Blair says he’ll leave office in June
LONDON – Prime Minister Tony Blair, who upended the old politics of liberalism and conservatism in Britain and pushed for an “ethical” foreign policy, said Thursday he would step down June 27 after more than a decade in power.
Blair, 54, one of Britain’s longest-serving prime ministers, resurrected the Labor Party from the electoral backwaters in 1997 on a wave of national optimism, only to see it founder over an unpopular war in Iraq.
His successor almost certainly will be Gordon Brown, the introverted, intellectual chancellor of the exchequer who worked with Blair to create the doctrine of New Labor but fell out with him in recent years over when he would be in line to become prime minister.
“Sometimes the only way you conquer the pull of power is to set it down,” Blair said in his announcement speech, which was part bittersweet and part defiant.
Addressing a roomful of Labor Party members, Blair sought to underline achievements that have brought near-record prosperity to Britain and injected new life into health and education services, even as he quietly but defiantly defended his decision to send British troops to war in Iraq.
“I ask you to accept one thing. Hand on heart, I did what I thought was right,” Blair told the supporters, who alternately cheered and wiped back tears, in his home constituency in the northeast England district of Sedgefield.
Blair called up the image of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the decision he made that was to prove the most fateful of his premiership, to “stand shoulder to shoulder with our oldest ally,” the United States.
“And so Afghanistan and then Iraq, the latter bitterly controversial, and removing Saddam and his sons from power,” he said. “For me, I think we must see it through. The terrorists who threaten us here and round the world will never give up if we give up. It is a test of will and of belief, and we can’t fail it.”
Only days before his announcement, Blair oversaw the induction of a new power-sharing government in Northern Ireland – a settlement he attributed in part to a new, more prosperous, more tolerant Britain “at home in its own skin.”
“I don’t think Northern Ireland would have been changed unless Britain had changed,” he said.
Blair’s announcement came at a time when the Labor Party has seen its membership drop by half since the first of his three general-election victories in 1997.
Even before the Sept. 11 attacks and the subsequent transport system bombings that killed 52 in London in 2005, Blair had fashioned his doctrine of an “ethical foreign policy” that would give “new momentum” to arms control, work for a ban on land mines and forge a commitment to push the environment and human rights up on the international agenda.
Blair made the international case for intervening in Kosovo in 1999 and again in Sierra Leone in 2000 in an effort to use British troops as shields against escalating violence.
“Tony is your classic liberal interventionist,” said Clive Solely, former chairman of the parliamentary Labor Party. “Before we were in power, Bosnia happened, and we didn’t intervene, and he saw how, incidentally, that’s when some of these extreme Islamic groups got their start. Sierra Leone was a great success. Then comes Iraq. It did go appallingly wrong, but I don’t think his motivation is any different.”