Just two years after his departure from Downing Street comes this early attempt to assess Tony Blair’s legacy as British prime minister. And it arrives at a time when Blair was being considered for the new role of President of the European Council; an ambition he was unable to realise. Such renewed interest surely focuses attention on the sometimes controversial record of this world leader. While there have been numerous accounts of his premiership (indeed a veritable avalanche in comparison to those of his immediate predecessor), many of the more serious academic treatments appeared in the first half of his decade in power. Latter accounts have tended toward the polemical, especially given the controversy over war with Iraq. As an examination of Blair’s ten years at the top then, this book sits alongside those drafted by Anthony Seldon and Peter Riddell respectively, not to mention some of the insightful articles by the likes of Vernon Bogdanor and Andrew Gamble. And as with the dilemma over a Blair European Presidency, it leaves readers somewhat divided: did he make as big an impact as it seems at close quarters; does Europe want a ‘stop the traffic’ head (to use David Milliband’s phrasing) or a more pedestrian, consensual, chair of summits. The quandary is testament to the impact of Blair as a political figure domestically and on the world stage.

Perhaps sensibly given the task, the book is a collection of essays, brought together under the deft editorship of Terrence Casey, Associate Professor of Political Science at the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in the United States. As a collection it includes some twenty-six scholars who tackle the question of Blair’s legacy thematically. These include Blair’s electoral record, devolution, constitutional reform, the Iraq war, foreign policy and the European Union. Casey sets himself and his fellow authors the task of analysing the impact of the Blair government organised around the key themes of politics, policy, governance and foreign affairs.

Naturally, being published so soon after Blair’s departure and during the very same Parliament that marked his third consecutive general election triumph, a fair criticism is that it remains too early to assess the Blair legacy. It is a point not lost on Casey who discusses the nature of legacies early on in the book and the question of whether Blair’s really was a great reforming government. One method of assessing legacies is to examine the impact of an administration on a government’s opposition. If for no other reason than its longevity, Blair’s government is compared to the two great reforming administrations of post-war Britain: that led by Clement Attlee 1945-51 which established in Britain the welfare state including a free at the point of delivery National Health Service, and the radical decade of Margaret Thatcher, which aimed to ‘roll back the frontiers of the state’ and instil the primacy of the market in economic and social policy. The point made is a strong one. In each case, the legacy of the government was cemented by the inaction of its successors. So in the case of Attlee, the Conservatives who held office for the next thirteen years after 1951 did not unwind the policies of that Labour government. In doing so they accepted the principles of the post-war consensus: the welfare state, nationalised industries and Keynesian economics. Similarly, Margaret Thatcher left a lasting legacy not only because of her radical reforms but because she forced the Labour party to accept and indeed embrace the market.

New Labour in office accepted the Conservative’s privatisation programme and was prepared to extend it; the administration accepted the dominance of economic over social policy; and Chancellor Gordon Brown targeted the control of inflation rather than the centre-left staple of full employment. Time will surely tell if Conservative leader, David Cameron, should he form a government following the anticipated 2010 general election, really is ‘heir to Blair’. The signs are good given that he has committed any government he leads to maintaining Labour’s public spending for the early part of the Parliament (a move which mirror’s New Labour’s own pledge in 1997 to maintain, relatively low, Tory spending commitments for the first two years of a Parliament). And, given the effects on policy of the world economic crisis, any incoming administration will have limited room for manoeuvre for some years to come.

Blair’s government set itself the challenge of reforming public services; primarily health and education and increased dramatically spending on both. Calum Paton’s succinct chapter on the NHS is particularly interesting in analysing just how distinctive Blair’s government has been in this regard. As is widely acknowledged, the administration poured billions of additional pounds into healthcare but did not challenge the Thatcherite inheritance of markets in public services. Indeed the marketisation of public services was something that Blair (if not Brown) put at the heart of his public sector reforming programme. The argument advanced is that rather than simply continuing the New Public Management of the Thatcher years, Blair’s was one of New Public Administration. It used the market and business techniques but its policy culture was frenzied and it saw considerable political interference and centralised command control geared towards hitting targets and measures.

Of course, internationally, Blair made a big impact, not least because of the controversy over the invasion of Iraq; a topic tackled authoritatively by David Coats and Joel Krieger under the chapter heading ‘The Mistake Heard Round the World’ and Ted Bromund’s ‘A Just War’. The latter argues that ‘Blair allowed his belief in his own persuasive abilities to override the evidence that Europe was simply not interested in his brand of social democracy and patriotic, liberal internationalism’. Ironically, while it is true that European leaders lined up in opposition to Bush and Blair’s war, it is that very same persuasive power which, following the terrorist attacks on New York in 2001 and during the subsequent military campaigns as part of the so called ‘war on terror’, catapulted the British Prime Minister to become a major figure on the world stage. It is this very significance that made leaders of those same European countries hanker after him as a European President who will ‘stop the traffic’ if he lands in Beijing or Moscow. The question remains as to whether there is another chapter to his political legacy. As for being the face and voice of the EU, it seems his decade as British premiere was simply too divisive, internationally, for the likes of Sarkozy and Merkel to countenance his return to the global stage, for now.

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