This may include advertisements from us and 3rd parties based on our understanding. The New Labour Revolution charts the meteoric rise and legacy left by Blair and Gordon Brown after the stewardship of Mr Blair and Gordon Brown in the Nineties and Noughties. The second episode of the series sees a landslide 1997 election victory make Mr Blair the first Labour Prime Minister in nearly two decades. The popularity of Mr Blair rose after he made significant inroads in order to secure peace in Northern Ireland, and was at odds with the public s grief after the death of Princess Diana.
However the document also shows cracks and political rivalries beginning to form within the party between the Prime Minister and his close friend and Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr Brown. One of the sources of the pair s tension was whether the UK should join the European single currency, with Mr. Blair deeply in favour and Mr Brown resolutely opposed. In the BBC show, Mr Blair stood by his belief that the UK should have joined the euro and stressed he believed it was the country's destiny Mr Blair said: With the euro, I have no doubt that was Britain s clear destiny. His comments come even with full knowledge of the eurozone crisis that took hold back in 2009. The crisis resulted from a stop of foreign capital into countries with substantial deficits, dependent on foreign lending, and was worsened by the inability of the states to resort to devaluation. Many critics argued that this highlighted the difficulty of having a fiscal union between the countries that used it:
I shared with Tony that there were enormous political advantages for retaining part of the Euro. But there were also economic drawbacks. If the economic cycle was different from that of Europe, the financial services sector was quite unique. My fear was that we would have a recession as soon as we entered the European Union euro. The Press stories soon emerged alluding to the differences between Number 10 and the Treasury which caused further tension between Mr Brown and Mr Blair and their respective allies, Charlie Whelan and Peter Mandelson. When inheriting the role of Prime Minister from Mr Blair in 2007 Mr Brown ruled out membership of the euro and said that the decision not to join was initially correct for Britain and for Europe. Mr Blair, who is staunchly pro-EU, was fiercely critical of the decision by the UK to leave the EU in 2016. In 2019, Mr Blair branded the exit of the UK as tragic After three years advocating for a reversal of Brexit, Mr Blair said in an interview with WETA: