Good Bye Mr Blair

Well its finally all over and Tony Blair has stepped down as the UK Prime Minister and Gordon Brown has taken over.

Luckilly sitting here in Sweden I feel quite ambivolent to it all. I'm much more concerned about changes to the property tax laws the Swedish government is discussing and much less about whether Gordon Brown can fix the educated, health, welfare etc... problems of the UK.

Which is all very good and proper as this is my home now and I may never return to live in Britain again. So has Tony Blair been a good Prime Minister for the UK ? Was he a good Prime Minister for Sweden for that matter?

Tony Blair pulled off the almost impossible task of pulling the Labour party around and thrusting them into power 10 years ago by re-branding the party and ditching the old policies which the electorate had so many times said not thanks to. Britains certainly voted for 'New Labour' not the old labour party.

Fast forward to 2006 and this became the model for Fredrik Reindfeldt's New Moderata which also finally managed to overturn years of Social Democratic rule. The New Labour movement showed that it was never too late to change and adapt to the modern politics of the day and turn a tired old party into one which the people would actually believe in and vote for.

Maybe Sweden has also benefitted from the British Governments stance on Europe. With France, Germany and many of the other European countries rushing to take up the Euro, the British government stood out as the only major economic power to say, 'No, we want to control our own ecenomy'. If Britian had joined up I have no doubt that countries like Denmark would have followed suite and so too would Sweden as Swedes always vote with the Danes (you just have to watch the Eurovision Song Contest to see this).

The result would have been that Sweden would have been bogged down in the poor economic growth of the other Euro block countries (although I guess Finland has not done too badly).

Finnally Tony Blair played a strong role in securing peace in Notheren Ireland so we should all be hopeful he can work some magic in the Middle East in his new role as peace envoy (although it is an odd choice to appoint a peace envoy to a region where he has already invaded two of the countries and has been pushing the UN to impose greater sanctions on a third ????)