Tony Blair has hit back at his critics after his excoriating essay on the future of Labour, published last week, unleashed a wave of condemnation from party politicians.
The former prime minister turned consultant attacked Keir Starmer’s government for its lack of a “coherent plan for the country”, arguing that manifesto commitments on workers’ rights, net zero and taxation should have been abandoned after the 2024 election.
His 5,600-word essay stressed the need for deregulation and to adopt AI, saying a “radical centre” agenda must focus on “reorganising the whole of government around the harnessing of the 21st-century technological revolution”.
His intervention provoked ire from would-be leaders Andy Burnham and Wes Streeting, former leader Jeremy Corbyn and Starmer himself.
But, writing for The Observer, Blair has doubled down on his comments, arguing that “because the world is getting transformed, our policy response must be transformative”.
The most successful Labour leader in the party’s history took aim at Burnham’s suggestion that inequality was fuelling populism. “We should be cautious about treating populism as a consequence simply of economics,” Blair said. Support for Brexit and Donald Trump showed that “cultural questions also matter”, he added.
“Too often progressive positions on these issues seem to have been driven by noisy pressure groups, not common sense.”
He also took aim at those who claimed he was boosting AI for the benefit of clients of his public affairs company the Tony Blair Institute. “The reason I think we’re living through a 21st-century technological revolution led by AI is not because my institute has been bought off by tech bros, but because I am studying what is happening and it’s blowing my mind in its implications,” he said. “AI adoption… will protect people at work more than anything else.”
Blair also went further on the central theme of his original essay; the need for radical change to break through the quagmire of British politics over the last 20 years, suggesting that the public would back a “rethinking of healthcare”, as well as a flexible labour market, lower business costs, cheaper energy and a reformed welfare system to free up spending on other areas such as defence.
Blair’s intervention is one of several competing policy diagnoses to have been published since Starmer’s leadership came under strain in recent weeks.
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Earlier this month, a clutch of papers were published, including a collection of essays from the left-leaning Tribune group of Labour MPs, a report from the centrist Labour Growth Group and an exploration of what Burnham’s “Manchesterism” would look like if deployed nationally.
Photograph by Charles Mcquillan / AFP via Getty Images