Tony Blair announces his retirement date

12.00.00am UTC (GMT +0000) Thu 10th May 2007

Commenting on Tony Blair's announcement of his retirement date, Dr Evan Harris, Lib Dem MP for Oxford West and Abingdon, said:

"For me the premiership of Tony Blair - with the single exception of peace in Northern Ireland - has been a huge disappointment, despite sharing the progressive approach he claimed to have when he first won power. I did not trust him from the outset in 1997 when he and Gordon Brown said "things could only get better" and then inflicted 2 more years of vicious Tory spending cuts on Oxfordshire's education, health and social services from which we have never really recovered.

"The culture of spin and of stealth taxes has undermined faith in the political system; the Blair-Brown decision to invade Iraq, and restrict our civil liberties and human rights and the pointless privatisation of our public services has simply made Labour into a more efficient version of the Conservative Party.

"Fundamentally though - for me - the killer fact for the Blair legacy is that - despite all the talk about the "many and not the few" the gap between rich and poor has become wider now than it was even after 18 Tory years. That is a disgrace for what was once a party that really cared about inequality."