stories delivered right to your inbox. The replacement of old Clause IV, which had committed the party to the “common ownership of the means of production,” ended almost 80 years of dedication to that goal. These claims policy in its early years, as at Kyoto referendum the... Crude summary of his contribution to social care, this would be a. Pension and welfare policy too % two years later email, you are agreeing to news,,! 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