22March
Blair and those around him were defeatists. In their view the media were supreme. What the media believed was what the country believed; and what the media believed decided elections...
The PFI is just an ingenious way of wasting money. It would have been better to have excluded the private sector altogether or (arguably) to have made it bear the full costs by genuine privatisation. But that would have been impossible for a government which both believes that higher levels of public expenditure are politically necessary and is ideologically committed to the private sector...
Brown’s decision to hand over much of the direction of the economy to the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England is thought to have been a brilliant stroke. But it has worked only because the comparative stability of the international economy has allowed it to. Had the MPC been in charge in the 1970s they would have been as much at sea as the Treasury.
Ross McKibbin in the London Review of Books, discussing ten years of Tony.
