Treasury ministers hit back at Blair over claims on tax and energy – UK politics live
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Treasury minister Torsten Bell hits back at Blair, saying he’s wrong about causes of tax rises and has no proper energy plan
There has been a lot of Labour reaction to the Tony Blair essay, and I will round up more of it later, but one of the most interesting critiques is from Torsten Bell, the Treasury minister and pensions minister and former head of the Resolution Foundation thinktank, who has posted a long thread about it on Bluesky.
It is worth reading in full, but here are some of his main points.
Blair putting on full display what is in many ways his special ability – to lay out a political argument grounded in his own view of global trends (globalisation in the 2000s, tech in the 2020s). But…
The truth, awkwardly for an essay that argues that policy not politics must come first, is that this is an essay that puts politics not serious policy first
Bell agrees with Blair on policy on some points, but here are some of the points where he differs.
1. There is no understanding here of why taxes have risen over the past decade. If you look at the data you’ll know this most significantly reflects two things
Most importantly higher debt interest costs (a global trend reinforced by scale of debt rise under the last government). This alone has driven taxes up by 2% of GDP since the late 2010s and has to be wrestled with not ignored as the essay does
The upward pressure on taxes is added to by the inevitability of unwinding the extremes of austerity for public services reached in 2018 – a level of austerity that was politically, economically and socially unsustainable.
It’s okay for the Tories/Times/Telegraph to pretend that taxes are up “because of welfare”. That’s politics. But if you care about policy you need to understand that is a long way from the truth – and wrestle with the consequences
2. The essay calls for VAT to have been increased. It does so in the middle of the 2020s, when countries are facing the biggest period of inflationary pressure for decades = a recipe for much higher interest rates with absolutely nothing pro-business about it
3. There is no real policy on energy here. Which reflects the failure to recognise the real pressure on bills is twofold. Our – reliance on hydrocarbons – need for investment in energy generation/distribution (in part because of a criminal lack of investment in 2010s & 2000s)
Our answer to those pressures is to accept that for future generations we have to deliver that investment but we don’t protect those generations by leaving the UK dependent on imported oil/gas. The exact path of North Sea transition matters but doesn’t buy us out of this reality
4. On foreign policy, the essay reiterates a (long held and broadly correct) view that Britain should not look to choose between Europe and the US
But the critique of today’s foreign policy choices is backed by a deep inconsistency, wanting: – a conditional relationship with Europe (largely based on EU tech policy) – an unconditional one with the US (pro-enabling an Iran conflict that has done huge damage to global economy)
This is what Bell says about Blair’s take on politics.
As I said, where the essay is much better is the politics – not shallow personality politics but what the 2020s requires of successful political leaders. Blair is entirely right to say that requires having “an attitude, a tribe and a project.”
And here is his final post.
In summary, this is in many ways an impressive attempt to engage with some of the big forces shaping our future. But, as Tony Blair would probably be the first to admit, governing requires a much grittier engagement with the world as it is, not as you might prefer it to be
Key events
Here are is some reaction to the Tony Blair article from journalists and commentators.
From Randeep Ramesh, the Guardian’s chief leader writer
Invoking Trump, Meloni and Milei as proof that voters want cults while insisting he is a sensible technocratic realist. This is Blairism with an AI wrapper: pro US, markets, deregulation, welfare cuts, techuptopia and impatience with democratic drag. Nah
From John Rentoul in a column for the Independent
This is Tony Blair’s most forceful intervention in British politics since he stepped down as prime minister nearly two decades ago …
[Blair] argues that the EU has adopted an approach to technology that is defensive and anti-growth; that Britain should adopt the opposite approach and then seek to persuade the EU.
That, he says, has been Labour’s mistake in government: to suppress growth instead of promoting it. To give business “headwinds, not tailwinds”. He offers a 10-point “wind of change” plan to raise productivity and to cut taxes and public spending.
Of course, he is right – or, at least, far more right than anyone else in British politics today, although I am not sure that a rise in VAT instead of Rachel Reeves’s national insurance increase would have been a good idea.
