A journey we've all heard before

No reader of the Star will give an enthusiastic welcome to Tony Blair's 700-page autobiography A Journey. Indeed, many might have preferred his testament to come from the war crimes tribunal at The Hague.

However, Blair was a Labour prime minister who headed three majority Labour governments and it is reasonable for historians to ponder whether his book offers any useful source material.

The anti-war demonstration on February 15 2003, which Blair notes by saying he was in Glasgow on the day, is part of our history. But the remainder of the Blair years are too recent to count as history. Yet that does not mean that we can review his book to see if it provides insights and information that might be part of a useful history one day.

Blair's book is the work of many hands. But there can be no doubt that the book's structure, drift and judgements are substantively his, as is the unique grammatical style.

Fortunately for historians there is a 25-page index but the nearer the book gets to the present day the less use it is to historians. The more contemporary chapters are commentary on current or near current events which is not history by any standard.

The chapters on Iraq really have no historical value or any other kind of worth, but socialists would not expect any different.

However, the first pages of the book do have material of some interest. There is little strictly new material but it is a useful summary of what the new Labour project was all about.

Blair felt that Labour had to "modernise" to face the changing world. Why Labour specifically might have been outdated is not really touched on although he did have a point when it came to the equalities agenda - old Labour had not been an unqualified or notable champion of LGBT rights.

While Blair is prepared to praise people like Tony Benn and Dennis Skinner as principled left-wing figures and brilliant speakers he makes it clear that he never agreed with their ideas. Indeed, he suggests that one of the few left-wing ideas he did support was the abolition of capital punishment - a somewhat ironic point given his warmongering.

He relates why he felt it was a matter of principle to scrap clause four and marginalise the left in the unions around, for example, Arthur Scargill.

He also makes it clear that he was absolutely dogmatic about pursuing the new Labour agenda on health and education but was prepared to be very flexible about more left-wing ideas that he did not actively oppose, such as the renationalisation of the railways. Blair says it simply cost too much, and to be fair to him, he said so at the time as well.

He talks of his time at Oxford where he was not politically active but was exposed through friends to some political ideas. One acquaintance was in the International Marxist Group which Blair correctly identifies as Trotskyist. He goes on to note that there were a few "normal" people in the Communist Party.

Much of this material simply marks Blair out as a right-wing social democrat, which again is certainly how he described himself. The transition from this to neoliberal warmonger is described in the book but hardly accounted for. Perhaps Blair does not even think there is a difference.

One would have to say that for an understanding of what new Labour was and became John O'Farrell's Things Can Only Get Better and the two volumes of Chris Mullin's Diaries are a far better guide.