Recently i have been having a few conversation where Blairs name has been raised.
This chap seems to raise the blood pressure of all when he is mentioned but the only two arguments i hear against him are;

1. He was the puppet of the US- wars/WMD. But hasn't every UK government since WW2 been the same?
2. He ditched left wing labour policies of the like of Foot as they were deemed unelectable.
Has this been proven to be true again by the 2019 election?

If someone can come up with anything else he did "wrong"except he is a Newcastle supporter i would be interested to hear.

1 he took it down to a new level. 2 same as 1. cannot say the wilson government was especially a left wing regime but he managed to win elections. and the iraq war farce and loads of other stuff i and others have forgotton due to time made many of us thinking that voting labour is not for us anymore.

He married a letter box.

I have actually met her and she does not have that look in real life. Yes it seems strange having seen many unflattering photos/ film clips. Do I allude to a press conspiracy.......I really dont know.

No wonder Boris disliked him...

May 2nd 1997 the bar stayed open all night and we celebrated each constituency won as if it were escape to victory ... many shandies were sunk as were the tories. Happy daze.

Iraq is seen by many as a defining low point in Blair's career. But, despite the promise of change, Blair's election win in 1997 marked the moment when Labour embraced the principles of the free market. One of his first acts was the surrender of control of interest rates to the Bank of England. His record on social issues may look mild compared with the carnage we have been experiencing under the Conservatives, but it was Blair who introduced tuition fees for students, it was Blair who pursued private finance initiatives across public services, and generally set about "freeing up business" by any means necessary. It is Blair's combination of aggression overseas, pro-market policies at home and deception in general that for many has made him a pariah.

I think the answer to Labour’s problems are very simple; The UK simply does not elect the far left or far right come to that.

When you analyse the election results since WW2, no politician has won with a leader that wasn’t either side of centre.

Attlee, Churchill, Eden, Wilson, Heath, Thatcher, Major, Blair, Cameron, May, Johnson. I’ve omitted those who inherited the office such as Callaghan and Brown.

None of the above were anything other than either side of centre. They were elected because the majority of the population are broadly centrists. John Smith, Blair and Mandelson recognises this and moved the Labour Party back to the centre and the result was three election wins.

This is why the Foot and Corbyn types of leader fail.

[quote="Mr Irrelevant"]I think the answer to Labour’s problems are very simple; The UK simply does not elect the far left or far right come to that.

that really sums it up without going any further. once a politician is tarred with being left or right then he has no chance of ever getting to the top no matter what their policies are. as george galloway said a few years ago, the difference between labour and the tories is 2p one way and 2p the other. that certainly was the case with blair/brown.

For those well to the left of centre - a big part of the issue is that with a Labour government in power, the hope would have been that some of the changes of the Thatcher years would be rolled back; that there would be some efforts to make things more equitable between rich and poor. Ultimately, that didn't happen - although the gap maybe didn't grow as quickly for a while, and as the economy was generally doing OK even the poorer people were doing OK.

Blair however did little to encourage traditional industry (MG Rover, the last mass market British marque, went bust on his watch, and the trend of moving to a Service Economy continued apace); didn't make any moves towards renationalising, other than setting up National Rail when Raitrack went pop; introduced Tuition Fees and ended Student Grants; got involved in lots of PFI Schemes that ultimately ended up costing far more to the NHS etc. than they were ever likely to save; did nothing to encourage the bulding of Social Housing.... Lots of things that traditional left-wingers wanted. Add in the continuing lack of regulation of the Financial Sector, which left a number of major banks and institutions far more vulnerable to the US-led Sub-Prime Mortgage Market crash, and you end up with the situation that even without the "Dodgy Dossier" and subsequent war in Iraq Blair was tarnished goods in the eyes of many in the Labour Party.

Corbyn's problem was a combination of many factors IMO. The lack of a clear position on Brexit was a damaging one without doubt; but there was also a sense of disbelief about how he proposed to deliver what seemed almost daily announcements of major policy. Had he stuck to a handful of clear policies, said there's lots more we want to do but we need to see what's possible, he might not have lost so heavily. He just wasn't credible as a Prime Minister to many. Does that mean that someone on the left can't win? Not necessarily - but they need to be somewhat less ambitious and more practical in terms of what's promised, and accept that they need to win support broadly across the whole party and not just from certain motivated parts of it like Momentum. To be fair to them, Tory leaders have tended to be better at keeping most of their party on board most of the time - not something Labour have been good at doing for many years now...