WORK|OUT European Students’ Review

Foto: Indymedia

   | Hugh Cleary (OXFORD). Tony Blair’s long-awaited announcement that he will step down as British Prime Minister at the end of June marks the end of an era in British politics. Here is a student’s verdict on the Blair years, and the vacuum which he leaves.
   The loss of Tony Blair’s leadership leaves the Labour Party with a space to fill, and they look set to fill it in the most straightforward way possible — by promoting TB’s number two, the chancellor Gordon Brown. The idea is that such a move will offer continuity, and show to the electorate that the programme will continue unchanged, just with a new anchorman. There will be no leadership contest, no debate on the future of the party. The empty space, the room for doubt, the moment for reflection, will be crushed as soon as they appear.
   The fact is that this is symptomatic of New Labour, whose success in generating economic and political stability has been built on democratically shaky foundations. Forget the disastrous foreign policy, the elitist and divisive changes to higher education, the stealth privatisation of schooling and healthcare — the Blair reign will above all be remembered as one which had such a fear of debate and opposition, that it steamrollered their entire realm.
   Public opinion has been systematically ignored, never more so than in the build-up to the war on Iraq, when millions of protesters took to the streets across the country, and poll after poll showed mass opposition to the war. Later on, a fundamental part of British democracy, the second parliamentary chamber (the House of Lords), was scorned as the government pushed through an unjustified and unenforceable ban on fox-hunting, in spite of the Lords’ opposition. And all the time, where we should have heard ideas and arguments, our ears were bombarded with statistics, new measures for unemployment and healthcare (with favourable results for the government), manipulation or contortion of facts, anything rather than face the uncertain, empty realm of free thought and criticism.
   The lasting legacy of Blair’s ten years will not be any of his undoubted achievements, nor his clear failures. It will be the irreversible transformation of the business of politics, which has seen the necessary vacuum — the space for thought, doubt and honesty — filled in by media manipulation and spin.

| W|O-articles on higher education in Great Britain:
— Cheers! (2006)
— Speechless Generation (2004)
— A Smart Investment (2004)
— Carico di debiti (2004)
— Higher Education Class Society (2004)
— Nur Druck hilft (2002)
— Hochschulfinanzierung in der Klassengesellschaft (2001)