Burnham hits back at ‘out of touch’ Blair and blames centrists like him for rise of Farage

Andy Burnham has hit out at Tony Blair, suggesting the former Labor prime minister was clueless and partly responsible for the rise of politicians such as Nigel Farage.

His rebuke came after Sir Tony urged the party not to move further left, saying it was “playing with fire” when it came to the future of the country, and urged it to occupy the “radical centre” instead.

In an interview with the Observer, Mr Burnham, who is campaigning to win a parliamentary by-election to return to Westminster – a prerequisite for challenging Sir Keir Starmer for the top job – criticized the former Prime Minister, who he said “did not once mention inequality”.

“If you don’t understand how this is driving policy right now, if you don’t base your analysis on the fact that people can’t live and things that were taken for granted are no longer affordable, then you don’t understand what’s going on,” he said.

Mr Burnham also insisted it was centrists like Sir Tony who had failed voters and fueled the rise of Mr Farage’s Reform UK.

Mr Burnham said the former party leader “criticized my remarks about 40 years of neoliberalism, but the last 40 years have given us wide inequality, which is responsible for the abandonment of the centre”.

“People don’t feel like the center is serving them in terms of their lives, so they’ve gone to even greater extremes.”

Mr Burnham also attacked what he described as Sir Tony’s “obsession” with universities.

While in office, the former Prime Minister set the famous target of 50 per cent of young people pursuing higher education.

Mr Burnham, who is now mayor of Greater Manchester, said there needed to be greater focus on technical education.

“The prioritization of universities is an important part of the problem that leaves out too many people and impacts the welfare system,” he said.

In his 5,600-word essay on the future of Labor and the country, Sir Tony warned that Labor risked long-term damage to both the party and the country unless the government embarked on a fundamental reset.

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

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

He warned that in the new world order, Britain was “caught between the isolationist tendencies of some on the right and the misguided progressivism of some on the left, which are in danger of coming together to leave Britain stranded on an irrelevant island.”

But in a blow to Wes Streeting, one of Mr Burnham’s potential rivals, who has called for the UK to one day rejoin the European Union, he also warned that the UK was “too weak” to reset its relationship with the EU and could not discuss rejoining until it regained the power it had lost.

This is a developing news story, more below…