tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6048425.post2050046556415761566..comments2023-11-02T15:32:15.417+00:00Comments on Bluematter.: Tony Blair: a profoundly reasonable manUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6048425.post-78904335947425576432007-05-10T15:11:00.000+00:002007-05-10T15:11:00.000+00:00The act of assessing legacies is interesting in it...The act of assessing legacies is interesting in itself. If you go back far enough (19th century or earlier for sure, but maybe even the first half of the 20th century), legacies were assessed by historians a long time after the event with pundits of the day relatively unimportant. However, with the growth in media it seems likely that some kind of near-consensus (or at least some consensus regarding what the main two or three "main" viewpoints are) might be made quite quickly on Tony Blair and will dominate the work of future historians.<BR/><BR/>This is in many ways a bad thing because I think assessing legacies benefits from a time lag to see how some longer-term policies pan out and to get away from any emotive feelings around the end someone's career. I also think Historians are often more interested in going into real depth whereas the current media obsession with over-simplification means it's far easier to dismiss Blair's legacy as "Iraq" (one word) or "overshadowed by Brown" (three words) and these kind of views might become too entrenched for later detailed work to really get away from them.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com