City lawyers should be more thankful for Blair's legacy

They say that time heals. And I suspect that Tony Blair’s reputation as a Prime Minister will start to recover once he has left office. After all, his record for winning elections for Labour is second to none. And while there are major question marks about the true impact of all that public spending on health and education, he has succeeded, for the time being at least, in changing the framework for the debate over taxation, with the political battle lines drawn not on the merits of spending money on public services but on how to do so effectively.

As for Legal Week readers, I suspect they are feeling a good deal more comfortable about the prospects of their party of choice than they did five or so years ago. There will always be a smattering of Labour activists among the commercial law community – Bird & Bird’s Hamish Sandison springs to mind, as does full-time Government adviser Garry Hart, formerly of Herbert Smith – but there is no doubt where business lawyers' natural sympathies lie.

Ironically though, commercial lawyers have less reason to be antipathetic towards Labour than those lawyers working in what would normally be regarded as the more traditional Labour-supporting field of public law. Low interest rates, low inflation and 10 years of uninterrupted economic growth, capped by London’s resurgence as an international financial centre, all spell good news for City lawyers, no matter how reluctant they are to give Labour the credit for this state of affairs.

As for lawyers working in legal aid... well, they are seething with anger right now, thanks both to the Government’s efforts to put a cap on the legal aid budget (see blog entry) and its authoritarian approach to civil liberties. Not to mention the Iraq war.

Labour's relationship with big business was always likely to be a fickle one. And yet the harder it tries to convince an ungrateful City it is in it for the long haul, the more it risks alienating its traditional voters.