But who is going to make this plan work, if Starmer has failed and the two named candidates to succeed him are not up to the mark? Perhaps he is timing his intervention, in the lull in the Labour leadership frenzy, in the hope that someone else will emerge from the ranks to seize the moment with the boldness of the young Blair
From Will Hutton, the Observer columnist
Blair writes apparently ignorant of the work of Nobel prize winners Philippe Aghion and Angus Deaton. The tech revolution must be accompanied by a social contract revolution and the addressing of multiple inequalities. Otherwise it dies. Labour has to respect these realities.
From Stephen Bush in his Inside Politics column for the Financial Times
I doubt it’s going to come as a galloping shock to many readers when I say that I think this is an absolutely correct analysis of where Labour has gone wrong. The Starmer project never had anything like the level of serious intellectual revival that Labour went through in the 1990s or the Conservatives went through under Michael Howard and David Cameron in the 2000s.
I repeatedly wrote from 2022 to 2024 that Labour was storing up problems for itself by promising to deliver so much while ruling out many of the ways it could actually deliver anything. It was always going to back itself into introducing various growth-damaging tax rises having ruled out touching the big three (income tax, national insurance contributions and VAT). Coupled with its economic interventions, the outcomes were predictable and predicted.
From Sienna Rodgers from the House magazine
TB essay is refreshingly well-written, and spot on both in diagnosing the problem and analysing the appeal of the unconventional politician, but I think the proposals are less useful – either wrong (eg we should fully support whatever mad adventure Trump has decided to go on) or, mostly, very, very vague
Still, would be great to see the Labour leadership contenders do the same exercise
From Vicky Spratt, the housing journalist and campaigner
Something is glaringly absent from Tony Blair’s essay…any ideas on how to create policy for and messaging to sell the inevitable fiscal trade offs that now face any British government. Economic context is very, very different to when he became PM.
From Tim Shipman, the Spectator’s political editor
Whatever you think of Blair, engage with what he’s saying not how he makes you feel. The bare minimum we should expect from any leader is that they have an analysis of the current situation and a plan to deal with it which is as coherent and realistic as his intervention. Pretty well every critique I’ve read so far has failed to meet this requirement.
‘Nothing to offer Labour’ – leftwingers hit back at Blair over his policy essay
Tony Blair’s comments have not gone down well with the left. Here are comments about his essay, posted on social media, from various figures either in the Labour party, or associated with progressive politics or the left.
Richard Burgon, the Labour MP who is secretary of the Socialist Campaign Group, says Blair has nothing to offer the party.
Tony Blair has nothing to offer Labour in 2026.
His neoliberalism, backing of endless wars and acceptance of inequality are exactly what Labour must break from if it wants to rebuild support and defeat the far-right
Diane Abbott, who was elected as a Labour MP but who has had the whip suspended, says Blair’s ideas are wrong.
Blair has no coherent plan for the country. His policy framework is support every US war, cut welfare and pensions, deregulate and privatise, continue anti-migrant policies.
A hopeless, failed project.
Stewart Wood, a Labour peer and former adviser in No 10 to Gordon Brown, has posted a long thread analysing the essay. Here are some of his concluding points.
Blair’s essay is fundamentally optimistic about corporate power. It will bring wealth, opportunity & strength. It makes a big bet on the ultimate benevolence & responsibility of these corporate giants, or at least the alignment of their private interest with the public interest.
There has been a transformation in voter concern about unchecked corporate power. It is no longer a peccadillo of those of us on the left, but an animator of anger across the political spectrum. Much is misguided, much is not, but those pushing the Blair agenda cannot ignore it.
As usual with Tony Blair, his analysis on individual policy issues is essential reading (on Europe, China, on the NHS shifting to preventive care, on the problem of welfare reform, much else). And no doubt his prescription will understandably find a strong band of supporters.
But we should be clear on what his recipe is: embracing AI & Washington; very laisser-faire on regulation; cutting state intervention, taxes & spending; & optimism about the coincidence of private & public interest. I am sceptical this is the future Britain wants or needs. END
Harry Quilter-Pinner, director of the IPPR, a left-leaning thinktank that had close links with Blair’s government, says some of Blair’s ideas are worrying,
1/ There is lots to like in this. Blair is right that the Labour Party needs a debate about policy and about purpose not just personalities. He is right that the biggest weakness of this government has been a lack of what David Miliband calls ‘project’.
