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 Blair Stepping Down June 27
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Posted on 05-10-07 9:24 AM     Reply [Subscribe]
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Source: - http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/05/10/news/britain.php

Blair names the day he'll step down: June 27
By Alan Cowell
Published: May 10, 2007

LONDON: After months of coy hints and fevered speculation, Prime Minister Tony Blair announced on Thursday that he would leave office on June 27 after a decade in power in which he sacrificed his popularity to the war in Iraq and struggled at home to improve schools, policing and hospitals.

With stirring oratory cast as a personal testament, he declared: "I ask you to accept one thing. Hand on heart I did what I thought was right. I may have been wrong. That's your call.

"But believe one thing: I did what I thought was right for our country.

"I have been prime minister of the country for just over 10 years," he said. "In this job, in the world today, I think that is long enough for me, but more especially for the country.

"Sometimes the only way you conquer the pull of power is to set it down."

he announcement at Blair's Sedgefield district constituency in northeastern England was part of a closely choreographed and protracted farewell that is not quite over yet. Between now and his final departure Blair plans to attend major European Union and international summit meetings in June.

The prime minister's aides have sought to detail his agenda between now and his resignation to counter taunts from the opposition Conservatives that he is leading a lame duck administration.

According to British media reports, Blair has also scheduled trips to France, Africa and the United States and will seek to press laws through Parliament before handing over to a successor - almost certainly Gordon Brown, the chancellor of the Exchequer.

"It's difficult in a way to know how to make this speech," Blair said Thursday. "1997 was a moment for a new beginning. Expectations were high, too high," he said referring to the landslide election victory that brought him to power and praising Labour's record.

"There is only one government since 1945 that can say all of the following," he continued, detailing what he depicted as Labour's record in cutting employment and crime while improving public services.

"Britain is not a follower today. Britain is a leader," he proclaimed. "It is a country at home in the 21st century."

Blair stood before 250 cheering supporters in a local Labour Party club-house, his words relayed by banks of television satellite vans drawn up outside. His tone was personal and partly elegiac.

His wife, Cherie Booth, the source of much controversy during the Blair era, was in the audience as he spoke and he paid tribute to her.

In marked contrast to the youthful exuberance with which he led Labour to office in 1997 after 18 years in opposition, Blair these days is more careworn and far less popular, his party trailing in the polls behind the Conservatives.

Only last week, Labour was forced into retreat in regional elections across Britain. Yet, in national elections, Blair has been one of the most successful and most charismatic campaigners, winning three consecutive victories for the first time in party history.

After announcing last September that he would leave office within a year, Blair - one of the closest allies of the White House - refused to be pinned down on a precise date as he strove in vain to erase two big stains on his legacy: British mistrust of his actions in going to war in Iraq and a lingering scandal over campaign financing.

The timetable announced Thursday gives the Labour Party roughly seven weeks to go through the motions of a leadership contest - Brown faces no serious challengers - and through a less-predictable battle for the deputy leadership to replace John Prescott, who plans to quit along with Blair.

The prime minister traveled to the tiny Trimdon village Labour Club in his Sedgefield constituency, the symbolic font of his political power, after talking to his cabinet ministers in London at a 15-minute meeting.

According to his spokesman, who spoke in return for anonymity under civil service rules, Blair did not disclose the date of his planned departure to the cabinet, apparently eager to forestall a leak and characteristically keen to dominate the stagecraft of the occasion.

At the cabinet meeting, Brown offered Blair a "fulsome tribute," the spokesman said.

The choreography reflected a belief among analysts that Blair does not want his departure to evoke humiliating comparisons with Margaret Thatcher's ouster by her Conservative Party in 1990. When he announced last year that he would step down, he was widely seen as being under overwhelming pressure to quit from supporters of Brown.

His loyalists hailed his announcement in glowing terms.

"Tony Blair has been the most successful leader ever in our 100-year history," said Peter Hain, the Northern Ireland minister, who has been a close Blair supporter. "Britain is a much fairer, much more tolerant, more democratic place than it was 10 years ago."

