Steerpike
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’.