2/ But, some of his solutions are worrying. At a time when working people are struggling and rejecting the status quo, undoing things like workers rights and key elements of tax justice is a mistake. It’s true to New Labour – but not to the New Britain we now live in.
Steve Akehurst, director of Persuasion UK, a progressive thinktank focusing on public opinion, says he is sceptical of Blair’s ideas.
There is some decent stuff here but ‘people are leaving Labour for the Greens because they want ID cards’ is a level of self-delusion well beyond that which Blair accuses everyone else
I suppose a better faith interpretation is a ultra deliverist one – people are fleeing Lab because nothing works, here’s how you make stuff work. I admire the self-confidence, but would be useful to hear how you unite a modern electoral coalition behind an agenda cooked up on the slopes of Davos.
Jeremy Corbyn, the former Labour leader who is now parliamentary leader of Your Party, says Blair is wrong.
Tony Blair thinks the answer to this country’s problems is AI, welfare cuts and endless spending on war. Who benefits? Arms companies and tech billionaires. Once again, Blair is wrong. The answer is a redistribution of wealth and power and the relentless search for peace.
Zarah Sultana, another former Labour MP now in Your Party, says Blair is a war criminal.
The only statement Tony Blair should be making is a plea of “guilty” from the dock at The Hague.
He is a war criminal with the blood of over a million Iraqis on his hands
Yanis Varoufakis, the economics professor and former Greek finance minister, has used the essay as a peg to post a long statement denouncing Blair’s entire record.
Tony Blair is the living embodiment of what happens when political office becomes a down payment on future plunder …
Soon after, the Chilcot Inquiry demolished Blair’s Iraq lies, exposing him as a liar, a chancer and a war criminal responsible for countless corpses of Iraqis, but also of British soldiers.
Then came Blair’s real innovation: the financialisation of the ex-premiership itself. The Tony Blair Institute, fuelled by £130 million from Oracle’s Larry Ellison—coincidentally, the largest individual donor to the Friends of the IDF—became a shadow state, brokering governance contracts for autocrats and companies like Palantir that weaponise AI to produce mega-death abroad and full-on surveillance of Western populations.
Now, in May 2026, this corporate fixer issues a 5700 word tantrum demanding that Labour embrace Trump even more than Starmer already has, denounce what is left of Labour’s betrayed Green New Deal, and trash the remnants of workers’ rights. This is not the wisdom of an aging statesman. It is the frantic squirming of a man fearing his grip on oligarchic power might soon wane and whose entire post-10 Downing Street existence depends on preventing the many from ever reclaiming what the few have plundered.
Burnham says he will give ‘considered response’ to Blair’s critique tomorrow
Andy Burnham says he is going to respond to the Tony Blair essay, and presumably the former PM’s criticism of his views (see 9.43am), tomorrow. In a post about the essay, he says:
This requires a considered response. I will set one out tomorrow.
Former Green MP Caroline Lucas accuses Blair of being naive about climate change
This is from Caroline Lucas, the former Green party MP and former party leader, on Tony Blair’s views on net zero. (See 9.57am.)
Whatever world Tony Blair inhabits appears to be one without climate change & where UK temperature record for May hasn’t just been smashed by over 2C. How else to explain his extraordinary dismissal of net zero & erroneous claim that fossil fuels are cheaper than renewables?
Tony Blair says Labour should accept that the pensions triple lock is unsustainable. (See 9.34am.) In interviews this morning, Dan Tomlinson, the Treasury minister, defended this policy. Asked if the triple lock was sustainable, he replied:
Yes, I do support the triple lock, I think it’s the right policy, it was in our manifesto and I think it’s important that we make sure we’re protecting pensioners and protecting their living standards.
These are from the political commentator Sam Freedman on this argument.
It’s interesting that getting rid of the triple lock has become the defining example of a sensible grown-up policy while at the same time it’s widely accepted that trying to means-test the winter fuel allowance was a disaster for Labour.
There’s a real tension in political coverage between praising “grown up” decisions in the abstract and castigating anyone who tries any of them for their hopeless political naivety.