Hain praised Blair's record on provoking debate on climate change and on relieving poverty in Africa. He called the installation this week of a power-sharing government in Northern Ireland, formally drawing a line under four decades of conflict and animosity, "an inescapable achievement."

The Conservatives acknowledged Blair's stature as an election winner, but assailed both his record on public services and his credibility.

"There has been so much spin in that the word of government is less believed than at any other time," said William Hague, the Conservative foreign affairs spokesman. "We will be glad to see the back of him."
 
Posted on 05-10-07 9:34 AM     Reply [Subscribe]
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I think he was a good priminister for a while, but then this war led by dumbass bush got him eventually. Rumsfield, him, Powell...BUSH owe them a big time, since they have to loose their position by supporting him. Well the decision to support was his so, untimately the blame goes to himself. What u gonna do, when u follow the wrong way with youre eyes closed.
 
Posted on 05-10-07 9:41 AM     Reply [Subscribe]
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Something to learn from him by Nepali leadership although longway to reach there...
 
Posted on 05-10-07 9:44 AM     Reply [Subscribe]
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This graphic on the Economist highlights some milestones in his tenure:



Rest of the article : - http://www.economist.com/daily/news/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9142360&top_story=1
 
Posted on 05-10-07 9:48 AM     Reply [Subscribe]
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I think now Nicolas Sarkozy's win wil be overshawoded by this news. Blair has been a Charimastic leader, outspoken and bold enough to face media. Good bye blair and THANK captain for bringing in the topic here in Sajha. I just watched that on BBC.
 
Posted on 05-10-07 4:14 PM     Reply [Subscribe]
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The Economist, not unknown for it's own leanings, hasn't always had the kindest of things to say of Blair and here's their take on his legacy

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Source: - http://www.economist.com/opinion/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=E1_JTQJSRN



Tony Blair
How will history judge him?


May 10th 2007
From The Economist print edition

For all the disappointments, posterity will look more kindly on Tony Blair than Britons do today

FEW Britons, it seems, will shed a tear when Tony Blair leaves the stage on June 27th after a decade as prime minister, as he finally announced this week he would do. Opinion polls have long suggested that he is unpopular. On May 3rd local and regional elections gave voters a last chance to give Mr Blair a good kicking. They took it with both feet, handing power to Conservatives, Scottish Nationalists, Welsh nationalists, anybody but distrusted Labour. Most wish he had gone last year—an opinion shared by his likely heir, Gordon Brown, who now faces a mighty struggle against David Cameron's Tories.

Either Britons are an ungrateful lot, or Mr Blair deserves his shabby send-off for having delivered too little and disappointed too much. The truth, as usual, is more complicated.

You used to love me...

On most measures, Mr Blair has left Britain a better place than it was in 1997 (see article). Uninterrupted economic growth has made the average Briton substantially better off, even if the tax burden has risen. There are fewer tatty schools and run-down hospitals. Although many exams lack rigour, more children are getting respectable grades and going on to universities. Thanks to the minimum wage and tax credits for poor working families, the forces relentlessly pushing up income inequality under Margaret Thatcher have been blunted.

These things are measurable; less easy to prove, but just as valuable, are the ways in which Mr Blair has helped make Britain a more tolerant, more cosmopolitan place. There is a human-rights act now; civil partnerships for homosexuals are recognised. Self-government for Scotland, Wales and now even Northern Ireland has extended democracy: peace in Ulster must rank among Mr Blair's greatest successes (see article). Class matters less: the fact that the Tories are gaining popularity led by an Old Etonian is, strangely, a sign of progress.

Under Mr Blair, fusty old Britain has become an international exemplar of openness. Large-scale immigration, especially from the former communist countries of eastern Europe, has boosted the economy without triggering a serious backlash of resentment. Embracing globalisation, London has become one of the most dynamic cities in the world. Mr Blair has changed the debate in Europe (Nicolas Sarkozy is another right-winger in his debt—see article) and he has also done more than any other Western leader to force people to pay attention to climate change and poverty in Africa.

