Blair says Labour needs debate about policy before it chooses new leader, as he criticises Burnham’s 40 years of failure claim
In his Today interview, Tony Blair said Labour needed to work out its policy agenda before choosing a leader.
Asked what he would say to Labour members being asked to choose between Andy Burnham or Wes Streeting, Blair replied:
My advice is choose your direction first and make sure that before you have any leadership change, you make all the candidates set out in detail their policy, what the Government’s got right, what it’s got wrong, what we should do differently.
While Blair praised Burnham in general terms, he also said the Greater Manchester mayor was wrong to argue, as he did in a speech last week, that government policies over the past 40 years have let voters down.
Blair said:
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 … what, nothing good happened in that period of Thatcher with the business community, or New Labour?
I don’t think he really means that, but what I’m saying, if you’re going to change leader, you’ve really got to force people to say where they stand, because otherwise you’ll be in what I think was always a problem for Keir – and I’ll be very honest about this, and I like him and I wish him well – but when we switched from that Corbyn agenda, there wasn’t enough explanation.
Not as to why Corbyn was an election loser, that was pretty obvious, but why the whole agenda was wrong.
You have to explain to people why it’s wrong if you want to lead the party in the future in a coherent way.
Key events
Donald Tusk says defence treaty he’s signing with Starmer means UK’s pledge to Poland goes beyond Nato guarantees
Jakub Krupa
Jakub Krupa writes the Guardian’s Europe live blog.
Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, has said a new Polish-British defence and security treaty to be signed today in London will focus on countering the long-term, strategic threat posed by Russia.
Briefing reporters before leaving for the UK, Tusk suggested the treaty – to be named after the RAF Northolt base which hosted Polish pilots during the second world war – will go beyond previous deals agreed in 2017 and 2023, and include provisions for mutual security assistance outside Nato’s article 5 framework.
Tusk said the bilateral treaty would mean Poland could count on the UK for a “rapid bilateral response … before a decision is made by all 32 Nato members” in the event of a conflict.”
He went on:
And as you know, in today’s reality … speed of response, adequate response, is something that will matter in a conflict.
The treaty also includes provisions on military cooperation, including procurement, drones, air defence and cybersecurity.
Britain already has similar deals with France and Germany, while Poland signed a similar agreement with Paris last year.
Blair hits out at Guardian, as he defends his stance on Trump, and being part of US president’s “Board of Peace”
It is not just Keir Starmer and almost every other senior figure in the Labour party who have been getting it in the neck from Tony Blair today. In his Today interview, Blair was asked by Nick Robinson about the Guardian pointing out that Blair is urging the UK government to get closer to Donald Trump. That provoked Blair to reply like this.
The Guardian – you’ve got to love them. I always used to say when I was prime minister that the most the greatest source of election losing advice was always from the Guardian.
On Trump, Blair said:
I’m not saying the Labour party should love Donald Trump, get close to Donald Trump. I’m simply saying the American relationship matters to Britain.
Blair also defended his role as a member of the executive board for Trump’s “Board of Peace”. He said:
We put together a plan that ended the war [in Gaza]. Now, at the moment, you’ve still got some fighting going on. You’ve still got a dire situation for the people.
This next week we will have further negotiations with Hamas because we need to move this new government into Gaza. And we need Hamas to agree that this government should be in control of Gaza.
So it’s a very tricky, difficult situation.
But we have if the plan is allowed to work, it will give Gazan people a fresh start with a new Palestinian government and a large amount of funding behind it.
Blair said Trump’s “Board of Peace” itself was sitting leaders. He said he sat on its executive board, which served underneath it.
(After it was launched, the Board of Peace was memorably described as looking like “a cast of Bond villains, plus Tony Blair”.)
Blair does not deny contemplating launching new centrist party during Corbyn era
In his Today interview, Tony Blair was asked by Nick Robinson about reports that, during the Jeremy Corbyn era, he considered setting up a new party. Robinson said that Blair’s long essay read like it had been written by a man “who wishes he had done it”.
In response, Blair did not deny the central claim. He said:
No, I don’t wish I’d done it.
But I think a lot of the issues that were raised at the time are still there and with us.
Look, my whole belief about the Labour party, it’s had 120 years of of history. It’s been in power really for about a quarter of that time. And the reason for that is what I always call the birth defect of the Labour party, when you separated the liberal progressive side from the Labour side, and New Labour was an attempt to fuse those two things back together. And that’s why we won successive elections.
The trouble is, since then we’ve moved away from that. And you do have, I think, this unrepresented centre in British politics. And I think it’s basically a supply problem and not a demand problem.
Blair never got anywhere with his plans to launch a new party, but it has been reported that this went beyond idle talk, and that people were approached about funding the project. This is what Tom McTague, now editor of the New Statesman, said about this in an UnHerd article last year.
In public, Blair insisted that he was not in any way “advocating a new party, organising one, or wanting to vote for one”. However, he had concluded that the Labour party was finished, according to someone who shared his views, and was involved in discussions about a new party. “He would tell those who thought otherwise that they were being nostalgic,” said the same associate. “He felt that too many in the party could not reconcile themselves to the reality that Labour was simply irrecoverable, passed its sell-by date.”
Blair says Labour should get rid of Ed Miliband’s net zero targets
Tony Blair has also given an interview to Times Radio. In it, he said the government should abandon its net zero target – implying that, if that meant Ed Miliband felt obliged to resign as energy secretary as a result, he would not view that as a problem.
Asked if he was proposing getting rid of Miliband’s net zero targets, Blair replied:
Yes, I am, and I’ll tell you exactly why.
It’s not that I’m against renewable energy, clean energy, and it’s not that I’m a climate denier.
It’s coming to terms with this reality: the three biggest emitters in the world today are China, America and India. Together they account for just over 50% of global emissions.
All of them are pursuing cheap energy and electrification. Doesn’t mean to say they’re not doing renewable energy, China builds more renewable energy than the rest of the world put together.
It just means that the lens through which they judge policy is cheap energy and the need for electrification, particularly in the age of AI.
Britain’s emissions are under 1% of global emissions, we can’t solve climate change, and to impose costs on our own businesses and consumers in order to accelerate net zero when the rest of the world is not doing so – I don’t understand the logic behind it, or shutting down our own oil and gas industry in circumstances where, again, I don’t know another country in the world that’s doing that.
This is more or less exactly the Conservative party’s position on net zero.
Asked if adopting this approach would made Miliband’s position untenable, Blair replied:
It’s really a question of explaining to the country, and to Ed, that right now we need to get growth levels up, we need to recognise with this AI revolution that we’re going to need cheap energy.
Blair and Miliband have been at odds with each other for more than a decade. Blair wanted Miliband’s brother David to win the Labour leadership contest in 2010, and he thought Miliband as leader was wrong to disown some of New Labour’s policies.
Blair says Labour needs debate about policy before it chooses new leader, as he criticises Burnham’s 40 years of failure claim
In his Today interview, Tony Blair said Labour needed to work out its policy agenda before choosing a leader.
Asked what he would say to Labour members being asked to choose between Andy Burnham or Wes Streeting, Blair replied:
My advice is choose your direction first and make sure that before you have any leadership change, you make all the candidates set out in detail their policy, what the Government’s got right, what it’s got wrong, what we should do differently.
While Blair praised Burnham in general terms, he also said the Greater Manchester mayor was wrong to argue, as he did in a speech last week, that government policies over the past 40 years have let voters down.
Blair said:
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 … what, nothing good happened in that period of Thatcher with the business community, or New Labour?
I don’t think he really means that, but what I’m saying, if you’re going to change leader, you’ve really got to force people to say where they stand, because otherwise you’ll be in what I think was always a problem for Keir – and I’ll be very honest about this, and I like him and I wish him well – but when we switched from that Corbyn agenda, there wasn’t enough explanation.
Not as to why Corbyn was an election loser, that was pretty obvious, but why the whole agenda was wrong.
You have to explain to people why it’s wrong if you want to lead the party in the future in a coherent way.
Blair suggests Labour was wrong to protect pensions triple lock
In his Today interview, Tony Blair said the government should have done more to prioritise growth when it took office. He also suggested the pensions triple lock was not sustainable.
He said:
When it came in, it saw the state of the inheritance. I think at that point, of course, it would be difficult. Everything in politics is difficult, but if I’d been them, I’d say, look, all of these commitments, they may be very worthwhile. There may be proper commitments in easy times, but in these hard times, we’ve got to prioritise growth. We’ve got to prioritise support for the business sector, and this artificial intelligence revolution, we’ve got to grasp it, both its opportunities and its risks, with both hands.
