It’s been a long road, but the hatred towards Tony Blair is gradually receding
The reaction to a new edition of our book reassessing New Labour’s record suggests attitudes are changing, says John Rentoul
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Your support makes all the difference.It has come to something when the anti-vaxers, the Defund the BBC types and the Very Online Scottish Nationalists are more virulent on social media than the Blair haters.
But it has happened. The paperback edition of the book Jon Davis and I wrote, Heroes or Villains? The Blair Government Reconsidered, was published on Thursday, and the response to it has been mild and generally positive.
In 2008, when we started the course at Queen Mary University of London on which the book is based, the hostility towards Tony Blair was still building. We thought it was important to try to judge his record as prime minister dispassionately, but for some time this felt like climbing uphill in the teeth of a gale.
Jon and I took part in a debate staged by Queen Mary Labour Society in 2013 and lost the motion, “Tony Blair saved the Labour Party”, overwhelmingly. The speaker against the motion was Jeremy Corbyn.
When the course moved to King’s College London in 2014, the tide was running against Blair in full flood. The publication in 2016 of the Chilcot report into the Iraq war was probably the point at which it turned, and it was only then that we felt it was time for a book that tried to reassess the Blair government’s record.
We braced ourselves for publication in 2019, but there was hardly a backlash at all. Even Natalie Bennett, the recent leader of the Green Party, wrote a polite review – disagreeing with everything Blair stood for, of course.
Since then, and since the failure of the Corbyn leadership in the 2019 election in particular, it has been possible to gain a hearing for a defence of Blair’s record once more. Labour Party members – even students – are willing to look again at the only leader of the party to have won a sustainable parliamentary majority for 55 years (not just once, but three times). It was striking that, in a recent poll of Labour Party members, as many had a favourable opinion of Blair as of Corbyn.
As we argue in the book, the Blair government changed the country for the better, and the positives were more important than the negatives – negatives that the party itself managed to exaggerate out of all proportion, and beyond any sense of the limits of the possible.
At last, the message seems to be getting through. The best a radio station could come up with to argue the anti-Blair case against me last week was someone who calls himself Broseph Stalin on Twitter, which I suppose is quite witty if you think admiring mass murderers is funny. But at last, the Labour Party seems capable of telling the difference between an actual mass murderer and someone who, though accused of terrible crimes, was in fact a successful social-democratic leader of modern Britain and a model for the party’s future.
Yours,
John Rentoul
Chief political commentator
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