Tony Blair has continued his attack on the Labour government, saying it should be about “policy first, politics second”.
Hours after he published a scathing essay in which he warned that the party’s “almost infinite capacity for self-delusion” meant it was likely to lose the next election, the former prime minister said it should “take a step back, analyse the world”.
On Keir Starmer and his would-be successors Andy Burnham and Wes Streeting, he urged Labour MPs to “force people to say where they stand” before getting behind a change in leader.
In his 5,700-word essay, published on Tuesday night, Blair argued for the government to crack down on welfare spending, abandon restrictions on oil and gas, embrace the technology and artificial intelligence revolution and smooth relations with Donald Trump.
He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Wednesday: “If you don’t decide what your policy direction is, there’s no point in changing the leader. And so the whole essence of the essay is to say it should be policy first, politics second.”
While he wanted to see Burnham win the Makerfield byelection and return to parliament, on the leadership he urged MPs: “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.”
Blair said the AI revolution was the 21st-century equivalent of the Industrial Revolution and was going to change “absolutely everything”. Yet “it’s not even part of the debate”, he said.
He added: “You can have a different personality occupying Number 10, but unless you have a policy agenda, which makes sense of the way the world’s changing, then you’re not going to be any further forward as a country. And you’ll find the country keeps shuffling the deck with prime ministers.”
Blair said Labour won the last election on an anti-Conservative vote. Labour was an “acceptable alternative”. He said Labour commitments “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.”
He said the country was in danger of spending more on incapacity disability benefits than on defence.
When asked whether what he argued for was more aligned with the proposals of Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative leader, he said: “I’m not asking the question about … is it Tory? Is it Reform? Is it the Greens? Is it Labour? I’m just saying: OK, take a step back, analyse the world – where do we go?”
He added: “I don’t really care whether it’s left or right in a traditional sense.” He continued: “I’m not tribal in the sense that I think one political party is going to have the exclusive capability of deciding the right answer.”
On populism, he said: “What I’m saying, discussing the radical centre, which is where I think the best politics come from, is that’s got to be radical. The centre’s not going to be the place of managing the status quo. It’s got be the place of making big change, but it’s based on policy first, politics second.”
Blair’s intervention was not universally welcomed by the Labour leadership or its MPs. The York Central MP Rachael Maskell described its timing as “incredibly unhelpful” due to three parliamentary byelections next month.
“Tony Blair won an election nearly three decades ago and it seems he’s continuing the argument from back then rather than looking at the situation today,” Maskell said.
The Treasury minister Dan Tomlinson said “things have moved on” since Blair’s government. “I think his 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,” he told BBC Breakfast.
“This government is taking the big steps, actually some of the steps that the Tony Blair government didn’t take, for example to reform our planning system, so that we can have more homes built in the UK, so we can provide more certainty and stability for young people, living with mum and dad till their 30s like I did, to be able to save up and buy a home of their own.”