You can go through this list, adding asterisks and footnotes: on the economy, not enough credit goes to the Tories who came before Mr Blair; on immigration, for every happy Czech waitress in Covent Garden there are several angry Muslims in Leeds; on civil liberties, he helped gays but not prisoners or young louts. Still, Mr Blair has improved Britain, on balance, and he has usually stood on the side of liberal progress. This newspaper, for one, has no regrets in having supported him.

Why then does Mr Blair leave a sour taste in Britain—and not only in the mouths of the old socialist left and the xenophobic right? For millions of people, only one word is necessary: Iraq. But the disappointments go further back than that.

This, after all, was the most gifted politician of his generation—certainly in Europe and (depending on your opinion of the foxier but less disciplined Bill Clinton) perhaps wider than that. Before coming to power Mr Blair already had one enormous achievement to his name: dragging the Labour Party to the electable centre. In 1997 he had not just a big parliamentary majority but a country that wanted what he wanted—an economy that combined the hard-won gains of Thatcherism with a greater emphasis on social justice and modernised public services. How could he fail?

By being astonishingly ill-prepared. In retrospect, it is hard to exaggerate the waste of Mr Blair's first term. Under the visionary rhetoric, the new government had little notion of how to improve public services, other than by dismantling its predecessor's successful attempts to raise their quality by injecting more competition. With one or two exceptions (among them primary schools), more harm than good was done to health and education. Unable to show solid progress, Mr Blair fell back on the techniques of opposition, spinning the news to convey an impression of activity and progress. His popularity continued to defy gravity, but authority was squandered, and public cynicism grew.

In his second term Mr Blair did eventually work out a model for public sector reform—one that involved refining the internal-market policies pioneered by the Tories, but with far more money from the state. But by then September 11th and soon Iraq were upon him. From the invasion in 2003, with his party squabbling and Mr Brown all too often sniping from the sidelines, public-service reform lost momentum. To his credit, Mr Blair tried to push ahead, risking his job over variable university tuition fees, for instance. But the fact is that, although services have got better, they are still worse than they should be; and a lot of cash has been thrown away. Britons will rue those wasted years as much as Mr Blair now does.

The Baghdad blues

By contrast, on Iraq, the source of so much misfortune, history may be a little kinder to Mr Blair than his countrymen currently are. Nobody denies the manifest disaster of the past four years. It would be convenient for supporters of the war, such as this newspaper, to claim we were tricked into it by Mr Blair; convenient, but unfair. He did indeed put more weight on the scanty intelligence evidence that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction than it could bear. But there is little doubt that he (and many others) believed in it at the time. Nor was it a bad thing to want to rid the world of a brutal tyrant. After all, Mr Blair had built the American-led coalition that ended the genocidal career of Slobodan Milosevic; and the invasion of Afghanistan had at first been a success.

As for the catastrophic mismanagement thereafter, Mr Blair should have insisted on far more in terms of post-war planning. And, yes, a bolder friend of America might have publicly pushed for Donald Rumsfeld to have been removed, for the nightmarish Guantánamo Bay to be closed, for George Bush to have tried harder to create a Palestinian state. But the greater fault lies with Mr Bush for refusing to listen to somebody who plainly knew more about the Arab world and indeed terrorism than he did. Given that obstinacy, Mr Blair had two real choices: to leave Iraq and America to a still-worse fate; or to stay in, hoping to repair some of the damage Britain had helped cause. On balance he did the right thing.

Perhaps the greatest tribute to Mr Blair is that neither Mr Brown nor Mr Cameron wishes to change fundamentally the course he has set. Both will stay in Iraq, for a while, and Afghanistan. Despite his initial scepticism, Mr Brown is unlikely to unpick Mr Blair's public-service reforms. Mr Cameron's popularity is based on occupying the Blairite centre ground.

If Margaret Thatcher, in much more testing times, gave the country what it needed, Mr Blair can at least claim to have given it much of what it wanted. It is unlikely that he will ever be thought of as the great prime minister he could have been. It is almost certain, however, that Mr Blair will come to be seen as a better one than he is today.
 
Posted on 05-10-07 4:25 PM     Reply [Subscribe]
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i hope the next premier whoever (O:
will pull troops out of Iraq (O:
 


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