Yes, Tony Blair Was a Neoliberal

Recently surveying Tony Blair's record as party leader and prime minister I saw that the pretense of Blair not being a neoliberal is just as risible as Bill Clinton's not being a neoliberal, given his not only acquiescing in the profound changes wrought in English economic and social life by his predecessors (privatization, union-breaking, financialization, etc.), but his particular brand of budgetary austerity with its tax breaks and deregulation for corporations and stringency with and hardness toward the poor, his backdoor privatization of basic services such as health and education (with college tuition running up from zero into the thousands of pounds a year on his watch), his hostility to government regulation of business, his inane New Economy vision of Cool Britannia (groan), and the rest. (Indeed, examining his record, and reexamining that of his predecessors, I was staggered by how much of it I had seen before reviewing the comparable history in the United States.)

That said, even considering the ways in which offended and disappointed many on the left, can seem halcyon in comparison with what has been seen since. The economic disasters and brutal austerity seen since his departure from office, which really does seem to spell the final doom of the post-war welfare state--the shift to an American-style regime with regard to higher education, a slower but still advancing shift in the same direction with the country's health care system, the raising of the regressive Value Added Tax yet again to 20 percent, the renewed assault on the social safety net of yet another Welfare Reform Act (2012) that delivered Universal Credit and bedroom tax, the hundreds of thousands of "excess deaths" in recent years traceable to cuts in care facilities, the plans to raise the retirement age (perhaps all the way to age 75, effectively abolishing retirement for most)--and all that, before the current public health/economic crisis.

I admit that next to that Blair's tenure does not look quite so bad--until one remembers the extent to which his policies did so much to pave the way for all of it, in carrying forward what apologists for New Labour tend to think of as Conservative projects, and his general lowering of the bar for what constitutes tolerable government. That led to this. And so lends the question "Was Tony Blair's Prime Ministership neoliberal?" an additional, very contemporary, significance, the more so with the Labour Party, for the time being, still walking the Blairite road.