Lots of mainstream commentators praising the Blair piece but if Starmer or Badenoch did a speech announcing scrapping the triple lock and disability benefits in favour of foreign aid and bungs to AI companies I suspect the reaction would be different.
Treasury minister Torsten Bell hits back at Blair, saying he’s wrong about causes of tax rises and has no proper energy plan
There has been a lot of Labour reaction to the Tony Blair essay, and I will round up more of it later, but one of the most interesting critiques is from Torsten Bell, the Treasury minister and pensions minister and former head of the Resolution Foundation thinktank, who has posted a long thread about it on Bluesky.
It is worth reading in full, but here are some of his main points.
Blair putting on full display what is in many ways his special ability – to lay out a political argument grounded in his own view of global trends (globalisation in the 2000s, tech in the 2020s). But…
The truth, awkwardly for an essay that argues that policy not politics must come first, is that this is an essay that puts politics not serious policy first
Bell agrees with Blair on policy on some points, but here are some of the points where he differs.
1. There is no understanding here of why taxes have risen over the past decade. If you look at the data you’ll know this most significantly reflects two things
Most importantly higher debt interest costs (a global trend reinforced by scale of debt rise under the last government). This alone has driven taxes up by 2% of GDP since the late 2010s and has to be wrestled with not ignored as the essay does
The upward pressure on taxes is added to by the inevitability of unwinding the extremes of austerity for public services reached in 2018 – a level of austerity that was politically, economically and socially unsustainable.
It’s okay for the Tories/Times/Telegraph to pretend that taxes are up “because of welfare”. That’s politics. But if you care about policy you need to understand that is a long way from the truth – and wrestle with the consequences
2. The essay calls for VAT to have been increased. It does so in the middle of the 2020s, when countries are facing the biggest period of inflationary pressure for decades = a recipe for much higher interest rates with absolutely nothing pro-business about it
3. There is no real policy on energy here. Which reflects the failure to recognise the real pressure on bills is twofold. Our – reliance on hydrocarbons – need for investment in energy generation/distribution (in part because of a criminal lack of investment in 2010s & 2000s)
Our answer to those pressures is to accept that for future generations we have to deliver that investment but we don’t protect those generations by leaving the UK dependent on imported oil/gas. The exact path of North Sea transition matters but doesn’t buy us out of this reality
4. On foreign policy, the essay reiterates a (long held and broadly correct) view that Britain should not look to choose between Europe and the US
But the critique of today’s foreign policy choices is backed by a deep inconsistency, wanting: – a conditional relationship with Europe (largely based on EU tech policy) – an unconditional one with the US (pro-enabling an Iran conflict that has done huge damage to global economy)
This is what Bell says about Blair’s take on politics.
As I said, where the essay is much better is the politics – not shallow personality politics but what the 2020s requires of successful political leaders. Blair is entirely right to say that requires having “an attitude, a tribe and a project.”
And here is his final post.
In summary, this is in many ways an impressive attempt to engage with some of the big forces shaping our future. But, as Tony Blair would probably be the first to admit, governing requires a much grittier engagement with the world as it is, not as you might prefer it to be
Zack Polanski, the Green party leader, posted this on social media about Tony Blair’s latest intervention this morning.
Tony Blair.
What the billionaire class have paid for.
And in a post commenting on a Guardian story headlined “Tony Blair says Labour must abandon net zero, support Trump and move firmly to the right”, Patrick Harvie, the former co-leader of the Scottish Greens, said:
Spot the difference between “Tony Blair says” and “Nigel Farage says”
Reform UK accused of being ‘soft on Putin’ after revelation about candidate seemingly backing invasion of Crimea
David Cameron was ahead of his time when in 2009 he warned against the dangers of social media, and Twitter, with the quip “too many twits might make a twat”. They are not laughing in Reform UK where Robert Kenyon, the party’s candidate in Makerfield, is now being faced every day with a barrage of questions about historic social media posts that were sexist, offensive – or worse.
Some of them were covered on the blog yesterday, here and here. As Peter Walker reports, in other messages Kenyon appeared to express doubt over the seriousness of Covid and the efficacy of vaccines for the virus.
But new revelations are potentially even more awkward for Reform UK.
