Labour’s war of words has entered its third day. After Tony Blair made a major INTERFERENCE on Wednesday with nearly 6,000 words of warning to the Labor Party, Andy Burnham, Keir Starmer and Wes Streeting have all submitted their versions of a rebuttal. Labour’s “battle of ideas” has certainly begun.
Streeting was first off the blocks, sharing his response to the former prime minister on Guardian on Wednesday evening. Of the three men, Streeting’s politics are closest to Blairism. The former health secretary is a darling of Progress, the think tank founded in 1996 to support Blair’s leadership. Streeting announced his intention to run for the Labor leadership at the group’s conference in the City of London on 18 May.
But although they come from the same Labor tradition, Streeting was deeply critical of Blair in his response. He wrote of a “striking weakness” at the heart of the former leader’s argument: although Blair addressed the challenges posed by changing technology, geopolitics and political strategy, “the defining issue of our age is hardly confronted at all”. Inequality and the cost of living crisis, Streeting argued, were conspicuously absent from Blair’s tirade.
He pushed back against Blair’s argument for the radical centre, reiterating his call for the UK to eventually join the EU and adding that the centre-left “cannot respond to populism simply with managerial competence or technological optimism”.
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Andy Burnham – who characteristically announced his decision to answer Blair at X – followed Streeting with an intervention of his own. In one essay on TimesBurnham hit back at his former cabinet colleague and the record of the government in which the two men served together. “The Labor government in which I was proud to serve did many great things,” Burnham wrote. “However, this did not divert us from the direction set by Thatcher.”
He described Blair’s calls for further deregulation to jump-start the UK economy as “retro thinking” and warned that unless Britain is extricated from its current mess, it risks being locked into “a toxic and divisive US-like politics”.
The Manchester mayor’s decision to hit back at Blair was seen by some of his supporters as a bold move. A Labor source sympathetic to Burnham told me on Wednesday they were worried it could backfire, with resources being devoted to fighting Blair rather than focusing on winning Makerfield. But by responding to his former boss, Burnham has also been given an opportunity to defend — and shape — his platform in public.
About an hour after Burnham’s response was published, Keir Starmer was released his. In a 3,000-word post on Substack, the Prime Minister turned the argument on Tony Blair. “It will come as no surprise to hear that I don’t agree with everything Tony says about Britain or the government,” Starmer wrote. Countering Blair’s analysis, the prime minister acknowledged some of the mistakes his government has made, such as the decision to cut the winter fuel payment. But he added that the economic situation inherited by his government – unlike Blair’s in 1997 – was the worst the country had faced since 1979.
Blair had taken his argument further on today programme, in which he said he did not think “one political party will have the exclusive ability to decide the right answer”. Starmer responded to this on his Substack, predictably insisting that only Labor can fix the problems facing the country. “Britain needs Labor values, has needed Labor values for a while. Our plan is driven by them,” the Prime Minister wrote.
It is generally a good thing that senior Labor politicians are discussing and debating these issues in public. UK – as Tom writes in this week New statesman Covers – has chosen illusion over reality, unable to face the very real decline we are experiencing.
But these arguments should have been aired years ago, when the party was in opposition and had the time and space to do so. Keir Starmer’s Labor Party is now two years into government, staring down the barrel of a leadership contest and, after that, a tooth-and-nail fight against the growing threat of Reform.
Has this long-awaited battle of ideas simply come too late?
(Further reading: A million Neet is a statistic but every Neet is a tragedy)
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