每日一星 Tony Blair

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每日一星 Tony Blair

On May 1, 1997, Tony Blair led Britain’s Labour Party to its biggest-ever election victory.  The following day he became the UK’s youngest prime minister since William Pitt the Younger at the end of the 18th century.  Blair was just 43.

Anthony Charles Lynton Blair was born in Edinburgh on May 6, 1953.  After graduating from the University of Oxford in 1975, he became a barrister.  He was elected to the House of Commons for the safe Labour constituency of Sedgefield, in the county of Durham, in the general election of 1983, when Labour sustained its heaviest defeat since 1935.  Blair belonged to a generation of young, open-minded Labour MPs(下院议员) who wanted the party to abandon its traditional devotion to state socialism.  Pro-European unity and pro-NATO, he was one of the keenest supporters of Neil Kinnock, who, as party leader from 1983 to 1992, sought to modernize Labour.  Blair was elected to the shadow cabinet by his fellow Labour MPs in 1988, when he was just 35.  In 1992, after Labour’s fourth successive election defeat, Kinnock resigned and John Smith became party leader.  As shadow home secretary, Blair sought to jettison Labour’s image of being “soft” on criminals.  He employed the phrase “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” to summarize Labour’s policies and attacked the Conservatives for their failure to tackle the underlying social causes of rising crime.  While bolstering his public image, Blair sought to speed up the process of party modernization and was frustrated at what he felt was Smith’s unwillingness to bring the party’s constitution and economic and industrial policies up-to-date.

In May 1994 Smith died suddenly of a heart attack.  There was little doubt who would win the contest to succeed him, and on July 21 Blair became party leader.  About two months later he told Labour’s annual conference that he wished to rewrite the party’s constitution and abandon its commitment to “the common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange.”  At a special conference in April 1995, he secured agreement to a new set of party objectives that explicitly acknowledge the virtues of market competition.  Blair also sought to woo the middle classes by promising not to increase the standard rate or higher rates of the income tax.  Within the Labour Party he acted to make it a more effective election-fighting force.  He borrowed a number of techniques developed in US Pres. Bill Clinton’s 1992 and 1996 election campaigns; for example, he established a “rapid rebuttal” unit, employing the most up-to-date information technology, to respond swiftly to statements made by Labour’s rivals.  Blair summed up his reforms by describing his party not as Labour but as New Labour.

On the morning of May 2, following his landslide election victory, Blair said, “We were elected as New Labour; we will govern as New Labour.”  Fears that the party might break its pre-election promises, especially on taxation, were quickly quelled.  Labour, and Blair personally, entered an extended honeymoon period with an electorate mostly delighted to see the end of the Conservative regime.  Blair’s opinion-poll ratings during the second half of 1997 were the highest for any prime minister since Winston Churchill, though ate in the year his support was somewhat eroded by cuts in welfare benefits and reports of a tax haven for wealthy government ministers.

from BRITANNICA BOOK OF THE YEAR 1998