As Pieter Snepvangers and Charles Hymas report in the Telegraph, a post has emerged showing Kenyon saying that Russia was “within their rights” to invade Crimea in 2014.
In an online forum, in response to someone who posted in March 2014, just after the Russian invastion of Crimea, saying “the people of the Crimea want to be in Russia, for me that is democracy in action”, Kenyon replied:
I agree totally, Russia are well within their rights to do what they have done, as we did with the Falklands. However, will Latvia be next?
In response, a Reform UK spokesperson told the Telegraph:
At no point did Rob explicitly support or endorse Russia’s actions in Crimea. He is fully opposed to Russia’s illegal and brutal invasion of Ukraine. We fully back Cllr Kenyon. He is an excellent local candidate, who we are confident will be a superb MP for Makerfield.
But this comment is unlikely to stop Kenyon’s post as being seen as fresh evidence of Reform UK’s pro-Russia leanings. Nigel Farage has supported the Kremlin argument that Brussels provoked the Russia-Ukraine war by offering Ukraine EU membership, and Nathan Gill, the party’s former leader in Wales, was jailed for taking bribes to deliver pro-Russia speeches when he was an MEP.
Commenting on the Telegraph story, Luke Pollard, a defence minister, said:
Nigel Farage has again chosen a candidate who promotes Kremlin talking points and makes excuses for Putin’s unacceptable actions against Ukraine.
While we stand with Ukraine in the face of Russian aggression, Robert Kenyon has shown he’s completely out of step with the British people.
And James Cartlidge, the Conservative defence spokesperson, said:
Nigel Farage must immediately condemn Robert Kenyon’s posts justifying Vladimir Putin’s illegal invasion of Crimea.
For too long, Reform has tolerated pro-Russian voices who excuse Putin and his brutal actions towards Ukraine.
The Conservatives are and will always be clear, we stood with Ukraine in Government and we stand with Ukraine today. If Nigel Farage is unable to condemn his candidate in Makerfield, it will only show that Reform are soft on Putin, soft on Russia.
Donald Tusk says defence treaty he’s signing with Starmer means UK’s pledge to Poland goes beyond Nato guarantees
Jakub Krupa
Jakub Krupa writes the Guardian’s Europe live blog.
Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, has said a new Polish-British defence and security treaty to be signed today in London will focus on countering the long-term, strategic threat posed by Russia.
Briefing reporters before leaving for the UK, Tusk suggested the treaty – to be named after the RAF Northolt base which hosted Polish pilots during the second world war – will go beyond previous deals agreed in 2017 and 2023, and include provisions for mutual security assistance outside Nato’s article 5 framework.
Tusk said the bilateral treaty would mean Poland could count on the UK for a “rapid bilateral response … before a decision is made by all 32 Nato members” in the event of a conflict.”
He went on:
And as you know, in today’s reality … speed of response, adequate response, is something that will matter in a conflict.
The treaty also includes provisions on military cooperation, including procurement, drones, air defence and cybersecurity.
Britain already has similar deals with France and Germany, while Poland signed a similar agreement with Paris last year.
Blair hits out at Guardian, as he defends his stance on Trump, and being part of US president’s “Board of Peace”
It is not just Keir Starmer and almost every other senior figure in the Labour party who have been getting it in the neck from Tony Blair today. In his Today interview, Blair was asked by Nick Robinson about the Guardian pointing out that Blair is urging the UK government to get closer to Donald Trump. That provoked Blair to reply like this.
The Guardian – you’ve got to love them. I always used to say when I was prime minister that the most the greatest source of election losing advice was always from the Guardian.
On Trump, Blair said:
I’m not saying the Labour party should love Donald Trump, get close to Donald Trump. I’m simply saying the American relationship matters to Britain.
Blair also defended his role as a member of the executive board for Trump’s “Board of Peace”. He said:
We put together a plan that ended the war [in Gaza]. Now, at the moment, you’ve still got some fighting going on. You’ve still got a dire situation for the people.
This next week we will have further negotiations with Hamas because we need to move this new government into Gaza. And we need Hamas to agree that this government should be in control of Gaza.
So it’s a very tricky, difficult situation.
But we have if the plan is allowed to work, it will give Gazan people a fresh start with a new Palestinian government and a large amount of funding behind it.
