Tony Blair

Maiden speech, July 6, 1983 Worth reading for the gap between the speaker and the man he became. Labour had just suffered its worst defeat in decades, and the new member for Sedgefield used a Finance Bill debate to describe unemployment of over 40 percent around the Wingate employment exchange. Then came a credo: he was a socialist not through a textbook or unthinking tradition, but because socialism at its best corresponds most closely to an existence both rational and moral. Followers of New Labour will find its moral framing, and little of its later caution, already in place.