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ANTHONY CHARLES LYNTON BLAIR

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Anthony Charles Lynton Blair. Prime Minister. - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

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Page 1: Anthony Charles Lynton Blair

ANTHONY CHARLES LYNTON BLAIR

Page 2: Anthony Charles Lynton Blair

PRIME MINISTER

Anthony Charles Lynton Blair (born 6 May

1953Edinburgh) is a British Labor Party politician who

served as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from

1997 to 2007. The former leader of the British Labor Party,

the 73rd Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1997 to

2007).

Page 3: Anthony Charles Lynton Blair

The record holder of the British Labor Party on the length of stay at the head of the party. He was the Member of Parliament for Sedge field from 1983 to 2007 and Leader of the Labor Party from 1994 to 2007. Blair led Labor to a landslide victory in the 1997 general election, winning 418 seats, the most the party has ever held. The party went on to win two more elections under his leadership, in 2001 and 2005, with a significantly reduced majority in the latter

Page 4: Anthony Charles Lynton Blair

A N T H O N Y C H A R L E S LY N TO N B L A I R

Blair was elected Labor Party leader in the leadership

election of July 1994, following the sudden death of his

predecessor, John Smith. Under his leadership, the party

used the phrase "New Labor" to distance it from previous

Labor policies. Blair declared opposition to the traditional

conception of socialism, and declared support for a new

conception that he referred to as "social-ism", involving

politics that recognized individuals as socially

interdependent, and advocated social justice, cohesion, equal

worth of each citizen, and equal opportunity.

He was succeeded as Leader of the Labor Party on 24

June 2007 and as Prime Minister on 27 June 2007 by

Gordon Brown. On the day he resigned as Prime Minister,

he was appointed the official Envoy of the Quartet on the

Middle East. In May 2008, Blair launched his Tony Blair

Faith Foundation. This was followed in July 2009 by the

launching of the Faith and Globalization Initiative with Yale

University in the US, Durham University in the UK and the

National University of Singapore in Asia to deliver a

postgraduate programme in partnership with the Foundation.

Foreign policy: Blair forged friendships with several

conservative European leaders, including Silvio Berlusconi

of Italy, Angela Merkel of Germany and more recently

Nicolas Sarkozy of France.

Page 5: Anthony Charles Lynton Blair

Blair became the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom on 2 May 1997, serving concurrently as First Lord of the Treasury, Minister for the Civil Service and Leader of the Labor Party. The 43-year old Blair became the youngest person to become Prime Minister since Lord Liverpool became Prime Minister at the age of 42 in 1812. With victories in 1997, 2001, and 2005, Blair was the Labor Party's longest-serving prime minister, the only person to lead the party to three consecutive general election victories. In the first years of the New Labor government, Blair's government implemented a number of 1997 manifesto pledges, introducing the National Minimum Wage Act, Human Rights Act and Freedom of Information Act, and carrying out devolution, establishing the Scottish Parliament, the National Assembly for Wales, and the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Page 6: Anthony Charles Lynton Blair

Blair's role as Prime Minister was particularly visible in foreign and security policy, including in Northern Ireland, where he was involved in the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. From the start of the War on Terror in 2001, Blair strongly supported the foreign policy of US President George W. Bush, notably by participating in the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and 2003 invasion of Iraq. Blair is the Labor Party's longest-serving Prime Minister, the only person to have led the Labor Party to more than two consecutive general election victories, and the only Labor Prime Minister to serve consecutive terms more than one of which was at least four years long.

Page 7: Anthony Charles Lynton Blair

EARLY LIFEBlair was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on 6 May 1953, the second son of

Leo and Hazel Blair (née Corscadden). Leo Blair, the illegitimate son of two

English actors, had been adopted as a baby by Glasgow shipyard worker James

Blair and his wife, Mary. Hazel Corscadden was the daughter of George

Corscadden, a butcher and Orangeman who moved to Glasgow in 1916 but

returned to (and later died in) Ballyshannon in 1923, where his wife, Sarah

Margaret (née Lipsett), gave birth to Blair's mother, Hazel, above her family's

grocery shop.

Blair has one elder brother, Sir William Blair, a High Court judge, and a

younger sister, Sarah. Blair spent the first 19 months of his life at the family

home in Paisley Terrace in the Willow brae area of Edinburgh. During this

period, his father worked as a junior tax inspector whilst also studying for a law

degree from the University of Edinburgh. In the 1950s, his family spent three

and a half years in Adelaide, Australia, where his father was a lecturer in law at

the University of Adelaide. The Blair’s lived close to the university, in the

suburb of Dulwich. The family returned to the UK in the late 1950s, living for a

time with Hazel Blair's stepfather, William McClay, and her mother at their

home in Stepps, near Glasgow. He spent the remainder of his childhood in

Durham, England, where his father Leo lectured at Durham University.

