Goodbye, Mr. Blair
Prime Minister Tony Blair ... excuse me, make that Former Prime Minister Tony Blair of Great Britain had his last day as a member of Parliament yesterday, saying goodbye to the House of Commons and tendering his resignation to the Queen:
Tony Blair has submitted his resignation to the Queen after receiving an unprecedented standing ovation from MPs at the end of his final Prime Minister's questions.
Labour MPs rose and applauded after the 30-minute session, which saw Mr Blair cracking jokes - even admitting he had received his P45.
Margaret Beckett, the Foreign Secretary, was in tears.
After a vintage Commons performance Mr Blair set off for Downing Street to say an emotional farewell to his staff, and from there to Buckingham Palace, where he formally resigned as head of the government.
I have to confess I have mixed feelings about Blair. On the one hand, there's no doubting he is a tremendously significant figure in British history, as significant as Thatcher had been in the 70s and 80s. He took Labour out of the Far Left woods it had lost itself in and made it a party the British people would trust again with government. He largely preserved the prosperity Thatcher's reforms created, while giving them a friendlier, social-democratic face. He was always been a moving and eloquent speaker, and, when I listened to our own leadership, I often envied the British. (I know. Certain Lefty UK friends would have gladly given him to us. :) )
Most importantly, when it came time to draw steel after 9-11, Blair placed Britain firmly alongside the United States, even though at terrible cost to his own popularity in Britain. For that alone, we Americans owe him a huge debt of gratitude.
But... there's always a "but." Mr. Blair was and is a committed EU-phile, tying Britain ever more closely to the EU and its statist, sclerotic economy, signing agreements that meant most of Britain's laws are issued by bureaucrats in Brussels, not her own Parliament. He wanted to push through the new EU constitution, which would have effectively ended the UK's sovereignty, without a vote of the people. (He dodged that crisis when the French and Dutch publics killed it before Britain's turn to vote came.) Like many top-down politicians, he was impatient with the democratic process and opposition, his government late in its life pushing a horrifying bill allowing ministers to rewrite laws after Parliament had passed them.
He was too in love with the idea of what Churchill once called "jaw-jaw" when it came to the Middle East, refusing to see the obvious: that nowhere among the Palestinians was there a suitable "partner for peace," and pushing Israel to offer more and more concessions to those who only saw such gestures as a sign of weakness. And he was too diffident when challenging the political threat of radical Islam in Britain, at once enacting harsh laws against terrorists, yet at the same time engaging and forming partnerships with Muslim organizations in the UK that harbor an Islamist agenda hostile to the very core of Western democracy and liberalism.
Still, in the end, Tony Blair is someone to be admired for his many strengths. I wish him well in the future.
(hat tip: PJM)
LINKS: More at Blue Crab Boulevard, and Britain and America looks at what needs to be done to preserve the "special relationship" under new PM Gordon Brown.
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