Tony Blair has launched a remarkable attack on the Labour party and Keir Starmer, accusing them of having no “coherent plan” for the Unite Kingdom and being anti-business.
In a 5,700-word essay, published last night on his thinktank’s website, the former prime minister said any leadership change at the top of the party was “irrelevant if it doesn’t start with a policy debate”.
Blair specifically criticised policies from Starmer’s government such as new workers’ rights laws, the phasing out of the British oil and gas industry and the above-inflation uplift to the minimum wage.
He called for Labour to move away from the soft-left and instead become the “radical centre” of British politics.
He also said the government was failing to address what he sees as both the biggest challenge and biggest opportunity of the current world: artificial intelligence
Leadership contest as ‘retro feel to it’
Addressing the seemingly inevitable leadership contest on the horizon, Blair accused Starmer, Andy Burnham and Wes Streeting of putting Labour’s future at risk.
He wrote: “The Labour Party is playing with fire; or, more accurately with its future, and that of the country.”
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Blair went on to say that the party’s “almost infinite capacity for self-delusion” means it is likely to lose the next election.
Although he praised Streeting as a “huge political talent” and described Burnham as an “outstanding member of my government,” Blair said the leadership debate has an “extraordinarily retro 20th-century feel to it.”
He said: “The world is turning on its axis and today’s politicians, living in a 24/7 pressure cooker, have barely time to recognise the turning let alone study it.
“These changes need long-term strategic thinking which is alien to the way most modern democracies function.”
2024 general election win
Blair also claimed that Labour only won the 2024 general election because Starmer had managed to present the party as an “acceptable alternative” to the Conservatives.
“Let’s be clear, I don’t think Labour won the last election because people read the manifesto and said, ‘this is what we want’”, he wrote.
“I think people thought that Conservatives have behaved completely unacceptably, and to Keir Starmer’s great credit, the Labour party was an acceptable alternative.”
Blair calls for ‘coherent plan for the country’
Labour’s most successful leader ever went on to say that the only reason the likes of Burnham and Streeting want to depose Starmer is because the party ‘doesn’t have a worked-out, coherent plan’ for the UK.
He wrote: “The government’s principal problem isn’t Keir’s personality. Or a failure to communicate ‘our achievements’. Or a need to assert more strongly Labour’s ‘values’.
“It is because we don’t have a worked-out, coherent plan for the country in a fast-changing world and are in the wrong political position from which we can devise one and win a second term.”
He called for Labour to stop governing from its “comfort zone” of the soft-left and for the party to reconsider its approach to economic growth for both prosperity and social justice.
Instead of Labour thinking about “how to ‘save the country’ from Reform,” the party should “start with an idea, a project, a governing purpose, an analysis of what is wrong and a plan to put it right.”
Blair’s policy ideas
Some of the policies Blair suggested was for Downing Street to show more support for Donald Trump, cut benefit and abandon net-zero.
Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Wednesday, the three-time general election winner also suggested the pensions triple lock was not sustainable.