Since 1997, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have formed the longest unbroken partnership of Prime Minister and Chancellor in modern British political history.  Despite their partnership being inharmonious and even bitter at times, their record in Government is a joint achievement; the years 1997-2007 are truly the Blair/Brown years.

In the month, that marks their 10 years in government, and is most likely to signal the end of their partnership, the Liberal Democrats published ‘The State They’ve Put Us In’, a dossier setting out much of what has gone wrong under Labour in specific areas, such as health, education, crime and the environment.  It is by no means exhaustive, but it illustrates just how much Blair and Brown have failed to achieve – and in many areas how things have gone backwards.

Against the backdrop of 18 years of Conservative rule from 1979-1997, things have got better, a little better – but nowhere near as much as promised, and nowhere near as much as needed.   4 out of 10 for Blair and Brown would be a fair assessment.   First the good news. 

For their first four years in Government, a much needed new broom began to sweep through the corridors of Whitehall.  The Bank of England was made independent bringing stability for the economy.  A Foreign Policy with an ethical dimension was announced.  A historic modernisation of our political system began with the creation of a Scottish Parliament and a Welsh Assembly beginning the much needed process of bringing power in Britain closer to the people it serves and the right of hereditary peers to sit in the upper house mostly abolished.  After initially sticking to Tory spending limits, investment in Britain’s dilapidated public services started.  The fruits of that investment can now be seen.  In the NHS more staff, reduced waiting lists, better care in some areas such a cancer.  In Education a schools building programme, better paid teachers, more books, and better equipment. All these were supported by and voted for by the Liberal Democrats, indeed it reflected much of what we set out in our 1997 manifesto ‘Make the Difference’. Crucially we were the first party to campaign for independence for the Bank of England.  Brown was utterly silent on this – until his first week in office, when he just went ahead and did it. 

So why only 4 out of 10?

It began to go wrong after the 2001 election.  The omens had been their before.  Blair and Brown’s reliance on gimmick, quick fixes, misdirection and spin to get themselves out of policy holes began to assert themselves.  Brown boldly pledged at the 2001 election not to raise the basic rate or top rate of income tax.  So in 2002 he raised National Insurance instead.  The pledge not to introduce tuition fees was broken.  Ministerial resignations gathered apace.  Having already lost Peter Mandelson (twice), Geoffrey Robinson and Ron Davies, between 2001-2005, Keith Vaz, Beverley Hughes, Stephen Byers and David Blunkett were all forced to resign.  Labour Home Secretaries became ever more authoritarian, undermining Britain’s cherished civil liberties and pandering to simplicity effectively abandoning the pledge to be both tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime.  And then came Iraq.

The fair wind that Blair and Brown had enjoyed since 1997 began to evaporate.  Hundreds of thousands marched through the streets against the war, but the Blair-Brown partnership, backed by the Conservatives took us in anyway.  Neither man seemed willing to challenge the direction of President Bush’s policy, neither was prepared to explicitly condemned the abuse of human rights and international laws that Guantanamo Bay represents, neither man has accepted that the invasion of Iraq was illegal and based on a flawed prospectus.  And then came the revelations surrounding the dodgy dossier on weapons of mass destruction and the death of David Kelly.  In the wake of the Hutton and Butler inquiries it became clear that patchy intelligence had been used as propaganda, that their were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and that Britain’s reputation in the world would suffer accordingly.

The 2005 election was a victory in name only.  Blair and Brown were returned to power with the lowest ever percentage of the vote for a Party with a majority in the House of Commons – a mere 36% of the vote.  The Liberal Democrats recorded the best result in their history, establishing three party politics across the length and breadth of Britain.  Since 2005, Britain has been treading political water.  Once Gordon Brown forced Tony Blair to renege on his promise to serve a full third term little could be achieved with a lame duck Prime Minister. 

Now for the bad news.  This is the state Blair and Brown have put us in.

Interest rates and inflation are creeping up, personal debt is spiralling out of control, our tax system is riven with complexity, burdened with stealth taxes and failing the environment, and the gap between the rich and poor is wider than it was under the Conservatives.

Public service reform has been bungled in a mass of Whitehall targets, centralised control and constant revolution.  Local people have been left with little influence over the services they rely on.  Hospitals are in deficit, wards are closing, health service jobs are being lost. In school, children from poorer backgrounds are doing worse.  Students are being saddled with mortgage style debts.  Truancy is at record levels.  More 16 year olds are dropping out of education altogether than in any other European country.

So much of the investment in our public services is being wasted.  Taxpayers money is being wasted on Blair and Brown’s Whitehall directed, target driven, one size fits all, wrong-headed, dogmatic obsession with command and control of the public services.  Taxpayers’ money is being wasted on gimmicks that get headlines, but have no practical effect.  Taxpayers’ money is being wasted on a merry-go-round of reorganisation that leaves our doctors, nurses and teachers tied up in red-tape, filling out forms and waiting for the next impractical gimmick to come skimming across their desk.

On the international stage, the invasion and occupation of Iraq has proved a catastrophic foreign policy disaster. Between them, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and George Bush have so mismanaged the response to the terrorist attacks of 2001 that they have squandered an immense reservoir of international goodwill, divided and disparaged their allies and fostered an arc of instability from the Mediterranean to Indian Ocean.  The Middle East peace process is still in deep freeze.  Iraq is close to civil war.  The Taliban is regrouping in Afghanistan.  Iran is emboldened.  Britain’s armed forces are overstretched and undermanned.

On Crime, there has been manifest failure in the Home Office.  Just one in every hundred crimes in this country is punished in court.  The prison population is at record levels, re-offending rates are the highest in Europe.  Labour is dragging the criminal justice system ever further in the wrong direction.  The fear of crime and anti-social behaviour has not diminished under Blair and Brown.  Instead they have fed this fear and exploited it to enact some of the most authoritarian peacetime legislation this country has ever seen.

Blair and Brown’s failure to deliver on their promises, their obsession with spin, headlines and short-term fixes, the centralisation of government and the growing arrogance of power have cruelly betrayed the public optimism of 1997 when Labour promised us that ‘politics has changed for good’

In place of that hope is unprecedented public disillusion with politics fuelled by the Blair-Brown partnership’s legacy of a catastrophic war, the vast waste of resources caused by mismanagement of public services and above all the squandered opportunity to make Britain a fairer, greener and better place for its citizens.

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Greg Simpson is Head of Policy and Research for the Liberal Democrats. This piece was originally published on 3rd May.