On Jun 4, 10:21*am, Tony Polson wrote:

Mizter T wrote:

That's just nonsense - I'm not going to wage some massive defence of
Blair, but to say that he didn't have any idea of what he wanted to do
in power is just plain ignorant.

What Blair wanted to do was to modernise Labour so that, having obtained
power thanks to John Major, it could retain it and gain the full second
term Labour had never previously managed. *And he achieved that.

But where James is right is that, once in power, Blair didn't know what
to do with it. *He came to power promising that his top three priorities
were "Education, education, education" then presided over the most rapid
decline in educational standards in living memory.

Proof? In the round, educational standards have improved. But we've
been here before, and so I'll just repeat what I said then - "I
suspect you have very little exposure to what goes on in education
these days, and not enough to have a properly informed opinion on it."


Labour doubled spending on the NHS in real terms only to squander the
money on increasing the salaries of consultants, GPs and nurses and
employing vastly more of them, to the point where there was hardly any
money left for patient care. *The doubling of spending (tripling in cash
terms) led to an increase in procedures (the best available index of
output) of only 17%. *Now it's true that nurses needed to be paid
significantly more after a decade of declining remuneration, but does
your local GP really deserve to be paid £107,000 on average, or a
consultant £170,000? *This was the price Labour paid for getting them to
agree to a modernisation that is far from the significant root and
branch reform of the NHS that was needed.

Healthcare has improved significantly. Wages for many in the NHS
needed to go up too, as you concede. I absolutely agree that the very
high pay settlements reached with consultants and GPs were absolutely
astounding - essentially it seems as though the DoH moronically simply
agreed to the BMA's opening gambit in the negotiations.

I also agree that by no means did the NHS as a whole manage to get
anything near as big a bang out of the bucks that were spent as should
have been the case.


And then there was the illegal war(s). *Blair cynically looked at them
from a party political point of view, and realised that he would be
toast with some of New Labour's new Middle England voters if he opposed
the war(s). *So he wrong-footed the Conservatives and joined up with
some of the most repugnant war criminals that have enjoyed power since
1945 - Cheney, Rumsfeld and their idiot stooge, Bush, all for domestic
party political gain.

I disagree - I really don't think Blair approached Iraq from a party
political standpoint at all. I think he essentially agreed to back
Bush, and then justified it to himself and others by focussing on the
evilness of Saddam Hussein's regime coupled with the somewhat forlorn
hope that the new Iraq could be a beacon to the rest of the Middle
East (and to an extent the wider world), plus a few other ideas (e.g.
felling a 'rogue state' would demonstrate to others that they should
be good).

I don't think either Afghanistan or Kosovo/Serbia were approached from
a party political angle either (and I would also demur with you in
labelling them as "illegal wars" but that's moving onto new territory).