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Tony Blair: Labour will not win if it steps away from centre ground Blair urges Labour not to wrap itself in a Jeremy Corbyn comfort blanket
(about 2 hours later)
Tony Blair has issued his most impassioned appeal for Labour not to repeat the mistakes of the 1980s by adopting a traditional leftist platform, saying the party could suffer four successive election defeats if it does so.
In his first intervention in the Labour leadership election, the former prime minister said a shift to the left after the party’s crushing general election defeat would be to treat voters as if they were stupid.
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Labour is heading for four election defeats if it continues to believe it can win by stepping away from the centre and offering old-school tax-and-spend policies, Tony Blair has said. Blair urged Labour members not to wrap themselves in a Jeremy Corbyn comfort blanket, saying that people whose heart was with the leftwing candidate should “get a transplant”.
He described the Labour campaign in this year’s election as old-fashioned enough to be from Star Trek and argued that shifting the party further to the left would just lengthen the period before Labour could win again. He added: “We lost in 2010 because we stepped somewhat from that modernising platform. We lost in 2015 with an election out of the playback from the 1980s, from the period of Star Trek, when we stepped even further away from it and lost even worse. I don’t understand the logic of stepping entirely away from it.”
Blair said those who said their hearts are with the leftwing candidate Jeremy Corbyn should “get a transplant”. His comments, to the centre-left Progress thinktank, came as the first public opinion poll in the Labour leadership contest suggested Corbyn was on course for a shock victory. Polls of political party electorates are known to be hard to gather a reliable sample size.
The former prime minister was speaking on the day that an opinion poll by YouGov showed that Corbyn was likely to win the party’s leadership election by a margin of six points in the final round. Blair described the veteran backbencher as the “Tory preference” and said the party could not regain power if it was simply a “platform for protest” against cuts.
Corbyn delivered his first major economic speech in the hours after Blair spoke and pledged a progressive tax system in which the rich pay more. Corbyn dismissed claims that he would split the party and hit back at Blair’s suggestion that he was the Tory preference.
He said that if elected prime minister in 2020 would also clamp down on corporate tax avoidance and use up to £93bn corporate tax reliefs to create a national investment bank. “I would have thought he could manage something more serious than those very silly remarks,” he said. “Surely we should be talking about the situation facing Britain today, the situation facing many of the poorest people in this country today, and maybe think if our policies are relevant.”
“Growth and higher wages must be key to bringing down the deficit,” he said. He added Blair had a problem until the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war is published. Corbyn believes the war was illegal.
“If there are tough choices, we will always protect public services and support for the most vulnerable. Instead we will ask those who have been fortunate to contribute a little more.” In a keynote speech setting out his economic policy, Corbyn said austerity was a “political choice not an economic necessity”. He said he wanted to see quantitive easing – a form of printing money to create bonds to fund infrastructure projects. He also called or a return to progressive taxation and a clampdown on business tax evasion.
Blair said he had no personal resentment of Corbyn but said his ideas took Labour away from the centre ground, and the prospect of government.
“It is not about the individual; it is about the platform,” Blair said.
He could see no logic in the party responding to defeat in successive elections by moving ever further from the centre and back to the tax-and-spend policies of the 1980s.
Blair said Labour “congenitally confuses values with the manner of their application”, which led it to “mistake defending outdated policy with defending timeless values”.
He said the most debilitating aspect of the current Labour debate was to think that “this is a choice not only between government and opposition but between heart and head between the pursuit of power and purity of principle”.
He added: “I would not win on an old-fashioned leftist platform. Even if I thought it was a route to victory, I would not take it. The speed of change requires new thinking. And 2015 is not 2007 or 1997. So yes, move on – but do not move back.”
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In call to supporters in the party to fight the left, he said: “’Unity’ does not work if you’re all together in the bus going over the edge of the cliff.” Blair warned the party could not win on an “old- fashioned leftist platform”. He compared the situation Labour found itself in following its 7 May election defeat with the position it faced in the 1980s, when the party swung to the left under Michael Foot, paving the way for 18 years of Conservative rule.
