Tony Blair was
born May 6, 1953 in Edinburgh, Scotland.
He was educated at the Durham Choristers
School in Durham, England and at Fettes
College in Edinburgh. He received a law
degree in 1975 from St. John's College
at Oxford University. He began practising
law the next year after being admitted
to the bar.
Blair first ran for Parliament as a Labour Party candidate in 1982, when he
lost a by-election for the Beaconsfield constituency. He joined the House of
Commons the following year, winning the seat from Sedgefield, in Northern England.
Blair held that seat through the 1980s and 1990s, easily winning parliamentary
elections during a political era mostly dominated by the Conservative Party.
After serving as a Labour Party spokesman on treasury matters, and then
on trade and industry affairs, Blair in 1988 was appointed shadow energy
secretary. He was named shadow employment secretary in 1989 and shadow home
secretary in 1992. The party elected him to its National Executive Committee
in 1992.
The Labour Party elected Blair as its leader in 1994. Blair, then 41 years
old, was the youngest-ever head of the Labour Party. He replaced John Smith,
who had died earlier in the year after leading the party for two years.
As Labour Party leader, Blair continued efforts by his most recent predecessors,
Smith and Neil Kinnock, to scale back the party's traditional adherence to
socialist ideology. He led a controversial campaign to remove from the party's
constitution a clause that called for common ownership, by British workers,
of the country's "means of production." The party in 1995 adopted
a new charter that omitted the clause.
Blair frequently referred to his party as "New Labour" in an effort
to distance it from recent criticisms of Labour members of Parliament. (The
party had widely been dismissed as a bastion of political extremism and incompetence.)
In a rejection of traditional Labour fiscal policy, Blair advocated low
taxes and tightly limited social spending. He called on the party to loosen
its links to trade unions and to work with the business community to solve
labour disputes. He also softened the party's hard-line stance against the
privatisation of state-owned industries.
Blair's political centrism, along with his youthful, energetic speaking
style, were credited with contributing to the Labour Party's steadily climbing
popular support.
Blair married Cherie Booth, a fellow trial lawyer, in 1980. They had three
children together.
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