Deborah Orr: He failed to stand up for the people most in need

Children's playgrounds are so neglected that they mock the very notion of 'childsplay'

Friday, 11 May 2007

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Blair's departure, fittingly enough, leaves us with one last awesome choice. These 10 years in Britain have been intense and tumultuous, full of contrast and paradox. They have been, if the wisdom can be found to learn their lessons, quite astoundingly vivid and instructive. We have the chance now to map our future. The shape and the significance of Blair's much-touted legacy is in that sense in our own hands.

Britain's great wealth is now blindingly and obviously apparent, most of all in London, of course, which has emerged as arguably the most powerful, and actually the most expensive, city in the world. From the start Mr Blair declared himself relaxed about wealth, and nobody can deny that he has held the line on that one.

There is a glittering, volatile sense of accelerating opulence in the capital that is seductive and enervating, thrilling and unsettling. The strain of euphoria in the capital sits on the edge of hysteria, and feels dangerous enough to be addictive. But the signs of comfort and plenty are by no means concentrated there. All round England, there are manicured country towns, with stylish shops, clued-up delis, smart private dentists and smart private schools, servicing rural lives of casual, relaxed, informal luxury. No matter what complaints abound as to the dreadful cost of upper-middle-class living, the numbers of people who seem able to afford such lives are steadily growing.

The vast majority of people privileged enough even to graze the margins of such plenty are loath now to suggest that aggressive free-market economies don't work. A high degree of consensus has hardened now around the idea that capitalism won the ideological battle that defined the 20th century, and that consensus is not going to go away. It's plain to see anyway, whatever reservations one may have, that a change of course now would be painful indeed.

It's just as perfectly, palpably plain though, that London is heaving also with poverty, disenfranchisement and nihilism. Walking into some pockets of deprivation is like walking into a war zone, with shops grimy and blackened enough to look almost burnt out, or children's playgrounds so neglected and abused that they mock the very notion of anything at all being "childsplay". Danger is a presence here too, but it is not charged up with glamour. It is threatening, sinister, depressing, dispiriting and hopeless. Not so occasionally the stabbing or shooting of a schoolboy, or a boy who should be a schoolboy, confirms that the threat of violence that pervades such places is quite, quite real.

Many of the young people classed as Neets (not in education, employment or training) are caught between a wider culture of aspiration and a failure, for all sorts of significant reasons, to access the skills-based economy. They dream of the easy and plentiful money they see in the media, or opt to join the supply side of easily accessible market in illegal drugs, and reject the reality of hard-earned, meagre wages.

Their existential all-out strike does them no good at all though, because people pour in from around the world, less sniffy about low pay and hard work, less hampered by a hazy sense of entitlement, less hung-up on a bowdlerised idea that they should be respected, and more open to the understanding that self-respect is what comes first. Their troubles are not simple, as our prisons, crammed with an unending stream of illiterates, addicts, alcoholics, self-harmers and people with other forms of mental illness attest.

Again, such deeply troubling contrasts are by no means confined to London, and the inner city. Rural poverty and isolation is widespread too. Globalisation, driven as much by technology as by political choice, has bitten hard in the countryside. "Food security" is no longer considered to be a political issue and subsidies for farmers are not only a discredited form of protectionism but also a practically useless bulwark against cheap, imported produce. Here too, imported labour will accept conditions and submit to work that defies the modest standards of a little-policed aspect of the law of the land. Free markets open borders far more efficiently than liberal immigration policies ever could. Anyone who believes you can have one without the other is just deluded.

What's been truly astounding about the savage polarisation we have seen across Britain, in the city and in the country, is that it is inexorably increased in the face of a vast expansion of a welfare state that supposedly exists to mitigate it. Ten years of effort to lift children out of poverty, to drive up educational standards, and to improve the health of the nation, has made little impact on the people that it needs to reach most.

There are still many, many people who are willing mulishly to reject the obvious thing this tells us - that market economics are as efficient at generating extremes of deprivation as they are at generating extremes of privilege. It is certainly true that there is plenty to dispute bitterly in the manner of the change that Labour has overseen in this area, and the mode of its delivery. But it is not without significance that the leadership of the Conservative Party is flagging up with some clarity that it is time to accept that free markets have some extremely destructive and divisive consequences, and that politics now has to focus on social rather than economic issues.

Even leaving aside the environmental consequences of wealth generation (not that in reality such a thing is possible anyway), it is crucial to recognise fully that market economies need social exclusion in order for them to function at their most ruthlessly efficient, and manufacture them for this reason. This is one of the things that the market decides and Blair's era has shown this to be so, in the most flamboyant manner. Choosing to ignore or deny this absolutely critical reality would be immeasurably capricious.

Despite the fact that under Blair Britain has become one of the most literally punitive societies in the world - again this week we're told that our prisons are full to bursting - there remains a stubborn vein of rhetoric that points to hoodie-hugging and cushy options under the welfare state as being the real cause of our woes. Such rhetoric can indeed seem quite stirring, as it rightly tends to emphasise that the people who suffer most from the consequences of criminal or loutish behaviour are the people who have little choice themselves but to live side by side with the chaos it makes, in a frustrating and draining war of attrition.

Yet in their avid yearning for a return to what they prefer to see as a great moment of Thatcherite connection with the decent and hardworking ordinary people, they fail to see that the neat delineation they imagine to exist between the good folks and the irredeemable ones is very far from clear. Sometimes, these supposedly discrete factions are living under the same roof, in the same family, looking for help that they often don't get, and are made to feel like pariahs for wanting. The harsh reality is that in our shiny skills-based economy, the job of making a comfortable, functioning life is by definition most challenging for the people least likely to possess the qualities or resources to do so. They need all the help they can get. Blair has not been the advocate for them he should have been.

The world according to Tony Blair

A new dawn has broken, has it not?

2 May 1997

We are not the masters. The people are the masters. We are the servants of the people.

Address to Labour MPs, 7 May 1997

I'm a pretty straight sort of guy.

Apologising for mishandling Bernie Ecclestone's £1m donation to Labour, 16 November 1997

It's not a day for soundbites really, we can leave those at home, but I feel the hand of history upon our shoulder.

Belfast, 7 April 1998, on the Good Friday Agreement

Our historic aim will be for ours to be the first generation to end child poverty.

Beveridge lecture, 18 March 1999

The class war is over. But the struggle for true equality has only just begun.

Labour conference speech, Bournemouth, 28 September 1999

Being a prime minister can be tough, but being a parent is probably tougher.

6 July 2000, after Euan was arrested for being drunk in Leicester Square while celebrating the end of his GCSEs

We, therefore, here in Britain stand shoulder to shoulder with our American friends in this hour of tragedy, and we, like them, will not rest until this evil is driven from our world.

Televised statement at Downing Street, 11 September 2001

The state of Africa is a scar on the conscience of the world.

Addressed to US, Labour conference speech, Brighton, 2 October 2001

If we are wrong, we will have destroyed a threat that, at its least, is responsible for inhuman carnage and suffering. That is something I am confident history will forgive.

Address on Iraq to joint session of US Congress, 17 July 2003

I've not got a reverse gear.

Labour conference speech, Bournemouth, 30 September 2003

I can apologise for the information that turned out to be wrong, but I can't, sincerely at least, apologise for removing Saddam.

Labour conference speech, Brighton, 28 September 2004

At least I don't have to worry about [Cherie] running off with the bloke next door.

Labour conference speech, Manchester, 26 September 2006