Number one bogeyman of the left, Sir Tony Blair, trained his guns on Labour this morning, launching a glorious attack. The former prime minister laid into his party over the full hog of net zero, workers’ rights, taxation, upping the minimum wage and bizarre pledges to rejoin the EU. The longest-serving Labour prime minister lambasted Sir Keir Starmer for having ‘no plan’ for Britain and hit out at party comrades for kickstarting a ‘personality contest’ rather than focusing on the myriad policies holding Britain back.
Conspicuously missing from his diatribe were thoughts on the Human Rights Act, civil service code and devolution…
In a 5,000-word essay that functioned largely as a veiled attack on Andy Burnham, Blair declared: ‘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.’
He took aim at PLP lefties for trying to ‘rehash the far-left critique’ that ‘nothing good came out of the last 40 years of neo-liberalism’.
The instigator of British involvement in the Iraq war demanded ‘fundamental reform’ of the bloated welfare system – including scrapping the ‘unaffordable’ triple lock in its current form. He said the Home Office should do ‘whatever it takes’ to end the scourge of small boat arrivals.
The broadside of course immediately triggered more of what Labour does best: bickering amongst itself. While Blair remains extremely divisive, Mr S hopes Spectator readers can at least agree with this insight he offered up to Nick Robinson on Radio 4 this morning:
I always used to say the greatest source of election-losing advice was the Guardian.
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