Gordon Brown and "Which Blair"

Gordon Brown (photo at right) is Britain's new Prime Minister. The MP I worked for in the House of Commons, Martin O'Neill, held the post of Labour Spokesman on Trade & Industry after his fellow Scotsman, Gordon Brown, had done the same.

The New York Times marks the transition occuring at 10 Downing Street with a solid editorial:

Tony Blair, who leaves office today, deserves to be remembered for far more than the disastrous war in Iraq. In 10 years as prime minister, he transformed Britain in positive ways and revitalized his Labor Party, which makes his failures in Iraq all the more lamentable.

Mr. Blair took what was best from Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative legacy and humanized and modernized it. He now hands it to Gordon Brown, a successor well-equipped to consolidate this achievement. Mr. Brown is not as gifted a phrase-turner, which for Blair-weary Britons may come as a relief. But he is a more rigorous and systematic thinker.

Mr. Blair’s most remarkable achievement was to bring peace and democratic self-rule to Northern Ireland. British leaders have been dealing with Irish issues for centuries, and mostly getting them wrong. Showing rare courage and vision, Mr. Blair got Northern Ireland just right.

On social policy, Mr. Blair (photo at right) revitalized Britain’s pioneering but rundown National Health Service and its underachieving schools. His reforms were Thatcherite in their free-market ideology, but Laborite in generous funding. The results have been less than could be hoped for, but they have created firm financial foundations on which Mr. Brown can build.

On foreign policy, Mr. Blair was unapologetically an activist and an interventionist, with largely positive results on Kosovo and hugely negative results in the far more important case of Iraq. In that fiasco, Mr. Blair’s great misfortune was to have President Bush as his partner. But his unforgivable failure was to serve as a mellifluous enabler, not as a badly needed voice of caution.

Mr. Blair should have, and probably did, know better. But he didn’t tell the truth to British voters about when and why he decided to go to war and about the quality of the intelligence he used to justify that decision. And he hasn’t acknowledged the failure of prewar planning and all the failures that have followed since. In three elections, British voters placed their trust in Mr. Blair to lead their country. On the most important issue of his tenure, he failed to reciprocate that trust.