The Labour Party turned on Sir Tony Blair once again this week for committing the cardinal sin of stating the bleeding obvious.
After accusing Sir Keir Starmer – in a devastating 5,600-word essay – of having ‘no coherent plan’ for the country and introducing policies that have held back business, he was rounded on by all the usual suspects.
Despite the fact that Tony Blair is the most successful Labour Prime Minister this country has ever known, or is ever likely to know, Andy Burnham – the mayor of Greater Manchester and the man most likely to be our next PM – had the gall to accuse him of a failure to understand modern politics.
He followed that up yesterday with an essay of his own – at 1,500 words, considerably briefer – in which he said that economic success in Manchester had been achieved through a ‘very interventionist’ approach and the lesson was that ‘you can’t just leave it to the market’.
None of this comes as much of a surprise to those of us who have paid the price of giving our lives to a party which now rejects almost everything we believe in.
I’d been a member of the Labour Party my whole adult life when I was first elected as an MP in 2010. But the Corbyn era made me a hate figure for the hard-Left.
There was no way back for me after I began the 2017 General Election campaign by saying I wanted to stand again as a Labour candidate – but would never vote to make such a dangerous man prime minister in the event that he won the party leadership.
After accusing Sir Keir Starmer of having ‘no coherent plan’ for the country and introducing policies that have held back business, Sir Tony Blair was rounded on by all the usual suspects
Only a fool would dismiss Blair’s advice. He won three elections – swept to power not by a bloc vote of Islington intellectuals and ex-miners but by ordinary Britons of all classes
Many local members in my constituency, Barrow-in-Furness in Cumbria, never forgave me. Some refused to campaign for me, even though Corbyn’s hostility to Trident would have been disastrous, not only for the security of the country, but particularly for the area where our nuclear submarines are manufactured.
But my alienation from Labour post-Blair had begun much earlier. As someone who had seen how skilfully he had governed from the centre, I was never going to be comfortable as then leader Ed Miliband took the party back into its Left-wing comfort zone.
That is why the reaction to Sir Tony’s essay is so depressingly familiar. Labour is in office with a huge majority, yet it is behaving like a defeated opposition party at some kind of weird group therapy session.
Instead of asking whether Blair might be right in saying that the Government lacks a coherent plan, senior figures have rushed for the comfort blankets of the past.
Wes Streeting, in many ways a talented and serious politician, reached for the legacy of the Iraq War. Andy Burnham proffered the idea that the country has been misgoverned under a ‘neoliberal’ regime for 40 years, a period which, awkwardly for him, includes the Blair government he served in.
Others mutter about Thatcher and Brexit. These words are catnip to the Labour Left. They provide the warm glow of tribal certainty but have nothing to do with the problems voters want fixed now.
The public is not lying awake fretting about Mosul in 2003, or marginal tax rates in the 1980s, or the Common Agricultural Policy.
They are worrying about the impact of mass legal and illegal migration, their spiralling energy bills, the growing scourge of welfare dependency, public services that always seem to cost more and deliver less, and whether their children will be better off than they are.
When they hear senior Labour figures having another navel-gazing argument about one old betrayal or another, they do not think: ‘At last! Here is a government focused on my preoccupations.’ They look on with utter contempt.
Blair is not right about everything. He would, I suspect, now rail against the Blob of overbearing, unaccountable officials, but he ought to accept that his government did a lot to empower them.
The introduction of the Human Rights Act in 1998 may have been well-intentioned but it has made it too easy for foreign criminals to scam the system and avoid deportation at the expense of protecting communities from the danger they pose.
Blair understood that Labour wins only when it looks outward to the country, not inward to its activists. Keir Starmer should understand this better than anyone
But only a fool would dismiss his advice. He won three elections – swept to power not by a bloc vote of Islington intellectuals and ex-miners but by ordinary Britons of all classes, who believed his promise of moderate, market-friendly social democracy.
He championed aspiration. He understood that Labour wins only when it looks outward to the country, not inward to its activists.
If Labour’s leaders keep pandering to a dwindling membership that is overwhelmingly Left-wing, more backward-looking and more hostile to hard choices than the public, it will continue its downward trajectory.
Keir Starmer should understand this better than anyone. He became leader by promising to make Labour electable after Corbyn’s drubbing at the polls in 2019.
But he never forced the party to confront why Corbynism was wrong – quite the reverse. While he promised the country that Labour had got serious, he simultaneously reassured the party that it did not need to change too much.
This balancing act worked in Opposition, when the only task was to seem marginally more competent than the flailing Conservatives, but it has proved disastrous in government.
Nothing exposed this problem more starkly than the Welfare Bill fiasco last July.
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Britain cannot afford a permanently expanding benefits budget at a time when taxes are already high, defence spending must rise and public services remain under strain. Yet when the argument became difficult, the Government flinched and withdrew a package of reforms to Personal Independence Payments. That is not grown-up behaviour. It is adolescence with a red box.
Blair’s prescription this week – government from the ‘radical centre’ – is not nostalgia, or an empty slogan. It is not a plea to rerun 1997 without the pager alerts and D:Ream.
It just means putting effective policies before party management. Growth before gesture politics. And above all, equipping our society and economy to handle the tidal wave about to hit us in the shape of artificial intelligence, a force that threatens to outstrip human capabilities and possibly make millions of jobs obsolete.
I despair at the narcissism involved in this Labour debate. The country will not be saved by a wealth tax, by rejoining the EU, or by pretending that saying the magic word ‘inequality’ will enable us to avoid the need to control spending, encourage enterprise or secure our borders.
Labour ministers were meant to be the adults in the room after the chaos of the Conservative years. Instead, less than two years after winning power, they are behaving like truculent teenagers, sticking their fingers in their ears while the real adults remind them of the hard truths.
Labour’s tragedy is that it has never forgiven Tony Blair for proving that the party had to change in order to win. Britain’s danger is that Labour may now ruin both itself and the country by pretending he was wrong.
John Woodcock is a former Shadow Minister for Transport