Page 8: Anthony Charles Lynton Blair

EDUCATION

After attending The Chorister School in Durham from

1961 to 1966, Blair boarded at Fettes College, a prestigious

independent school in Edinburgh, during which time he met

Charlie Falconer (a pupil at the rival Edinburgh Academy),

whom he later appointed Lord Chancellor. While studying at

the school classmate of the future prime minister was the

actor Rowan Atkinson

Page 9: Anthony Charles Lynton Blair

After Fettes, Blair spent a year in London, where he attempted to find fame as a rock music promoter before reading jurisprudence at St John's College, Oxford. As a student, he played guitar and sang in a rock band called Ugly Rumours

Page 10: Anthony Charles Lynton Blair

He was influenced by fellow student and Anglican priest Peter Thomson, who awakened within Blair a deep concern for religious faith and left-wing politics. While Blair was at Oxford, his mother Hazel died of cancer, which greatly affected him. After graduating from Oxford in 1975 with a Second-Class Honors B.A. in Jurisprudence, Blair became a member of Lincoln's Inn, enrolled as a pupil barrister, and met his future wife, Cherie Booth (daughter of the actor Tony Booth) at the law chambers founded by Derry Irvine (who was to be Blair's first Lord Chancellor), 11 King's Bench Walk Chambers.

Page 11: Anthony Charles Lynton Blair

PERSONAL LIFEFAMILY, RELIGIOUS FAITH

Blair married Cherie Booth, a Roman Catholic and future Queen's Counsel, on 29 March 1980. They

have four children: Euan, Nicholas, Kathryn, and Leo. Leo, delivered by the Royal

Surgeon/Gynecologist Marcus Setchell, was the first legitimate child born to a serving Prime Minister in

over 150 years—since Francis Russell was born to Lord John Russell on 11 July 1849. Blair was

criticized when it was discovered that one child had received private tuition from staff at Westminster

School. All four children have Irish passports, by virtue of Blair's mother, Hazel Elizabeth Rosaleen

Corscaden (1923-1975).

The family's primary residence is in Connaught Square Religious faith. Blair has the Christian faith.

Blair often read the Bible before taking any important decisions. He says that "I was brought up as [a

Christian], but I was not in any real sense a practising one until I went to Oxford. There was an

Australian priest at the same college as me who got me interested again.

Page 12: Anthony Charles Lynton Blair

CHARITY

On 14 November 2007, Blair launched the Tony Blair

Sports Foundation, which aims to "increase childhood

participation in sports activities, especially in the North East

of England, where a larger proportion of children are

socially excluded, and to promote overall health and prevent

childhood obesity." On 30 May 2008, Blair launched the

Tony Blair Faith Foundation as a vehicle for encouraging

different faiths to join together in promoting respect and

understanding, as well as working to tackle poverty. "The

Foundation will use its profile and resources to encourage

people of faith to work together more closely to tackle

global poverty and conflict," says its mission statement.

Blair has established Tony Blair Associates to "allow him to

provide, in partnership with others, strategic advice on a

commercial and pro bono [free] basis, on political and

economic trends and governmental reform".The profits from

the firm go towards supporting Blair's "work on faith, Africa

and climate change". In February 2009, he applied to set up

a charity called the Tony Blair Africa Governance Initiative:

the application was approved in November 2009.

Page 13: Anthony Charles Lynton Blair

EARLY POLITICAL CAREER

Blair joined the Labor Party shortly after graduating from

Oxford in 1975. During the early 1980s, he was involved in

Labor politics in Hackney South and Shoreditch, where he

aligned himself with the "soft left" of the party. In 1982

Blair was selected as the Labor candidate in the safe

Conservative seat of Beaconsfield, where there was a

forthcoming by-election. Although Blair lost the

Beaconsfield by-election (the only election he lost in his 25-

year political career) and he lost 10% of the vote, he

acquired a profile within the party. In contrast to his later

centrism, Blair made it clear in a letter he wrote to Labor

leader Michael Foot in July 1982 that he had "come to

Socialism through Marxism" and considered himself on the

left. The letter was eventually published in June 2006.

In 1983, Blair found the newly created constituency of

Sedge field, a notionally safe Labor seat near where he had

grown up in Durham. The branch had not made a

nomination, and Blair visited them. Several sitting MPs

displaced by boundary changes were interested in securing

selection to fight the seat. With the crucial support of John

Burton, Blair won their endorsement; at the last minute, he

was added to the short list and won the selection over Les

Huckfield. Burton later became Blair's election agent and

one of his most trusted and longest-standing allies.

