Tony Blair
Anthony Charles Lynton Blair (born 6 May 1953) is a British Labour Party politician and former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1997 to 2007. He now runs a consultancy business and performs charitable work. Blair was the Member of Parliament (MP) for Sedgefield from 1983 to 2007 and Leader of the Labour Party from 1994 to 2007. Blair led Labour 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, in which it won another landslide victory, and in 2005, with a reduced majority. Blair was elected Labour 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 Labour" to distance it from previous Labour 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 recognised individuals as socially interdependent, and advocated social justice, cohesion, equal worth of each citizen, and equal opportunity. Critics of Blair denounced him for having the Labour Party abandon genuine socialism and accepting capitalism. Supporters, including the party's public opinion pollster Philip Gould, stated that after four consecutive General Election defeats, Labour had to demonstrate that it had made a decisive break from its left-wing past, in order to win again. In May 1997, at 43 years old, Blair won a landslide General Election victory, the largest in Labour Party history, to become the youngest Prime Minister since Lord Liverpool in 1812. He attained early personal popularity, receiving a 93% public approval rating in September 1997, after his public response to the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. In the first years of the New Labour government, Blair's government introduced the National Minimum Wage Act, Human Rights Act and Freedom of Information Act, and carried out devolution, establishing the Scottish Parliament, the National Assembly for Wales, and the Northern Ireland Assembly, fulfilling four of the promises in its 1997 manifesto. In Northern Ireland, Blair was involved in the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. From the start of the War on Terror in 2001, he strongly supported much of the foreign policy of US President George W. Bush, and ensured that British armed forces participated in the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and, more controversially, the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Blair is the Labour Party's longest-serving Prime Minister, the only person to have led the Labour Party to more than two consecutive general election victories, and the only Labour Prime Minister to serve consecutive terms more than one of which was at least four years long. Blair was succeeded as Leader of the Labour 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 Globalisation 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.