Tony Blair published a 5,700-word essay on Tuesday attacking Keir Starmer’s government for lacking a “coherent plan for the country” and introducing policies that have actively held back British business. The BBC reported that Blair criticised new workers’ rights laws, the phasing out of the British oil and gas industry, and the above-inflation minimum wage uplift — arguing these had given “headwinds not tailwinds” to the economy. He also attacked the National Insurance increase for employers and what he described as a budget that appeared to raise taxes to fund welfare spending, at a time when the public already believed welfare bills were too high. The Guardian reported that Blair called on the government to crack down on welfare spending, abandon restrictions on oil and gas production, and smooth relations with Donald Trump — while simultaneously warning Labour against forcing Starmer out without first having a policy debate. The essay lands as Starmer faces what is widely described as a formal leadership challenge, having lost five ministers to resignation and suffered what political commentators have called a catastrophic local election result. Andy Burnham and Wes Streeting — now resigned from Cabinet — are the presumed frontrunners to succeed him.
The received wisdom
Labour members and the party’s left will receive Blair’s intervention with the mixture of contempt and anxiety that has characterised their relationship with him for twenty years. The contempt is predictable: Blair is the man who took Britain into the Iraq War, who spent his post-premiership advising authoritarian governments and accumulating wealth through consultancy, and who has never faced democratic accountability for any of it. His calls to get closer to Trump and abandon climate commitments will strike most Labour activists as precisely the wrong lesson from an international moment when Trump’s erratic trade and foreign policy has alienated America’s traditional allies. The argument that Burnham and Streeting are pulling Labour away from the centre is particularly hard to sustain for Burnham, whose platform is essentially social democratic rather than radical, and for Streeting, who has consistently positioned himself as the candidate the Blairites should like but has declined to accept the label.
Furthermore, Blair’s timing is constitutionally unusual — former prime ministers of the same party rarely offer publicly devastating critiques of a sitting leader of their own party, particularly during a period of acute political vulnerability. There is a reasonable argument that whatever its policy merits, the essay does more damage than good precisely because of when it arrived.
A different read
That said, Blair’s core diagnosis is awkward to dismiss. The structural problem he identifies — that Labour won a historically large Commons majority in 2024 on a historically low vote share, because the opposition was fragmented rather than because the country was enthusiastic about a left turn — has not been made to disappear by the passage of time. A government that mistakes a negative mandate (voters rejecting the Tories) for a positive one (voters endorsing its programme) tends to overreach on policy and underperform on politics. The evidence that this is what happened to Starmer is not thin.
The specific policy critiques deserve to be engaged with rather than attributed to personal motive. The employer National Insurance increase was, by the assessment of the Office for Budget Responsibility as well as several major business bodies, a drag on hiring at the margin. The workers’ rights legislation — the Employment Rights Bill — expanded employment protections substantially and rapidly in a manner that the CBI and British Chambers of Commerce argued would deter small and medium enterprise investment. These are not invented grievances. They are the real-world feedback from the portion of the electorate whose economic behaviour affects growth rates. Whether or not one agrees with Blair’s prescriptions, the evidence that these policies reduced business confidence is not negligible.
There is also something important in Blair’s distinction between a leadership change and a policy debate. The Labour Party is currently having the former without the latter. Burnham and Streeting are competing as personalities and representing factions, but neither has articulated a programmatic alternative to what Starmer has done. The leadership contest, if one materialises, risks becoming a referendum on vibes rather than a genuine reckoning with why Labour’s policies produced the economic and political results that they did. Blair’s point — that you need the policy debate first — is structurally correct even if his preferred policies are contestable.
The harder question is whether New Labour’s 1990s formula is exportable to 2026. The economy Blair managed was growing; Britain’s relationship with the US and Europe was stable; the geopolitical environment was permissive. None of those things is true now. Telling a Labour Party to “get closer to Trump” while governing in the aftermath of an Iran war that has pushed up energy bills and rattled global supply chains is somewhat different from the managed triangulation of the Clinton-Blair era. Blair’s analysis may correctly diagnose the patient’s symptoms while prescribing medicine formulated for a different disease.
What to watch
- Whether Burnham formally enters the Commons through the Makerfield by-election, giving the succession contest a timetable
- Starmer’s response to Blair — specifically whether Downing Street continues to refuse comment, or whether a more direct rebuttal emerges from senior Cabinet ministers
- The policy platform that emerges from would-be successors: do they engage with Blair’s substantive critique or simply reject him as a figure?
- Labour polling following the essay — whether Blair’s intervention moves opinion among the electorate as opposed to inside Westminster
— J