Quote:
Originally Posted by thunder99
Towards the end I think he had lost touch with the people. But when he first got elected he really was a ray of sunshine for Britain.
I totally disagree with his stand over Iraq, but I hope people will give him credit for helping to bring peace to Northern Ireland and bringing hope to Britain after the Thatcher/Major years.
It's very easy to knock people like Blair, but I do truly believe that most of the time he did what he honestly thought was best.
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If you think about what it means to
represent the people, it is inevitable that an elected politician is eventually going to pay the price for ignoring their wishes. Blair was unable to sell his views on Iraq, either before or after the event. Thatcher paid the same price for her arrogance.
Blair also paid the price that
any long-term leader in the west must face these days, namely that - at least in terms of much of the middle- and working-classes - their economies are in decline. Globalisation is draining the wealthier countries of jobs, leaving them with declining tax revenues and less ability to fund services. The government of the day may be able to play with interest rates or taxes themselves, or it can choose what to cut and how. But the longer someone holds office, the more people will convince themselves that the grass looks greener on the other side.
Perhaps it will be another 50 or 100 years, but sooner or later we are going to have to start asking what is the relevance of nations and what we can now reasonably expect of national governments. Maybe we need to ask whether globalisation itself is something we want and if not, can it be reined in.
I'm not making judgements or proposing solutions, just making the point that we see major changes taking place, yet expect life to carry on as normal. Rather like the way that when I was a kid, almost every family had a parent always at home. All that changed, but unless the role of a parent was never necessary or was being played out wrongly, shouldn't we have anticipated consequences? Yet 50 years on, even our schools still keep the same hours and operate for the same number of weeks in a year.
Arguably, countries have never been more than pools of labor and consumers. Wealth began shifting from the countryside to towns, from towns to cities. But now it is shifting from continent to continent, without anyone apparently being overly concerned as to what that is going to mean.