Tony Blair has followed up his excoriating essay last night with a fresh attack on Labour’s leading lights on this morning’s media round. Even Burnham gets a kicking…
Speaking on the Today programme, Blair said:
“I just think when you look at the analysis… and by the way, I hope Andy wins Makerfield. I think he’s a great guy, I want to see him in Parliament. But you know, when he does this thing about ’40 years of wasted [neoliberalism]’… I mean we’re in 2026. Let’s go back to 1986, well we assume he doesn’t mean the first seven years of Margaret Thatcher, right? So back to the 70s? And nothing good happened in that period of Thatcher with the business community, or New Labour? I don’t think he really means that.”
So Thatcher gets a hat-tip, and Burnham gets a pasting…
He then attacked Starmer for failing to do enough to explain his own “agenda“, as if such a thing existed. Read Blair’s full essay below…
The Labour Party is playing with fire; or, more accurately, with its future, and that of the country.
I led the Labour Party for 13 years and through three general elections. It is a party largely of decent, well-meaning people who want the best for the country. Its mission is, as its 1994 rewritten constitution says, to ensure that “power, wealth and opportunity are in the hands of the many not the few”, and it’s a perfectly noble one.
But I am afraid, like many progressive parties, it has an almost infinite capacity for self-delusion.
It won the 2024 election not by acclaim, but by being an acceptable — credit to Keir Starmer — default option to a Conservative government the country felt had behaved unacceptably.
However, partly because of the intellectual wasteland of the Corbyn years, it had no properly thought-through analysis of how the world was changing and what that meant for policy.
Wes Streeting is a huge political talent and Andy Burnham was an outstanding member of my government. But this leadership debate has an extraordinarily retro, 20th-century feel to it. Like most politicians, they’re anxious to distance themselves from the “Westminster bubble”.
But Britain’s problem isn’t with a “Westminster” bubble. It is with a “politics” bubble.
The politics of the future may be better understood by those presently outside politics.
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.
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.
The government is governing from an essentially traditional Labour “soft left” position, parked firmly in the party’s comfort zone.
Whether there is a leadership change or not is irrelevant if it doesn’t start with a policy debate. Are we really prioritising economic growth — essential not just for prosperity but for social justice — if there is a slew of policies we’re implementing which might restrict it? Does our economy need, right now, the goal of clean energy or cheap energy? How do we justify adding to the welfare bill when it is already ballooning, taxes are high and getting higher, and we’re told we have to increase defence spending to prepare for the possibility of war?
And is it right that we’re living through the 21st-century equivalent of the 19th-century Industrial Revolution? And if so, are we remotely meeting the scale of that challenge? And what are the opportunities in areas like health and education for transformative change consequent on this revolution — and the existential dangers of this revolution — when, quite soon, someone sitting in their front room could hack into vital national infrastructure and bring it down?
Do we have a foreign policy which makes sense of a changing world order?
Trying to force the prime minister out before we know what policy direction we’re bringing in is not a serious way of conducting ourselves.
And so far, though of course these are very early days, we have a fight between a “modernising” wing of the Labour Party appearing to advocate rejoining the EU — and now equalising capital gains and income tax, something rejected by successive governments for good reason — and the alternative, which thinks the answer is moving even further left on taxes, spending and welfare, spun with a rehash of the far-left critique about nothing good coming out of the last “40 years” of “neo-liberalism”, which presumably includes the last Labour government.
With the left position odds-on to win.
It is one thing, when in opposition, to indulge this perennial delusion that when we lose seats to the right the country is really signalling it wants Labour to move left; it is dangerous to do it in government.
And no one was more passionately opposed to Brexit than I was, and the result of it was both predictable and predicted. But, as I shall argue later in this essay, an approach for Britain to go back into a structured relationship with Europe needs to be handled with care and with strategy.
Just as Brexit was never the answer to Britain’s challenges back in 2016, reversing it isn’t the answer to the country’s far worse situation in 2026. Our relationship with Europe should be part of a comprehensive strategy for Britain’s future, and that doesn’t begin with Europe but here at home.
Unfortunately, to the exam question — how do we win a second full term of government? — the one answer which seems ruled out is learning from the only time in the party’s 120-year history it has ever done so.
Governments which succeed don’t start with a personality contest. Or a political question — as in, how do we “save the country” from Reform? They start with an idea, a project, a governing purpose, an analysis of what is wrong and a plan to put it right.
The challenge of democracy is not transparency, honesty or conspiracy theories about the hidden power of elites.
It is efficacy. It is the ability to get big things done. To have leaders who are not problem-managers but problem-solvers.
As John Adams — second president of the United States — once wrote: “Ballast is what I want; I totter with every breeze.”
This, not the absence of “better communications” or of a “charismatic” leader, has been the defining problem of the government. Too often they seem to totter in the breeze. To lack ballast.
There are two epochal changes happening in the world today — one geopolitical, the other technological — and Britain is not prepared for either.
They require radical change in policy, system of government and politics.
The best political space from which this can be achieved is what I call the Radical Centre.
The centre — properly defined — is where you put policy first and politics last. So you begin with the question: what is the right answer? And only once you have that do you engage in the political task of persuading people of it.
Britain is in a mess precisely because, in recent years, it has done the opposite.
Both main parties have gone off the rails by putting internal politics first and good policy second. Labour moving to the left after 2007, culminating in the absurdity of the Corbyn leadership. The Tories with Brexit.
Neither has fully recovered and, ironically, their failures have spawned new parties to their further left and right.
Yes, Britain needs radical change, but the difficulty — not just in Britain — is that too often the sensible people aren’t radical, and the radical people aren’t sensible.
The first epochal change is in the geopolitical order, where America’s superpower status is now shared by China, in time to be joined by India. A sort of G2/3. These countries will be far ahead of whichever nation is in fourth place. By this calculation, everyone else, including Britain, is a middle power.
The second is the technology revolution led by developments in artificial intelligence, which will change everything. I mean everything.
There is no point in debating whether this technological revolution is a good or bad thing. Just know it is a “thing”. In fact, it is the thing.
It will displace jobs, though creating new ones, but no one yet knows the full consequence. Companies and countries will rise or fall on the back of it. It will revolutionise the private sector and should, in time, revolutionise public services and government.
Yet people in most countries, including Britain, have no idea what is about to hit them.
Batting away critical points from Nick Robinson on the Today Programme, Tony Blair said:
“I always used to say the greatest source of election-losing advice was the Guardian.”