Andy Burnham has hit back at Sir Tony Blair, accusing him of failing to understand modern politics, after the former prime minister launched a scathing attack on Labour’s policy agenda. The ex-Labour leader called for his party to champion the ‘radical centre’, warning it is ‘playing with fire’ over the UK’s future and lacks a ‘coherent plan’.
In a highly critical 5,700-word essay published on Wednesday, Sir Tony also urged Labour MPs to avoid a ‘personality contest’ or backing a change at the top without first deciding on its policy direction. Mr Burnham, who is widely expected to launch a bid for the Labour leadership if he wins next month’s Makerfield by-election, criticised the essay for not mentioning inequality.
He told the Observer: ‘If you don’t get how that’s driving politics now, if you are not rooting your analysis in the fact that people are unable to live and that things that were taken for granted are no longer affordable, then you are not understanding what’s going on.’ He added: ‘People don’t think the centre has delivered for them in terms of their lives, therefore, they’ve gone further to the extremes.’
The Greater Manchester mayor, who served in Sir Tony’s government, said the problem with Blairism is it ‘sometimes saw the market as always the answer’. Sir Tony also called on Sir Keir Starmer to rip up Energy Secretary Ed Miliband’s net zero targets and reduce the welfare budget, which he said risks outpacing defence spending by the end of the decade.
The former prime minister said if large increases in incapacity benefit along with the triple lock continue, ‘we’re going to create a situation where economically we’re not able to grow’. He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that ‘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’.
A curb on the triple lock was rejected by Treasury ministers, with Dan Tomlinson insisting increases to the state pension are sustainable long-term. His Treasury colleague Torsten Bell claimed the reality of Britain and its politics in the 2020s was not dealt with in the essay. Sir Tony told Times Radio he does not understand the logic of choosing 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’.
In a post on the BlueSky social network, Mr Bell said he was wrong about the Government’s net zero plans. He also said calls to increase VAT were incorrect during the cost-of-living crisis and that the essay did not understand why taxes had risen. Mr Bell said: ‘The challenge for the essay is that it doesn’t have a project that remotely fits the time and place we are living in. Saying “AI” is not the same as having a plan for Britain.’
Speaking to broadcasters on Wednesday morning, Mr Tomlinson conceded the Government needs to make sure it is not spending ‘more money than we need to’ on social security payments, ‘particularly’ for young people who have been out of work for a long time. But he said it is ‘important we have the triple lock and that we increase spending on pensioners’. Asked whether the triple lock is sustainable in the long term, he said: ‘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.’
He also disputed Sir Tony’s framing of Labour’s challenges, saying the party is not ‘stuck in this New Labour, old Labour battle, which (Sir Tony) talks about a lot in his essay’. ‘That was a debate that was happening in the 1990s in the UK, which was pretty much around the time I was born,’ Mr Tomlinson told BBC Breakfast. ‘Things have moved on a lot since then.’
