Wes Streeting and Andy Burnham unite to criticise Tony Blair

While Wes Streeting and Andy Burnham may well sit on opposite wings of the Labour Party, the pair found common ground in criticising former Labour leader Tony Blair after he attacked the current direction of the Labour Party.

Blair, who served as prime minister from 1997 to 2007, winning three general elections, wrote a highly critical essay of the current direction of the Labour Party, saying that it had ‘no coherent plan’ for the country and had also introduced policies that held back businesses.

He criticised measures including new workers’ rights laws, the phasing out of the British oil and gas industry and the above-inflation uplift to the minimum wage.

Amid talk of a leadership challenge to Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Blair warned that changing the Prime Minister was irrelevant if it doesn’t start with a policy debate.

“Trying to force the prime minister out, before we know what policy direction we’re bringing in, is not a serious way of conducting ourselves”, he said.

He also criticised Burnham and his fellow leadership contender Wes for ideas on tax and spending that he said had been rejected by serious governments. He said it was a “perennial delusion” that the party should move left while losing seats to the right, saying it was “dangerous to do it in government”.

Blair added: “Wes Streeting is a huge political talent and Andy Burnham was an outstanding member of my government.

“But this leadership debate has an extraordinarily retro 20th-century feel to it. Like most politicians, they’re anxious to distance themselves from the ‘Westminster bubble’.”

He also said: “Governments which succeed don’t start with a personality contest” and called for the government to remove parts of the net-zero agenda “which prioritise clean energy over cheaper energy”.

In stark contrast to the position taken by Starmer, Blair also called on the government to maintain its close ties with Donald Trump’s America even when it’s “difficult or unpopular”.

Reacting to Blair’s essay, both Streeting and Burnham criticised the former Labour leader for failing to engage with rising levels of inequality.

In an article for the Guardian, Streeting said that in Blair’s essay, “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.

“But inequality, rather than being incidental to the crises reshaping western democracies, is actually their cause.”

Streeting also took issue with Blair’s call for the UK to cosy up to Trump, saying: “When US presidents flirt with authoritarian leaders, undermine international law or pursue reckless military adventurism, Britain must have the confidence to act independently. We learned at terrible cost in Iraq what happens when loyalty replaces judgment.”

Burnham, the Mayor of Greater Manchester, also hit out at Blair for failing to set out how to deal with inequality.

He told the Observer: “The last 40 years has given us wide inequality – that’s what’s responsible for the abandonment of the centre.

“People don’t think the centre has delivered for them in terms of their lives, therefore they’ve gone further to the extremes.”