And so, I think, yes, it would have been tough, but I think you could have explained to the country why it was necessary …
At some point you’ve got to be able to stand up and have an honest debate with the public, which is to say, look, ultimately we’re probably taxing people too much, spending too much, borrowing too much at the moment.
If we carry on like this with these large increases in incapacity benefit, with the triple lock on pensions, we’re going to create a situation where economically we’re not, we’re not able to grow because we put such a weight affecting growth on the back of our economy.
Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves did claim they were prioritising growth when they took office. But business leaders claim that higher taxes, especially the rise in employer national insurance, and stronger rights for workers have been bad for growth.
They have also kept the pensions triple lock because they pledged to do so in the 2024 manifesto. With the other main parties also committed to it in 2024, not promising to keep it was seen as too much of an electoral risk.
Blair says Labour won 2024 election because it was ‘acceptable alternative’, not because of its manifesto
In his interview on the Today programme, Tony Blair said Labour won the election in 2024 because it was “an acceptable alternative” – not because voters liked what was in its manifesto.
He said:
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’.
I think people thought that Conservatives have behaved completely unacceptably, and to Keir Starmer’s great credit, the Labour party was an acceptable alternative.
Minister rejects Blair’s critique of Starmer’s government, accusing ex-PM of retreading arguments from Labour’s past
Good morning. Labour is in the midst of ‘phoney war’ leadership contest. The formal bit has not started yet, but Andy Burnham and Wes Streeting are already actively engaged, Angela Rayner is taking an interest, and Keir Starmer is defending his legacy with renewed vigour. The last thing anyone expected was for Tony Blair to join in.
But he has, sort of, with a 5,700-word essay, published last night on his thinktank’s website, setting out where the former PM thinks his part is going wrong (on most things, it seems) and what he thinks it should do next. Blair, of course, won’t be a candidate in the leadership contest, but ideas matter in politics and this essay is chock-full of them.
Here is Jessica Elgot’s story on what he says. She says Blair has accused Starmer, Burnham and Streeting of putting Labour’s future at risk by abandoning the centre ground, warning that the party’s “almost infinite capacity for self-delusion” means it is likely to lose the next election.
And here is Peter Walker’s analysis.
Peter says the Blair essay is the work of “a man who worries deeply that the party he once led, plus the UK more widely, is stuck in a loop of insular political debate, not even beginning to get to grips with what he portrays as the century-defining challenge – and opportunity – of AI”. But Peter also points out that many in Labour are likely to regard Blair’s “call for a move to the ‘radical centre’ as somewhere between vague and meaningless”.
Quite a lot of what Blair says sounds as if it could have been written by Kemi Badenoch. Any other Tory leader would be championing this as vindication. But Badenoch seems to approach any argument on the basis that whatever someone from the left is saying must always be wrong, and she has not commented yet; perhaps she is still trying to compute how she and a former Labour PM could have ended up in the same place.
Blair has been on the Today programme this morning, and I will post highlights from his interview soon. Dan Tomlinson, a junior Treasury minister, has been the government voice in the broadcast studios and he has had the awkward job of trying to rebut criticism from the party’s most successful election winner. Tomlinson was respectful about Blair, and said he agreed with him on some points, but essentially he accused Blair of resurrecting old arguments about Old Labour v New Labour and not accepting that the world has moved on. He told BBC Breakfast:
I think [Blair’s] essay was about whether we’re New Labour or old Labour – that was a debate that was happening in the 1990s in the UK, which was pretty much around the time I was born. Things have moved on a lot since then.
And, on Times Radio, where he said the Old Labour/New Labour split was “just not where we are today”, Tomlinson said:
If we look at the jobs market, when Tony Blair was prime minister there weren’t really any people on zero-hour contracts. Now there are hundreds of thousands of people struggling with that uncertainty, so, yes, we are passing our employment rights legislation to give people more certainty in work.
There will be a lot more to say about the Blair essay, and reaction to it, as the day goes on.
There is not much in diary today – parliament is in recess – but we will see Starmer today when he signs a new defence treaty with Poland with Donald Tusk, the Polish PM, at an event outside London around lunchtime.
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