Blair: Labour is playing with fire over UK’s future – and is too weak to rejoin EU

Sir Tony Blair has warned Labor is “playing with fire” and risks long-term damage to both the party and the country unless the government embarks on a fundamental reset.

In a major intervention, Labour’s most successful former leader and prime minister called on the party to return to its “radical centre” and warned that the country was in “mess” because the party had failed to put policy first and politics last.

He said reversing this was key to winning a second term in government and said he needed a clear plan to put things right if he wanted to save the country from Nigel Farage’s UK Reformation.

But he warned that trying to remove the prime minister without clear policy direction was “not a serious course of action”.

The stark warning comes at a time when Sir Keir Starmer’s government is in limbo and awaiting the outcome of the Makerfield by-election. If Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham wins the by-election (currently just ahead of Reform UK in the polls) he will launch a leadership challenge against Sir Keir.

Sir Tony, who played a key role in the Remain campaign opposing Brexit, also warned that Britain was “too weak” to reset its relationship with the EU and could not discuss rejoining until it regained the power it had lost.

In his 5,600-word essay on the future of Labor and the country, Sir Tony discusses Britain’s position in the new world order; the centrality of artificial intelligence and the technology revolution; and sets out “a new policy agenda to halt Britain’s decline”.

He warned: “The Labor Party is playing with fire, and indeed with its future and that of the country.”

“The world is spinning on its axis, and today’s politicians, living in a pressure cooker 24/7, do not have time to notice this rotation, let alone work. These changes require long-term strategic thinking that is alien to the way most modern democracies operate.”

In a damning indictment of a nearly two-year-old Starmer government, he added: “We have no worked out, coherent plan for the country in a rapidly changing world, and we are in the wrong political position to draw up a plan and win a second term.”

But Sir Tony suggested replacing Sir Keir with Mr Burnham, former deputy prime minister Angela Rayner or former health secretary Wes Streeting, who claimed on Tuesday he had the 81 supporters needed to challenge the leadership, would not alone solve the problem.

He said: “If it doesn’t start with a policy debate, it doesn’t matter if there’s a change of leadership.”

In his plea for the party to be given more time to think, he added: “Trying to remove the prime minister without knowing what policy direction we are introducing is not a serious course of action.”

Sir Tony was sacked by Gordon Brown supporters in 2007 as Labor lost the next election in 2010. But he warned that, unlike his own government, the party was now trying to govern “from its comfort zone” on the soft left.

He said: “The government governs essentially from the traditional Labor ‘soft left’ position, firmly parked in the party’s comfort zone.

“In the last Budget it looked like we were increasing tax for additional welfare spending when the public already thought their welfare bills were too high.”

In a scathing critique, Starmer noted that his government’s measures such as “new workers’ rights laws; a net-zero acceleration and phase-out of the British oil and gas industry; a beyond-inflation increase in the minimum wage; and non-dom changes” were giving “headwinds, not headwinds, to British business despite the macroeconomic gains for which the chancellor is rightly praised.”

He argued: “Successful governments do not begin with a personality contest or a political question like ‘how to save the country from the Reformation’. They begin with an idea, a project, a governing purpose, an analysis of what is wrong and a plan to put it right.”

He called on Labor to occupy the “best political space”, which he described as the “radical centre”.

“The properly defined center is where you put policy first and politics last. So you start with the question: What is the right answer? And only after you have found that do you set about the political task of convincing people of it. Britain is in a mess precisely because it has done the exact opposite in recent years.”

On Brexit, he said simply reversing it was “not the answer” as the country was in a much worse position than when Britons voted to leave the EU in 2016, largely due to its stagnating economy.

“If we want to return to some kind of structural relationship with Europe, we can only do so from an economically strong position. We must be at the cutting edge of Europe’s competitiveness. At the moment we are not,” he said.

Regarding the country’s position in the new world order, he said Britain was “caught between the isolationist tendency of some on the right and the misguided progressivism of some on the left, which together are in danger of leaving Britain stranded on an irrelevant island.”

He claimed to understand the “anxiety in Europe” as US president Donald Trump casts doubt on the value of NATO, or the transatlantic alliance, but described it as “more of a ‘showdown’ than a ‘break’. On this side of the water we are being told some home truths from which we will wake up if we are wise.”

He added: “Europe needs to develop economic competitiveness and military capacity. It is currently not succeeding as well as it should at both.”