Well, well, well. Maybe things will get better after all:

Jack Straw, widely expected to replace John Reid as the home secretary, today clearly signalled that the future of the national identity card scheme would be in the melting pot when Gordon Brown becomes prime minister next month.

Mr Straw - who is Mr Brown’s leadership campaign manager and has a long record of cabinet opposition to a compulsory ID card system - indicated that the future of the £5.75bn project would be under review in the new government

Technorati Tags: politics, id cards, jack straw

So there we have it: Tony will soon be gone. I had forgotten some of the good things: the minimum wage; civil partnerships (though why not for het couples?); the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly; the London Mayor and Assembly; Northern Ireland, of course. Even the hunting and smoking bans.

But Iraq; the dodgy dossier; detention without trial; ID cards; ASBOs; and so on and on.

“You’re a well-respected man, but bullshit! You could’ve been great” as The Waterboys once put it. Actually I wouldn’t describe Blair as “well-respected”, so that doesn’t really work.

Should the government go to the country when the party leader steps down? Many think so, but actually, I largely don’t. In theory we live in a representative democracy. Citizens vote for a representative for their local area, and the party with the most seats forms a government. If the leader retires - or even is kicked out, though that does put a different complexion on things - that doesn’t change the position in parliament. And changing the leader does not necessarily mean a change of government.

On the other hand, calling an election wouldn’t be a bad thing for the country, except for one problem: we’d probably end up with a Tory government.

Though it shows how bad things have got when I find myself thinking that maybe a Tory government, if they would scrap ID cards, wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

Technorati Tags: politics, blair, tony blair, pm, prime minister, resignation

He could have been great, you know.

We could be sitting here now, raising a glass to the end of the reign of Britain’s greatest Prime Minister of the (loosely-bounded) century, if not ever. It wouldn’t have been hard. Look at the two before him: after they had finished their slash-and-burn attack on the economy and the welfare state, all he’d have had to do was put it back together, and things would have got better

And they did do some good; some things did get better. I’ve spoken before about my approval of the Human Rights Act, and despite its current problems, the NHS is, on the whole, in a better state than it was. And the economy has seen a kind and duration of stability that you just don’t get under the Tories (never trust a right-winger with your economy: they’re all about “invisible hands”, and they just don’t know how to run it properly; just look at the way Bush threw away the trillions that Clinton left him).

And the Africa thing. A real attempt at ending poverty in Africa. Now that would have been a legacy worth having.

But here we are, now. He’s squandered all the goodwill he had ten years ago, taken the country into an illegal war, and taken massively Orwellian steps towards the reduction of civil liberties. In years to come, when you search the net for the phrase “power corrupts”, you’ll find a picture of Tony Blair.

Don’t bang the door on your way out, Tony, and goodbye.

Technorati Tags: politics, tony blair, legacy, irag illegal war, id cards, power corrupts, new labour, things can only get better, 1997