Andy Burnham and Wes Streeting have hit back at Sir Tony Blair, accusing him of misunderstanding modern politics in his attack on the Labour government. The former prime minister urged his party not to move to the left and to embrace the “radical centre” in a highly critical 5,700-word essay published on Wednesday.
Sir Tony also warned Labour that they were “playing with fire” over the UK’s future and lacked a “coherent plan”, while urging Labour MPs to avoid a “personality contest” or backing a change at the top without first deciding on its policy direction. However, Mr Burnham and Mr Streeting, who are both potential Labour leadership challengers to Sir Keir Starmer, suggested the former leader had overlooked how inequality is shaping modern politics.
Mr Burnham, who is hoping to win a parliamentary seat at the Makerfield by-election next month, suggested that Sir Tony was out of touch and partly to blame for the rise of politicians like Nigel Farage, while noting that Sir Tony "doesn't mention inequality once" in his essay. Mr Burnham 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.”
The Greater Manchester mayor, who was a junior minister in Sir Tony’s government, added: "The last 40 years has given us wide inequality - that's what's responsible for the abandonment of the centre." Asked if he considered himself to be left wing, Burnham said: "If you want to call it left wing that's fine by me. It's knowing where you need to take a more left solution and where you want to be pro-business. Blairism sometimes saw the market as always the answer. That's its problem."
Former Health Secretary Mr Streeting took a similar view on the essay, arguing the “striking weakness at the heart of Sir Tony Blair’s intervention” is the lack of mention of inequality. Writing in The Guardian, he said: “Across thousands of words about technology, geopolitics and political strategy, the defining issue of our age is barely confronted at all. Inequality - the economic, social and democratic fracture running through modern Britain - is treated as peripheral rather than fundamental.”
In his essay, Sir Tony called on Labour to occupy the “best political space” which he described as “the radical centre”, while warning that Britain was “caught between the isolationist tendency of parts of the right, and the misguided progressivism of parts of the left, which combined are in danger of leaving Britain marooned on an island of irrelevance”. He also criticised Burnham for claiming Britain has been "on the wrong path for 40 years" - a period that includes Sir Tony's 10 years in power, from 1997 to 2007.
