Thursday, May 28, 2026
Things kick off in the Labour Party
The paper says that Burnham's rebuke comes after Sir Tony warned that Labour was “playing with fire” on the future of the country, as he urged the party not to move further to the left, saying it should instead occupy the “radical centre”:
In an interview with the Observer, Mr Burnham, who is fighting to win a parliamentary by-election to return to Westminster, a prerequisite for challenging Sir Keir Starmer for the top job, criticised the former PM, who he said did not “mention inequality once”.
“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,” he said.
Mr Burnham also insisted it was centrists, like Sir Tony, who had failed voters and fuelled the rise of Mr Farage’s Reform UK.
The Greater Manchester mayor said his former party leader “criticises my phrase about 40 years of neoliberalism but 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,” he added.
Mr Burnham also attacked what he described as Sir Tony’s “obsession” with universities.
When he was in office the ex-PM famously set a target for 50 per cent of young people to go on to higher education. Mr Burnham said there should be a greater focus on technical education, such as apprenticeships.
“The prioritisation of universities is a significant part of the problem that has left out too many people and has impacted on the welfare system,” he said.
Sir Tony’s scathing attack on Labour, in the form of a 5,600 essay, said the party had no clear plan for the future and warned it risked doing long-term damage to both itself and the country unless the government underwent a fundamental reset.
In a damning indictment of nearly two years of a Starmer government, he said: “We don’t have a worked-out, coherent plan for the country in a fast-changing world, and are in the wrong political position from which to devise one and win a second term.”
But he warned trying to force the prime minister out without a clear policy direction “is not a serious way of conducting ourselves”.
He called on Labour to occupy the “best political space” which he described as “the radical centre”.
As unwelcome as Tony Blair's intervention may be to those within Labour, I think John Crace in the Guardian sums it up best in his parody version:
I led the Labour party for 13 years and won three general elections. Never forget that. No other Labour politician has done that. And if I play my cards right, no other Labour politician ever will. Right now, the Labour party is in the grip of self-delusion. Which makes me the perfect person to critique it. Because no one is more self-deluded than me. ‘Tis very heaven to imagine you are being constructive when your real goal is to switch off the life support.
A 7,500 word essay from Tony Blair on the future of the UK should be nobody's idea of what we need right now.
