Well, if only to balance out the apraisal above, HP. The Right in Labour like to repeat that Blair was electorally the must successful leader, but when you're prioritising electoral concerns to the extent he did, often over principles and ideology, it becomes counter-productive to any success, and for all Blair's victories (three, if we're counting - and he could hardly have hoped for better circumstances for the two he actually won convincingly) he was no more successful than Wilson or Attlee (I'd argue a great deal less successful than both) in the goal of winning elections - to further your aims and ideas, and to enact policies that reflect them.
The Clinton comparison is very apt, and you only need to ask yourself if you feel Clinton is a democratic socialist, to see Blair was nowhere near the party's ambitions. Despite the caricature of the Left ostensibly denying any good he done, it's more that the good he did was overshadowed by the bad - and there was a lot of that, beyond Iraq. Domestically, he cemented much of Thatcher's legacy - to the point where she described him
as her legacy - and in some areas even drove it forward: welfare, education, public sector "reform" to name a few.
Internally he overseen a top-down structure within the party, where everything was stage-managed and conference went ignored (still waiting for that rail re-nationalisation!), and out of the party, the British political spectrum became a lot narrower; helping frustration and apathy reign, if they weren't hopping off to the now left-of-Labour Liberal Democrats
I think you only need to hear the Tories say "we're only continuing Labour's work", when they're privatising our schools and the NHS, and see the Labour MP's convoluted response as to why Labour's privatisation was good as opposed to how this is bad, to realise how much damage Blair done to Labour's cause.
Or, y'know, you can just read
his offerings.
