The week that British politics will remember as Labour’s very public therapy session began with Tony Blair publishing what amounted to a brutal report card on Keir Starmer’s government — and ended with the Prime Minister’s presumed successors firing back. Burnham and Streeting accused Blair of ignoring inequality while the former prime minister’s own record was live. Starmer himself hit back, defending his policy decisions and, in the clipped language of a man who would rather be doing other things, insisting his government’s direction was correct. Blair, for his part, has reportedly told allies that Labour is not moving fast enough on economic reform and is too constrained by its trade union base to make the structural changes that would revive growth. The spectacle — a party grandee attacking a sitting prime minister, who is in turn attacked by his own potential replacements — was a gift to the Conservative opposition and an advertisement for Reform UK. Starmer’s position, while not yet existentially threatened, has been measurably weakened by an argument he did not start and cannot fully win.
The received wisdom
The mainstream narrative is sympathetic to Starmer. He inherited a broken economy, a demoralised civil service, and a public exhausted by Conservative chaos. Blair’s intervention, in this reading, is the self-aggrandising gesture of a man who cannot accept that the political and economic conditions of 1997 — a centre-left party facing a discredited and exhausted Tory government in a period of global growth — do not exist in 2025. Blair governed in a moment of fiscal plenty; Starmer is governing through the aftermath of a pandemic, an energy crisis, and a fiscal settlement that leaves almost no room to manoeuvre. The criticism that Labour is too close to trade unions, progressives note, conveniently ignores that those unions were the base from which Starmer built his parliamentary majority. And Burnham’s and Streeting’s counter-attacks are simply honest: Blair’s inequality record is genuinely mixed — growth was shared unevenly, and the housing crisis whose roots lie in his governments has compounded ever since.
A different read
All of that is true, and yet something important is being missed.
Blair’s critique, stripped of whatever personal animus attaches to it, contains a substantive challenge that deserves engagement rather than dismissal. Labour’s first two years in government have been characterised — even by sympathetic commentators — by a series of strategic missteps: an immediate inheritance tax on farms that alienated a key rural constituency, a welfare reform agenda that has generated extraordinary internal opposition, and a fiscal posture so constrained by self-imposed rules that the government has been functionally unable to use borrowing to invest. The result is a party that promised change and has delivered, in the eyes of many voters, a slower version of the same. Reform UK’s extraordinary electoral surge earlier this month — the Makerfield by-election now becomes a test case of this — is not a Tory problem; it is Labour’s problem, a haemorrhage of working-class voters to a party that at least performs the aesthetic of action.
The Burnham-Streeting counterpunch is revealing in a different way. Burnham and Streeting are smart politicians who understand the game they are playing. By publicly contradicting Blair, they are not primarily defending Starmer — they are positioning themselves as the authentic voices of a post-Blair Labour settlement, untainted by Iraq and the compromises of the neoliberal era. This is politically rational. But it also means the Labour succession debate is happening in public, in a way that undermines the sitting leader’s authority, at a moment when he has not yet recovered from the gilt yield crisis, the welfare rebellion, and a set of polling numbers that suggest the public’s patience is thinner than many inside the party acknowledge.
There is a deeper structural problem here that neither Blair nor Burnham nor Starmer has squarely addressed: British growth has been anaemic for two decades, and no faction of the Labour Party has a convincing programme for reversing it. Blair’s growth came from financial services deregulation and public spending fuelled by the proceeds; that model is exhausted. Burnham’s Northern English political economy is attractive but limited in scale. Streeting’s NHS reform agenda is real but narrow. What Labour lacks is a compelling story about what the British economy is actually for in 2026, and who it is supposed to serve. Blair was right to raise the question even if his timing and framing were self-serving. The fact that it triggered a leadership therapy session rather than a policy debate is the most depressing thing about the whole episode.
What to watch
- Makerfield by-election: A true test of Labour’s hold on its working-class base. A strong Reform performance would lend credibility to Blair’s critique and accelerate the succession conversation.
- Streeting’s NHS reform timeline: If his agenda stalls due to union opposition, it validates Blair’s analysis even as Streeting refutes the messenger.
- Scottish Parliament independence vote: Holyrood endorsed a call for an independence referendum this week — another front Starmer must manage with a party divided on constitution.
- Gilt yields: Energy bills are set to rise as the Iran war’s costs ripple through energy markets. If yields spike again, Starmer’s fiscal constraints become even tighter, and the argument from Blair will gain force.
— J