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Book Review- Tony Blair's Journey I once caught a girlfriend reading a magazine backwards. I said to her "I know a lot of men like to read newspapers backwards; they start with the sport, move on to the trivia, and finally tackle the news. But why are you reading backwards?" She explained that Vogue is not an intellectual publication, the articles are short and have no introduction, so she likes to read the conclusion to see if it's worth reading the rest, also to get a better sense of the big picture before moving onto the detail. In the same spirit, Blair's book is best read backwards - begin with the postscript. It ends with the line "It has never been entirely clear whether the journey I have taken is one of triumph of the person over politics, or of politics over the person". Essentially the book is the story of Blair's endless fight against backward thinking Labour politicians, a destructive Conservative opposition, and an electorate too easily carried away by poor quality journalism. The extent to which the reader believes Blair won determines the answer to the question: person over politics, or politics over person. For example, the book's opening scene begins on election night in 1997 with a sober Blair, weighed down by responsibility, telling one of his drunken MPs to "bugger off". Later Blair's main frustration becomes the psychologically challenged Gordon Brown, a man he can not work with, but whom he dares not fire for fear of sinking the entire ship. Hovering over the book is a sense of disappointment, of work left unfinished because of political conflicts. In the postscript, Blair also says: "Three years out of office have given me time to reflect on our system of government... I think there is a tendency for those of us in democracies to become smug about the fact that we are democratic, as if universal suffrage and no more were enough to give us good government... Democracy needs to mature; it needs to adapt and reform. I would say that the way we run Westminster or Whitehall today is just not effective in a twenty-first-century world. Many might say the same about congress in the US... Yet the debate, though it acknowledges that the public are disillusioned and disquieted, focuses exclusively on the issues of honesty, transparency and accountability as if it were a character problem. It isn't. It's an efficiency problem." A few pages before, Blair talks about a new breed of politicians without any private sector experience. He explains that politicians require two set of skills, politics and management. Political skills win elections, but management skills make an effective official. Each time Blair tried to bring good managers into government from the private sector, the media concentrated on politics, subjected his life to scrutiny, searched for problems, and found the candidate wanting. Blair says "The role of modern media in modern democracy is an issue every senior politician I know believes is ripe for debate. Yet it is virtually un-debated... Every walk of life involving power is now subjected to regulation except one: the media." These comments about politics, democracy, efficiency, management, and the media are not groundbreaking, but they are unorthodox, and politicians in this day and age rarely mention the unorthodox. I was impressed, but my enthusiasm didn't last long. Elsewhere in the postscript, Blair says that looking back at his period in office, Labour's key mistake, forced upon him by politics (especially Gordon Brown), was to allow public spending to consume an ever higher share of GDP, from 41% in 1996 to 48% in 2010. Instead, Labour should have focused on containing spending and delivering greater levels of efficiency in public services by, for example, outsourcing to the private sector. Although this sounds reasonable, it is not in fact the real key to Labour's failure. Labours real failing is revealed elsewhere in the postscript. Blair says: "I profoundly disagree with the statist, so called Keynesian response to the economic crisis... [The credit crisis] led progressive politicians, on the left especially, to assert that politics is undergoing a radical shift of direction towards a more interventionist statist position... the end of an era that began over thirty years ago with the Thatcher/Regan economic and political philosophy... [I reject this and] funnily enough, the public has got this more than many politicians and commentators, which is why a great lurch leftwards has not materialised. The public understands completely the difference between the state being forced to intervene to stabilize the market, and the government back in fashion as a major actor in the general economy. The role of the government is to stabilize and then get out of the way as quickly as is economically sensible. Ultimately the recovery will be led not by governments but by industry, business and the creativity, ingenuity and enterprise of people. If the measures you take in responding to the crisis diminish their incentives, curb their entrepreneurship, make them feel unsure about the climate in which they are working, then recovery becomes uncertain... What should strengthen this belief is that the new economies now rising up in the marketplace are doing so precisely by following more open economic policies, and faltering when they don't. China is opening up, and thrives as it does so... It would be odd if we moved in the opposite direction. And foolish." But Blair is wrong. The real essence of New Labour's failure was to think that the economy should be left alone and the profits simply milked for social projects. The decline of manufacturing, the absurd rise of banking and real estate, pointed to an out of control economic model which was bound to flounder sooner or later. In fact Blair's entire so called 'progressive' New Labour vision of laissez-faire plus moral humanitarian redistribution is a failure. The secret is managing the economy, spending on infrastructure, investing in the future. The UK government spends less than 10% of its revenue on infrastructure, the Chinese spend 50%. Labour's problem was not spending too much, it was spending on the wrong things, wasting money social projects not building for a better future. Look at the Aid for Africa debate: many people say humanitarian aid doesn't work, concentrate on greater good not individual suffering, saving lives is less important that building the economy. Also, the secret is restraining excess corporate profits, not by curbing their entrepreneurship, but by regulatory constraint of rent seeking, curtailing information asymmetries, making the market more competitive, more entrepreneurial, and more socially useful. In an increasingly competitive market seller returns on capital are supposed to shrink, so why are corporate profits rising as a proportion of GDP? Because the market is not working. Returning these profits to society is the proper path to redistribution. Blair's comments about politics are right, politicians are incompetent. His mistake is to have believed he was different. PS Can I get my money back?
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