Good riddance Tony Blair
LEVEL PLAYING FIELD
The Hindu, 6 May
After ten years as Prime Minister, Tony Blair faces the end of the road, and for most of us in Britain, his resignation will come not a moment too soon.
A man elected in 1997 because he was portrayed as moderate, prudent and sincere has become a by-word for mendacity, double-talk and self-serving recklessness. He promised a sea-change from the sleaze-tainted Tories, but his administration became notorious for dishing out special favours to the rich. His last months in office have been dogged by the cash-for-peerages scandal and his quashing of the inquiry into the bribery of Saudi officials by BAE, Britain’s biggest arms manufacturer.
Blair’s devotion to the welfare of the wealthy has been his single most consistent policy. Under his administration, low tax Britain had become a happy home for the world’s super-rich. There are now 68 billionaires in the country – three times as many as in 2003 – most of whom have moved here from abroad. Over the past five years, Britain’s 1,000 richest people saw their liquid assets increase by 79%; the next 0.3.% of the population saw theirs increase by 66%; while the 30% at the bottom have no liquid assets at all.
According to the Gini coefficient, income inequality is now even higher than it was when Labour took office after 18 years of Tory rule. Despite sustained GDP growth and some positive measures in tax credits and benefits, the independent Institute for Fiscal Studies reports that relative poverty, absolute poverty and child poverty all rose last year. Poverty rates for working-age adults without dependent children are at their highest levels since 1961. University tuition fees have been introduced, bringing to an end decades of free higher education – while corporation taxes have been slashed, and are now lower than in the US.
Privatisation has been extended into realms even Thatcher never dreamed of, including schools, colleges, prisons, hospitals, underground transport and air traffic control. Meanwhile, the four giant supermarket chains – some of them major donors to the Labour party – have been licensed to colonise ever more public space, depressing both wages and farm prices.
In a recent UNICEF report ranking child welfare in 21 wealthy countries, Britain came last overall. British children are the most likely to have a jobless parent, to have been drunk, involved in a fight or bullied. A study by academics at Dundee University revealed that Britain has the second highest child mortality rate among the 24 richest countries, with infants in the UK twice as likely to die before the age of five as children in Sweden.
Despite recent record levels of spending, the National Health Service is in severe crisis with health workers being laid off and treatment units closed. Thanks to a below-inflation pay offer, public sector workers now face a cut in living standards; NHS staff, including nurses, have threatened strike action. What has happened is that with each tranche of additional public funding have come managerial diktats demanding stepped-up internal “competition” and expanding private sector involvement. Under Blair, the NHS has signed more than 800 Private Finance Initiative deals, leaving the NHS with more than ?200 billion in long-term debt repayments.
Britain now has has the lowest levels of product and labour market regulation in the OECD. Last year, the number of construction workers killed on building sites rose by 25 per cent, but convictions of companies responsible for these deaths declined by nearly three-quarters. British employees enjoy less security than before Blair took office, working for more years and longer hours than their European counterparts.
Nonetheless, productive output per hour lags behind Germany, France and US, and the gap is wider in services than in manufacturing, where Britain has shed some one million jobs since 1997. According to financial journalist Anthony Hilton, “The entire UK economy has become, in effect, a giant hedge fund with a massive one way bet on financial services – and no Plan B.”
Despite his own indifference to elementary ethical requirements – including flagrant conflicts of interest in his relationships with the super-rich – Blair has never tired of preaching personal responsibility to others. Over the years he has scapegoated one social group after another, single parents, public sector workers, Muslims and most recently the whole black community for its alleged failure to address “gun culture”. Meanwhile, asylum seekers have been subject to an almost annual round of punitive legislation, resulting in internment or deportation for thousands of innocents, while British citizens find their civil liberties hammered thin by a succession of “Anti-Terror” laws, each one criminalising an ever wider circle of legitimate political activity.
Under Blair, voter turn-out in general elections has plummeted – from 72% in 1997 to 60% in 2005, the lowest in Europe – while the prison population has rocketed – from 60,000 to 80,000, the highest in Europe.
All this is in addition to the most acute horror of the Blair years: British foreign policy. Britain joined the US in bombing Iraq in 1998 and Yugoslavia in 1999. It backed Russia’s assault on Chechnya in 1999 and Israel’s on Lebanon in 2006. It armed Indonesia as it attacked Aceh province in 2003 and continues to succour brutal regimes in Colombia, Saudi Arabia and Uzbekistan. Blair and his chancellor Brown have made much of the growth of Britain’s international aid budget – now up to a measly 0.52% of GNP – while acting in global trade forums as insistent voices for the kind of one-sided pro-corporate liberalisation that has wrecked the lives of millions in the developing world.
Finally and most damningly, Blair leaves Britain deeply embroiled in two avoidable, unjustifiable overseas wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq. He comes second only to Bush in bearing personal responsibility for the deaths of 655,000 Iraqis and the near destruction of an entire society. After the calculated lies Blair told both Parliament and the public to get Britain to make war against Iraq, the greatest regret is that he will leave office without being impeached, though there is still hope he may face an international criminal tribunal at some time in the future. In Blair’s book, of course, accountability, like the obligation to pay your taxes, only applies to those Leona Helmsley once infamously described as “the little people”. For the rich, there will always be an exemption, and Blair’s successor, whether Labour or Conservative, will work hard to make sure it stays that way.
