Ex-British PM Tony Blair lambasts Labour’s leadership woes

LONDON - Former Labour prime minister Tony Blair criticised the party he once led for “playing with fire” in its attempt to oust Prime Minister Keir Starmer, while also slamming the government for lacking a clear agenda.

In a 5,600-word essay penned for his think-tank, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, he said that the Labour Party needs to move towards “radical centrism”, prioritising cheap energy over clean energy, fundamentally overhauling planning regulations, putting economic growth at the heart of policies and cutting welfare spending.

“The government’s principal problem isn’t Keir’s personality,” Mr Blair wrote in the essay, published late on May 26.

“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.”

Mr Blair’s intervention comes less than three weeks after Labour suffered catastrophic losses in a set of local elections, shedding 60 per cent of the English council seats it was defending and losing control of the Welsh assembly, known as the Senedd, for the first time.

His views matter because he won three elections and led the country from 1997 to 2007, making him electorally the party’s most successful leader.

Labour’s losses earlier in May sparked an internal rebellion as approaching a quarter of the party’s Members of Parliament called for Mr Starmer to go.

While no one has yet formally challenged the Prime Minister, Mr Wes Streeting quit his post as health secretary and indicated he would stand in any contest, and Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham launched a bid to secure the parliamentary seat he would need to mount his own challenge.

He faces a tough contest against Mr Nigel Farage’s hard-right Reform UK party to win in the Manchester constituency of Makerfield, whose MP, Mr Josh Simons, stood down to make way for Mr Burnham.

Mr Blair said Labour has “an almost infinite capacity for self-delusion”, adding that “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”.

Nevertheless, voters and a swathe of the parliamentary Labour Party see Mr Starmer as having little clear vision for Britain, and as the wrong person to turn Britain’s stagnating economy around.

The Prime Minister has repeatedly said expanding the economy is top of his agenda, yet has been denounced by businesses for growth-stifling measures including raising taxes on employers, lifting the minimum wage, and increasing workers’ rights, which have had a combined effect of lowering employment.

Mr Blair criticised Mr Starmer’s policymaking during almost two years in power as being “parked firmly in the party’s comfort zone” of the so-called soft left.

“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?” he wrote.

“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?”

He added that Labour could not just hope to win votes on a message of stopping the advance of Reform, which has led in the polls for more than a year and is aiming to prove itself as a credible contender for government in a general election due by mid-2029. Instead, it should also aim for what he called the “radical centre”, where “you put policy first and politics last”.

Mr Blair himself lost popularity within Labour for taking the UK into war alongside the US in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

In the May 26 essay, he said he knew “how hard it is to be an ally of the USA”, but that the alliance was core to Britain’s security.

Mr Blair added that Britain should also aim to maintain strong working relationships with China and the Gulf states in the Middle East, in order to further economic growth.

US President Donald Trump’s recent combative rhetoric towards Britain should be regarded “less as a ‘rupture’ than a ‘reckoning’”, Mr Blair said.

“This side of the water we’re being told some home truths which, if wise, we will wake up to,” he added. BLOOMBERG