Blair said Trump’s “Board of Peace” itself was sitting leaders. He said he sat on its executive board, which served underneath it.
(After it was launched, the Board of Peace was memorably described as looking like “a cast of Bond villains, plus Tony Blair”.)
Blair does not deny contemplating launching new centrist party during Corbyn era
In his Today interview, Tony Blair was asked by Nick Robinson about reports that, during the Jeremy Corbyn era, he considered setting up a new party. Robinson said that Blair’s long essay read like it had been written by a man “who wishes he had done it”.
In response, Blair did not deny the central claim. He said:
No, I don’t wish I’d done it.
But I think a lot of the issues that were raised at the time are still there and with us.
Look, my whole belief about the Labour party, it’s had 120 years of of history. It’s been in power really for about a quarter of that time. And the reason for that is what I always call the birth defect of the Labour party, when you separated the liberal progressive side from the Labour side, and New Labour was an attempt to fuse those two things back together. And that’s why we won successive elections.
The trouble is, since then we’ve moved away from that. And you do have, I think, this unrepresented centre in British politics. And I think it’s basically a supply problem and not a demand problem.
Blair never got anywhere with his plans to launch a new party, but it has been reported that this went beyond idle talk, and that people were approached about funding the project. This is what Tom McTague, now editor of the New Statesman, said about this in an UnHerd article last year.
In public, Blair insisted that he was not in any way “advocating a new party, organising one, or wanting to vote for one”. However, he had concluded that the Labour party was finished, according to someone who shared his views, and was involved in discussions about a new party. “He would tell those who thought otherwise that they were being nostalgic,” said the same associate. “He felt that too many in the party could not reconcile themselves to the reality that Labour was simply irrecoverable, passed its sell-by date.”
Blair says Labour should get rid of Ed Miliband’s net zero targets
Tony Blair has also given an interview to Times Radio. In it, he said the government should abandon its net zero target – implying that, if that meant Ed Miliband felt obliged to resign as energy secretary as a result, he would not view that as a problem.
Asked if he was proposing getting rid of Miliband’s net zero targets, Blair replied:
Yes, I am, and I’ll tell you exactly why.
It’s not that I’m against renewable energy, clean energy, and it’s not that I’m a climate denier.
It’s coming to terms with this reality: the three biggest emitters in the world today are China, America and India. Together they account for just over 50% of global emissions.
All of them are pursuing cheap energy and electrification. Doesn’t mean to say they’re not doing renewable energy, China builds more renewable energy than the rest of the world put together.
It just means that the lens through which they judge policy is cheap energy and the need for electrification, particularly in the age of AI.
Britain’s emissions are under 1% of global emissions, we can’t solve climate change, and to impose costs on our own businesses and consumers in order to accelerate net zero when the rest of the world is not doing so – I don’t understand the logic behind it, or shutting down our own oil and gas industry in circumstances where, again, I don’t know another country in the world that’s doing that.
This is more or less exactly the Conservative party’s position on net zero.
Asked if adopting this approach would made Miliband’s position untenable, Blair replied:
It’s really a question of explaining to the country, and to Ed, that right now we need to get growth levels up, we need to recognise with this AI revolution that we’re going to need cheap energy.
Blair and Miliband have been at odds with each other for more than a decade. Blair wanted Miliband’s brother David to win the Labour leadership contest in 2010, and he thought Miliband as leader was wrong to disown some of New Labour’s policies.
Blair says Labour needs debate about policy before it chooses new leader, as he criticises Burnham’s 40 years of failure claim
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.
While Blair praised Burnham in general terms, he also said the Greater Manchester mayor was wrong to argue, as he did in a speech last week, that government policies over the past 40 years have let voters down.
Blair said:
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?
I don’t think he really means that, but what I’m saying, if you’re going to change leader, you’ve really got to force people to say where they stand, because otherwise you’ll be in what I think was always a problem for Keir – and I’ll be very honest about this, and I like him and I wish him well – but when we switched from that Corbyn agenda, there wasn’t enough explanation.
Not as to why Corbyn was an election loser, that was pretty obvious, but why the whole agenda was wrong.
You have to explain to people why it’s wrong if you want to lead the party in the future in a coherent way.