Blair said the new leader should promise to do root-and-branch rethinking and warned that if the party moved back to the left, the public “will not vote for us – not because our thoughts are too pure but because they are too out of touch with the world they live in”. “After the 1979 election the Labour party persuaded itself of something absolutely extraordinary,” Blair said. “Jim Callaghan had been prime minister and the Labour party was put out of power by Margaret Thatcher and the Labour party persuaded itself that the reason why the country had voted for Margaret Thatcher was because they wanted a really leftwing Labour party.
He warned that it was not enough for Labour to be a “platform for protest” against cuts and said it had to develop a credible strategy for government if it wanted to regain power. “This is what I call the theory that the electorate is stupid, that somehow they haven’t noticed that Margaret Thatcher was somewhat to the right of Jim Callaghan.”
“In the next few years there are some very tough things happening in public services, in welfare. People are going to feel very angry, very disenfranchised, very dispirited,” he said. Blair said he would not be endorsing any candidate in the race as he had not done so in 2010. He also said he doubted if his endorsement would help.
“It is easy and enormously tempting for the Labour party in those circumstances to just to become a platform for that protest. But we know what happens when that happens.
“If you don’t fashion a credible platform for government and not merely a strategy for opposition, then, yes, over the course of the parliament you will go up in the polls, the government becomes unpopular: but then you come back to choice, and if people don’t think you’ve got a credible platform for government, they don’t like you.” A poll by YouGov for The Times found Corbyn was the first preference for 43% of party supporters – way ahead of bookies’ favourite Andy Burnham on 26%. The shadow home secretary, Yvette Cooper, was on 20% and Liz Kendall on 11%.
The poll said that when Kendall and Cooper were eliminated and their second preferences redistributed under the preferential vote system, Corbyn would beat Burnham by 53% to 47% in the final round.
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Blair insisted he was motivated, not depressed, by the current state of Labour and said he believed the party could win the 2020 general election “if our comfort zone is the future and our values are our guide and not our distraction.” Corbyn’s success led Margaret Beckett, one of the senior MPs that put Corbyn on the ballot paper, to admit she had made a mistake.
Asked to set out his views of the party’s former leader, Ed Miliband, Blair said he had “great admiration for his resilience under attack and the way he stuck to his guns in the election”. The shadow education secretary, Tristram Hunt, warned that Labour could be reduced to a “pressure group” that would not have “broad reach into all parts of the United Kingdom”.
But he added that Miliband thought the centre had shifted left and: “I don’t think the centre shifts in that way. It’s a disagreement. It is familiar where it ends up.” Lord Hattersley, the former Labour deputy leader, dismissed the poll as a 24-hour sensation and said Corbyn had no chance of winning the leadership.
In the 2015 election the public may have voted Tory out of fear, he said, “but we have to understand what their fears were”. John McTernan, a former special adviser to Blair in Downing Street, said those Labour MPs who had “lent” their nominations to Corbyn to broaden the debate, had behaved like “morons”.
Blair said Labour had “not got what the modern world was about”. Insisting he was Labour through and through, he added: “Anyone who fought the 1983 Labour campaign is Labour through and through.” Blair also called for the party to take up a tougher stance combating Scottish nationalism. “You have to take the ideology of nationalism head on,” he said. “Nationalism is not a phenomenon when they talk about a new politics, it is the oldest politics in the world. It is the politics of the first caveman council where the caveman came out from the council where there had been difficult decisions and pointed with his club across the forest and said: ‘There, over there. they are the problem.’ It’s blame someone else. However you dress it up it is a reactionary political philosophy.”
He added: “I personally don’t think we will win by saying we are more Scottish or by engaging in this ridiculous thing where a lot of power in Brussels is fine but power in London is absolutely terrible.”
He continued: “The SNP have achieved this remarkable feat, they are a government that is allowed to behave like an opposition.”