Tony Blair was, in David Cameron’s famous line, “the future once”. Yet for a man written off as a relic more than 16 years ago, Labour’s last prime minister still looms large in British public life.

For the past two years, his policy institute has researched ways through the pandemic. His allies push Labour to return to the Blairite modernising handbook. His decision to accept a knighthood from the Queen, announced over the weekend, has driven critics from Left to Right into spasms of outrage.

More than 150,000 people have signed a petition demanding that the knighthood should be reversed, and one can only imagine the campaign being hastily arranged in Kirkcaldy to award Gordon Brown the same title as his bitter rival.

But the howls of rage are misplaced. Whatever his errors and sins — and we will soon turn to them — if Britain cannot honour a 10-year prime minister, the only leader to have won an election for Labour in almost half a century, then who among the top ranks of public service can we honour?

For there is no doubt that Blair, along with Margaret Thatcher, is one of the two figures to dominate the past five decades of British politics. Not everything was different when he became prime minister — England lost the Ashes and had almost won the European Championships, while Britain was run by a Tory government battling Brussels and allegations of sleaze — but there is no denying he transformed the country.

In the 1990s, Britain was a unitary state, with no devolved government in Northern Ireland, Scotland or Wales. Its social liberalism was yet to emerge: the age of consent was older for gay people, and civil partnerships, not to mention marriages between gay people, were still unthinkable. Its economy was very different too: manufacturing accounted for almost one in five jobs compared, these days, to less than one in 10.

The changes we have experienced since the 1990s were driven by deep shifts in the world economy and technologies, intellectual trends and the attitudes of younger generations. But they were also driven and shaped by politicians. If there is a simple way of describing the positive side of Blair’s legacy, it is that he achieved what his predecessor, Sir John Major, had promised. From gay rights to tackling racism, Blair helped to make Britain a country more at ease with itself.

Much of the negative side is well-known. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, fought at great cost in blood and gold, were disastrous and ended up weakening Britain and America on the world stage. Asymmetric devolution has fuelled separatism and undermined good government and democratic fairness. The deregulation of the banking industry left us exposed to the worst of the financial crash. The glib embrace of globalisation — “you might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer” — left our economy unbalanced, unfair and unready for severe shocks.

Blair was, even more than Thatcher, the archetypal ultra-liberal politician. Thatcher had rolled back the state and liberalised the British economy in the 1980s. Blair went even further. New Labour was, in Peter Mandelson’s words, “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich”, and cared little for how they did so. Bankers’ excesses were ignored. After the early windfall tax, investors in utility companies got fat. And on social policy, Blair completed the ultra-liberal revolution.

Before Blair became prime minister, net migration to Britain had never exceeded the tens of thousands. Its peak had been 77,000, in 1994. But then suddenly, one year into Blair’s term, net migration leapt to 140,000, and since then the annual inflow has only ever been higher. When Labour finally left office, in 2010, net migration was running at a quarter of a million a year — a number reduced by the coalition government at first, but which soon went back to record levels when the political will to make difficult decisions evaporated.

Mass immigration was a deliberate policy. The primary purpose rule was abolished as one of New Labour’s first acts. The asylum system was allowed to break down. Transitional controls from Poland and other new EU states were rejected. The student visa system was abused on an industrial scale by bogus colleges and economic migrants.

The Human Rights Act, passed in 1998, made it harder to enforce immigration laws and deport foreign criminals. And together with the Equality Act, a later New Labour law promised and prepared under Blair but passed under Gordon Brown, it created a legal framework that continues to define much of what the public sector does.

We are still living with the consequences of requiring the police and legal system to balance the rights of criminals with the right of the rest of us to live in security and peace. And with woke theories in the ascendancy, the culture of public sector equality duties and equality impact assessments, and obsession with judging people by their race, sexuality and gender, we are living with a public sector governed by the Equality Act.

If there is a complaint to be made by conservatives, however, it should not be directed at Blair. He is a progressive, and presumably still believes in the legal frameworks that still dominate our public life. The complaint should be directed at the conservatives who believed, or we thought believed, something very different to Blair and his New Labour supporters. They have had 11 years to make a change.

Admittedly, five of those years were in coalition with the Liberal Democrats, and another five and a half have seen them contend with Brexit, and there has been the pandemic, too. But whether it is the Human Rights Act or the Equality Act, mass immigration or asymmetric devolution, we are still living in Blair’s world.

The question is do ministers really want to escape it? There is little point complaining about the culture wars, the performance of the public sector, the criminal justice system, our asylum rules or our unquenchable thirst for immigration, if we are not prepared to dismantle the legal frameworks and economic policies that fuel the problems in the first place. Another world is possible, but it will take intellectual honesty from conservatives about the choices we face.