Blair's election literature in the 1983 UK general election

endorsed left-wing policies that Labor advocated in the early

1980s. He called for Britain to leave the EEC, though he had

told his selection conference that he personally favoured

continuing membership. He also supported unilateral

nuclear disarmament as a member of the Campaign for

Nuclear Disarmament. Blair was helped on the campaign

trail by soap opera actress Pat Phoenix, his father-in-law's

girlfriend. Blair was elected as MP for Sedge field despite

the party's landslide defeat in the general election.

In his maiden speech in the House of Commons on 6 July

1983, Blair stated, "I am a socialist not through reading a

textbook that has caught my intellectual fancy, nor through

unthinking tradition, but because I believe that, at its best,

socialism corresponds most closely to an existence that is

both rational and moral. It stands for cooperation, not

confrontation; for fellowship, not fear. It stands for

equality." The Labor Party is declared in its constitution to

be a democratic socialist party rather than a social

democratic party; Blair himself organized this declaration of

Labor to be a socialist party when he dealt with the change

to the party's Clause IV in their constitution.

Once elected, Blair's political ascent was rapid. He

received his first front-bench appointment in 1984 as

assistant Treasury spokesman. In May 1985, he appeared on

BBC's Question Time, arguing that the Conservative

Government's Public Order White Paper was a threat to civil

liberties. Blair demanded an inquiry into the Bank of

England's decision to rescue the collapsed Johnson Matthey

Bank in October 1985 and embarrassed the government by

finding an EEC report critical of British economic policy

that had been countersigned by a member of the

Conservative government. By this time, Blair was aligned

with the reforming tendencies in the party (headed by leader

Neil Kinnock) and was promoted after the 1987 election to

the shadow Trade and Industry team as spokesman on the

City of London.

In 1987, he stood for election to the Shadow Cabinet,

receiving 71 votes. When Kinnock resigned after a

Conservative landslide in the 1992 election, Blair became

Shadow Home Secretary under John Smith.

Page 14: Anthony Charles Lynton Blair

EVE NT S BEF ORE RE SIGNAT ION

As the casualties of the Iraq War mounted, Blair was

accused of misleading Parliament, and his popularity

dropped dramatically. Labor party's overall majority in the

2005 general election was reduced to 66. As a combined

result of the Blair-Brown pact, Iraq war and low approval

ratings, pressure built up within the Labor party for Blair to

resign. On 7 September 2006, Blair publicly stated he would

step down as party leader by the time of the Trades Union

Congress (TUC) conference held 10–13 September 2007,

having promised to serve a full term during the previous

general election campaign. On 10 May 2007, during a

speech at the Trim don Labor Club; Blair announced his

intention to resign as Labor Party leader and Prime Minister.

Page 15: Anthony Charles Lynton Blair

At a special party conference in Manchester on 24 June 2007, he formally handed over the leadership of the Labor Party to Gordon Brown, who had been Chancellor of the Exchequer. Blair tendered his resignation on 27 June 2007 and Brown assumed office the same afternoon. Blair also resigned his seat in the House of Commons in the traditional form of accepting the Stewardship of the Chiltern Hundreds, to which he was appointed by Gordon Brown in one of the latter's last acts as Chancellor of the Exchequer. The resulting Sedge field by-election was won by Labors’ candidate, Phil Wilson. Blair decided not to issue a list of Resignation Honors, making him the first Prime Minister of the modern era not to do so.

Page 16: Anthony Charles Lynton Blair

RELATIONSHIP WITH THE UNITED

STATESAlong with enjoying a close relationship with Bill Clinton, Blair formed a

strong political alliance with George W. Bush, particularly in the area of

foreign policy. Bush lauded Blair and the UK. The alliance between Bush

and Blair seriously damaged Blair's standing in the eyes of many British

people. Blair argued it is in Britain's interest to "protect and strengthen the

bond" with the United States regardless of who is in the White House.

However, a perception of one-sided compromising personal and political

closeness led to serious discussion.

Page 17: Anthony Charles Lynton Blair

POST-PRIME MINISTERIAL

CAREERDIPLOMACY

On 27 June 2007, Blair officially resigned as Prime

Minister after ten years in office, and he was officially

confirmed as Middle East envoy for the United Nations,

European Union, United States, and Russia. Blair originally

indicated that he would retain his parliamentary seat after

his resignation as Prime Minister came into effect; however,

on being confirmed for the Middle East role he resigned

from the Commons by taking up an office of profit.

President George W. Bush had preliminary talks with Blair

to ask him to take up the envoy role. White House sources

stated that "both Israel and the Palestinians had signed up to

the proposal». In May 2008, Blair announced a new plan for

peace and for Palestinian rights, based heavily on the ideas

of the Peace Valley plan.