Blair suggests Labour was wrong to protect pensions triple lock
In his Today interview, Tony Blair said the government should have done more to prioritise growth when it took office. He also suggested the pensions triple lock was not sustainable.
He said:
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 …
At some point you’ve got to be able to stand up and have an honest debate with the public, which is to say, look, ultimately we’re probably taxing people too much, spending too much, borrowing too much at the moment.
If we carry on like this with these large increases in incapacity benefit, with the triple lock on pensions, we’re going to create a situation where economically we’re not, we’re not able to grow because we put such a weight affecting growth on the back of our economy.
Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves did claim they were prioritising growth when they took office. But business leaders claim that higher taxes, especially the rise in employer national insurance, and stronger rights for workers have been bad for growth.
They have also kept the pensions triple lock because they pledged to do so in the 2024 manifesto. With the other main parties also committed to it in 2024, not promising to keep it was seen as too much of an electoral risk.
Blair says Labour won 2024 election because it was ‘acceptable alternative’, not because of its manifesto
In his interview on the Today programme, Tony Blair said Labour won the election in 2024 because it was “an acceptable alternative” – not because voters liked what was in its manifesto.
He said:
Let’s be clear, I don’t think Labour won the last election because people read the manifesto and said, ‘this is what we want’.
I think people thought that Conservatives have behaved completely unacceptably, and to Keir Starmer’s great credit, the Labour party was an acceptable alternative.
Minister rejects Blair’s critique of Starmer’s government, accusing ex-PM of retreading arguments from Labour’s past
Good morning. Labour is in the midst of ‘phoney war’ leadership contest. The formal bit has not started yet, but Andy Burnham and Wes Streeting are already actively engaged, Angela Rayner is taking an interest, and Keir Starmer is defending his legacy with renewed vigour. The last thing anyone expected was for Tony Blair to join in.
But he has, sort of, with a 5,700-word essay, published last night on his thinktank’s website, setting out where the former PM thinks his part is going wrong (on most things, it seems) and what he thinks it should do next. Blair, of course, won’t be a candidate in the leadership contest, but ideas matter in politics and this essay is chock-full of them.
Here is Jessica Elgot’s story on what he says. She says Blair has accused Starmer, Burnham and Streeting of putting Labour’s future at risk by abandoning the centre ground, warning that the party’s “almost infinite capacity for self-delusion” means it is likely to lose the next election.
And here is Peter Walker’s analysis.
Peter says the Blair essay is the work of “a man who worries deeply that the party he once led, plus the UK more widely, is stuck in a loop of insular political debate, not even beginning to get to grips with what he portrays as the century-defining challenge – and opportunity – of AI”. But Peter also points out that many in Labour are likely to regard Blair’s “call for a move to the ‘radical centre’ as somewhere between vague and meaningless”.
Quite a lot of what Blair says sounds as if it could have been written by Kemi Badenoch. Any other Tory leader would be championing this as vindication. But Badenoch seems to approach any argument on the basis that whatever someone from the left is saying must always be wrong, and she has not commented yet; perhaps she is still trying to compute how she and a former Labour PM could have ended up in the same place.
Blair has been on the Today programme this morning, and I will post highlights from his interview soon. Dan Tomlinson, a junior Treasury minister, has been the government voice in the broadcast studios and he has had the awkward job of trying to rebut criticism from the party’s most successful election winner. Tomlinson was respectful about Blair, and said he agreed with him on some points, but essentially he accused Blair of resurrecting old arguments about Old Labour v New Labour and not accepting that the world has moved on. He told BBC Breakfast:
I think [Blair’s] 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.
And, on Times Radio, where he said the Old Labour/New Labour split was “just not where we are today”, Tomlinson said:
If we look at the jobs market, when Tony Blair was prime minister there weren’t really any people on zero-hour contracts. Now there are hundreds of thousands of people struggling with that uncertainty, so, yes, we are passing our employment rights legislation to give people more certainty in work.
There will be a lot more to say about the Blair essay, and reaction to it, as the day goes on.
There is not much in diary today – parliament is in recess – but we will see Starmer today when he signs a new defence treaty with Poland with Donald Tusk, the Polish PM, at an event outside London around lunchtime.
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