Ex-PM issues highly unusual intervention with 5,700 word essay and accuses Starmer, Burnham and Streeting of putting Labour’s future at risk
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.
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?
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 …
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