It’s been a diffi cult decade and a half in which to run a democracy. Two wars that did not go to plan—if I can put it like that—and a financial crisis that touched almost all the world have hardly helped build confidence in liberal democracies and free markets. My shelves are dominated by books of the “What went wrong?” genre: first a wave on Iraq and Afghanistan, giving way to a longer, higher swell of those on the crash and recession.
Debt, deficits, ageing populations, the impact of globalisation and technology on jobs and the stalling of productivity and wages all play a part. Threats and environmental problems proliferate and international alliances to combat them are wobbling. Above all, there is the new, angry scepticism of voters about their leaders, raising the spectre that democracy may be unable solve its own problems. For Prospect, these questions are its central preoccupation; the magazine was founded 21 years ago this year, and while it has never been attached to any political party, it early on borrowed the roll-your-sleeves-up spirit of the years that followed Tony Blair’s 1997 landslide.
The question of how Britain should combat such problems, abroad and at home, was the focus of an hour-long interview with Blair in Westminster on 24th May, just a month ahead of the European Union referendum and only a few weeks more from the publication of the Chilcot inquiry into Iraq.