Blair says Labour won 2024 election because it was ‘acceptable alternative’ – UK politics live | Politics
Blair says Labor won 2024 election not because of its manifesto but because it is an ‘acceptable alternative’
In his interview on the Today program, Tony Blair He said Labor won the election in 2024 not because voters liked what was in its manifesto, but because it was an “acceptable alternative”.
He said:
Let’s be clear, I don’t think Labor won the last election because people read the manifesto and said ‘this is what we want’.
I think people thought the Conservatives were behaving completely unacceptable and, according to Keir Starmer, Labor was an acceptable alternative.
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Labor wrong to triple lock pensions, Blair suggests
In his interview today, Tony Blair He said the government should do more to prioritize growth when it takes office. He also suggested that the triple lock of pensions was not sustainable.
He said:
When he entered, he saw the state of the inheritance. At that point, of course, I think it will be difficult. Everything is difficult in politics, but if I were them, I would say, look, all these commitments can be very valuable. There may be appropriate commitments in easy times, but in these difficult times we must prioritize growth. We must prioritize support for the business sector and grasp this AI revolution with both hands, both its opportunities and risks.
And I think, yes, it would be difficult, but I think you could explain to the country why it was necessary…
At some point you have to be able to stand up and have an honest debate with the public, so look, the bottom line is we’re probably taxing people too much right now, spending too much, borrowing too much.
If we continue like this, with these huge increases in disability benefits and the triple lock on pensions, we will create a situation where we will not be able to grow economically, we will not be able to grow because we are putting a weight on our economy that affects growth.
Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves claimed to prioritize growth when they took office. But business leaders argue that higher taxes, especially increases in employer national insurance and strengthening rights for workers, are bad for growth.
They also kept pensions under triple lock as they promised in the 2024 manifesto. Since the other main parties had also made this commitment in 2024, it was seen as a huge electoral risk if they did not promise to maintain it.
Blair says Labor won 2024 election not because of its manifesto but because it is an ‘acceptable alternative’
In his interview on the Today program, Tony Blair He said Labor won the election in 2024 not because voters liked what was in its manifesto, but because it was an “acceptable alternative”.
He said:
Let’s be clear, I don’t think Labor won the last election because people read the manifesto and said ‘this is what we want’.
I think people thought the Conservatives were behaving completely unacceptable and, according to Keir Starmer, Labor was an acceptable alternative.
Minister rejects Blair’s criticism of Starmer’s government, accusing former Prime Minister of rehashing arguments from Labour’s past
Good morning. Labor is in the middle of a ‘fake war’ leadership race. The official part has not yet begun, but Andy Burnham and Wes Streeting are already actively engaged, Angela Rayner is interested, and Keir Starmer is defending his legacy with renewed vigor. The last thing anyone expected was: Tony Blair to join.
But he has a 5,700-word article published last night. on thinktank’s websiteIt reveals where the former Prime Minister thinks his part has gone wrong (apparently on most counts) and what he thinks he should do next. Blair won’t be running in the leadership contest, of course, but ideas matter in politics and this article is full of them.
At work Jessica ElgotThe story of what . He said Blair accused Starmer, Burnham and Streeting of risking Labour’s future by abandoning the centre, and warned that the party’s “almost infinite capacity for self-deception” meant it was likely to lose the next election.
And here it is Peter WalkerAnalysis of .
Peter says Blair’s article is the work of “a man who is deeply concerned that the party he once led, and the UK more broadly, is stuck in a cycle of insular political debate”; it can’t even begin to grasp what it portrays as AI’s century-defining challenge and opportunity. But Peter also highlights that many in the Labor Party may regard Blair’s “call for a move to the ‘radical centre’ as somewhere between vague and meaningless”.
Much of what Blair says sounds like it was written by Kemi Badenoch. Any other Tory leader would defend this as revenge. But Badenoch seems to approach any debate on the basis that anything anyone on the left says must always be wrong, and he has yet to comment; perhaps he is still trying to work out how he and a former Labor Prime Minister could end up in the same place.
Blair appeared on the Today show this morning and I’ll be sharing highlights from his interview soon. Dan TomlinsonThe deputy treasury secretary became the government’s voice in broadcast studios and had the awkward task of trying to rebut criticism of the party’s most successful election winner. Tomlinson treated Blair with respect and said he agreed with him on some points, but mainly accused Blair of rehashing old debates between Old Labor and New Labor and failing to accept that the world had moved on. He told BBC Breakfast:
According to me [Blair’s] The article was about whether we were New Labor or old Labor; This was a debate in the UK in the 1990s, almost around the time I was born. Things have changed a lot since then.
Tomlinson said on Times Radio that the Old Labor/New Labor divide was “not where it is today”:
If we look at the job market, when Tony Blair was prime minister there was no one working on a zero-hours contract. There are now hundreds of thousands of people struggling with this uncertainty, so yes, we are introducing our employment rights legislation to give people more certainty in their jobs.
There will be more to say about Blair’s article and the reactions to it as the day goes on.
There’s not much in the diary today – parliament is in recess – but we will see Starmer signing a new defense deal with Poland with Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk at a lunchtime event outside London today.
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