{"id":606514,"date":"2026-05-27T11:46:09","date_gmt":"2026-05-27T11:46:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/606514\/"},"modified":"2026-05-27T11:46:09","modified_gmt":"2026-05-27T11:46:09","slug":"labour-must-put-policy-first-politics-second-tony-blair-says-tony-blair","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/606514\/","title":{"rendered":"Labour must put policy first, politics second, Tony Blair says | Tony Blair"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tony Blair has continued his attack on the Labour government, saying it should be about \u201cpolicy first, politics second\u201d.<\/p>\n

Hours after he published a scathing essay<\/a> in which he warned that the party\u2019s \u201calmost infinite capacity for self-delusion\u201d meant it was likely to lose the next election, the former prime minister said it should \u201ctake a step back, analyse the world\u201d.<\/p>\n

On Keir Starmer<\/a> and his would-be successors Andy Burnham and Wes Streeting, he urged Labour MPs to \u201cforce people to say where they stand\u201d before getting behind a change in leader.<\/p>\n

In his 5,700-word essay<\/a>, published on Tuesday night, Blair argued for the government to crack down on welfare spending, abandon restrictions on oil and gas, embrace the technology and artificial intelligence revolution and smooth relations with Donald Trump.<\/p>\n

He told BBC Radio 4\u2019s Today programme on Wednesday: \u201cIf you don\u2019t decide what your policy direction is, there\u2019s no point in changing the leader. And so the whole essence of the essay is to say it should be policy first, politics second.\u201d<\/p>\n

While he wanted to see Burnham win the Makerfield byelection and return to parliament, on the leadership he urged MPs: \u201cChoose your direction first and make sure that before you have any leadership change, you make all the candidates set out in detail their policy, what the government\u2019s got right, what it\u2019s got wrong, what we should do differently.\u201d<\/p>\n

Blair said the AI revolution was the 21st-century equivalent of the Industrial Revolution and was going to change \u201cabsolutely everything\u201d. Yet \u201cit\u2019s not even part of the debate\u201d, he said.<\/p>\n

He added: \u201cYou can have a different personality occupying Number 10, but unless you have a policy agenda, which makes sense of the way the world\u2019s changing, then you\u2019re not going to be any further forward as a country. And you\u2019ll find the country keeps shuffling the deck with prime ministers.\u201d<\/p>\n

Blair said Labour<\/a> won the last election on an anti-Conservative vote. Labour was an \u201cacceptable alternative\u201d. He said Labour commitments \u201cmay be proper commitments in easy times, but in these hard times, we\u2019ve got to prioritise growth. We\u2019ve got to prioritise support for the business sector, and this artificial intelligence revolution, we\u2019ve got to grasp it, both its opportunities and its risks, with both hands.\u201d<\/p>\n

He said the country was in danger of spending more on incapacity disability benefits than on defence.<\/p>\n

When asked whether what he argued for was more aligned with the proposals of Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative leader, he said: \u201cI\u2019m not asking the question about \u2026 is it Tory? Is it Reform? Is it the Greens? Is it Labour? I\u2019m just saying: OK, take a step back, analyse the world \u2013 where do we go?\u201d<\/p>\n

He added: \u201cI don\u2019t really care whether it\u2019s left or right in a traditional sense.\u201d He continued: \u201cI\u2019m not tribal in the sense that I think one political party is going to have the exclusive capability of deciding the right answer.\u201d<\/p>\n

On populism, he said: \u201cWhat I\u2019m saying, discussing the radical centre, which is where I think the best politics come from, is that\u2019s got to be radical. The centre\u2019s not going to be the place of managing the status quo. It\u2019s got be the place of making big change, but it\u2019s based on policy first, politics second.\u201d<\/p>\n

Blair\u2019s intervention was not universally welcomed by the Labour leadership or its MPs. The York Central MP Rachael Maskell described its timing as \u201cincredibly unhelpful\u201d due to three parliamentary byelections next month.<\/p>\n

\u201cTony Blair won an election nearly three decades ago and it seems he\u2019s continuing the argument from back then rather than looking at the situation today,\u201d Maskell said.<\/p>\n

The Treasury minister Dan Tomlinson said \u201cthings have moved on\u201d since Blair\u2019s government. \u201cI think his essay was about whether we\u2019re New Labour or old Labour \u2013 that was a debate that was happening in the 1990s in the UK, which was pretty much around the time I was born. Things have moved on a lot since then,\u201d he told BBC Breakfast.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis government is taking the big steps, actually some of the steps that the Tony Blair government didn\u2019t take, for example to reform our planning system, so that we can have more homes built in the UK, so we can provide more certainty and stability for young people, living with mum and dad till their 30s like I did, to be able to save up and buy a home of their own.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tony Blair has continued his attack on the Labour government, saying it should be about \u201cpolicy first, politics…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":606515,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-606514","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/606514","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=606514"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/606514\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/606515"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=606514"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=606514"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=606514"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}