Blair’s Legacy: Britons Are Spending More Than They’re Earning
THE TELEGRAPH: Watching many British consumers en route to a debt crisis has been like observing drivers of cars with faulty brakes, heading confidently towards the edge of a cliff. When alerted to looming disaster, these debtors and motorists kept giving the same reply: "Relax, everything's in control." Then, whooosh!

Over the past five or six years, cautious voices have warned eager borrowers that they were taking on far too much debt. Just because they could afford their monthly repayments (for now), it did not mean that "maxing out" on credit cards, overdrafts and mortgages was a smart move.

Unfortunately, too few consumers wanted to listen. Those of us who predicted a crash landing were dismissed as Cassandras. We didn't understand the new paradigm. Debt was cool, a financial fashion item. Saving was for wimps. Only fuddy-duddies and stick-in-the-muds didn't have debt.

Now, however, as the price of money rises and the pain of higher interest charges is beyond that which many troubled borrowers can tolerate (100,000 went bust last year), debt is starting to look decidedly démodé, the unattractive bling of bankrupts. The trouble is, we're stuck with £1,300 billion of it - and it's going up by £1 million every four minutes. Blair’s legacy is a nation engulfed by debt (more) By Jeff Randall

Mark Alexander

Taking the 'New' Out of 'New Labour' - unceremoniously

Photo of Blair ‘the Showman’ courtesy of Google Images

THE TELEGRAPH: Labour set the stage for a new era under Gordon Brown yesterday by unceremoniously dumping Tony Blair's "New Labour" brand within minutes of the Prime Minister delivering an emotional and stage-managed resignation statement.

As Mr Blair admitted that he had not always lived up to the public's high expectations when he entered Downing Street a decade ago, the "New Labour, New Britain" logo - the defining symbol of his leadership - was removed from the party's website and replaced with plain "Labour" and the red rose symbol.

The move emphasised the determination of senior Labour figures to regain hundreds of thousands of traditional supporters who have come to associate New Labour with a betrayal of the party's values. Mr Blair launched the name at his first conference as leader in 1994 at the start of a relentless programme of modernisation. The end of New Labour (more) By George Jones and Toby Helm

Telegraph Leader: Tony Blair's exit was gracefully done, though the seven-week farewell tour that is to follow will surely test everyone's patience.

This peerless political showman delivered a speech that was perfectly pitched and refreshingly free of maudlin sentiment.
Yet what was most striking about the swansong was its defensiveness, underscored by his rather plaintive assertion that "hand on heart, I did what I thought was right" as he apologised for the times when he had "fallen short". It struck an elegiac note in counterpoint to his predictable roll-call of New Labour "successes". A great showman – but an average statesman (more)

Mark Alexander

Opinion: A N Wilson on Blair
INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE: A little over a decade after he came in as the young hope of a New Britain, Tony Blair is a figure vilified and loathed by his own party and disliked by people in Britain at large.

There is, however, one good legacy he bequeaths us, and we should not be ungenerous in recognizing it. That is peace in Ireland. Both sides in the Northern Irish dispute hate the English, and both have good reason to do so. This hatred was a substantial reason successive British prime ministers, many of them doing their very best to undo the mistakes of the past, got nowhere with the Irish.

But the hatred was only part of the reason. Another was the phenomenon of language. The Ireland of James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Oscar Wilde, Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams is a place where words bounce, and fly and sing, often meaning several things at once, sometimes meaning nothing at all. Expecting the various parties in Northern Ireland to negotiate with such solidly Aristotelian figures as Margaret Thatcher simply wasn't fair. Her word was her bond. Of course, both sides became entrenched behind barricades not only of barbed wire but of discourse.

Blair, however, is a boundlessly superficial person, and he was perfectly happy to swim about in the weird world of Irish politics where words could mean anything you liked. Most of his sentences would be untranslatable. They were even delivered in quite different accents, as though he was more than one person, which in a way he is. Blair: A player who never found his stage (more)

Mark Alexander