Apr 29 2007
The Wall Street Journal asks ” What is the Blair legacy?”
A call from a journalist three thousand miles away asked me to sum up the end of the Blair era. He told me he was thinking of saying “Economy OK, a pity about Iraq”.
I suggested he thought again about the first part of that testimonial. We have lived through 10 years of good growth, low inflation, low interest rates, rising house prices and cheap Indian and Chinese goods in all the main world economies.
John Redwood has been the Member of Parliament for Wokingham since 1987. First attending Kent College, Canterbury, he graduated from Magdalen College...
Mr Redwood, here’s Blair’s “legacy”:
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias.
I was for many years a member of the Labour Party. Was.