Politics

Five lessons for Labour from Tony Blair

The former Prime Minister believes Labour's latest defeat has vindicated his centrist position

July 22, 2015
Tony Blair: has Labour's defeat vindicated him? © Ian Gavan/PA Wire/Press Association Images
Tony Blair: has Labour's defeat vindicated him? © Ian Gavan/PA Wire/Press Association Images
If Tony Blair was, as Roy Jenkins put it, someone who "climbed up the building from the outside" to win the Labour leadership, then today he touched back down on a rooftop helipad to dispense some advice to his party. Speaking to the centre-left pressure group Progress, he gave his thoughts on what Labour needs to do to win the next election and to develop a credible programme for government. 

Here are his five key points:

It isn't all about winning. It's fashionable to argue that Labour should adopt a centre-left position in the coming five years mainly because this is more likely to get them elected. But Blair rejected the characterisation of Labour's leadership debate as "a choice... between heart and head." “I wouldn't want to win on an old fashioned leftist platform. Even if I thought it was the route to victory, I wouldn't take it,” he said. Instead, he said that Labour should be thinking about how to apply its values in the modern world: his reformist achievements on schools, the NHS and crime "weren't a betrayal of principle but an application of principle.”

There's hope for 2020. While he was more critical of Miliband than he allowed himself to be before the election, Blair was—seemingly genuinely—positive about the party's prospects. He said that "the values of our age are essentially those fashioned by social democracy," and that Labour could win the next election "but only if our comfort zone is the future, and our values are a guide not a distraction."

Don't kowtow to Holyrood. Asked about the SNP, Blair said that Labour needs to tackle nationalism head on: he called it "the oldest politics in the world... the politics of the caveman council." Labour needed to develop an alternative offer, not try and become more Scottish, he said. He also said that Labour needed to better challenge the SNP on its record. Referring to John Mcdermott's Prospect essay on their time in government in Scotland, he said the party is "a government that's allowed to behave like an opposition." "I think the Labour party is the only party that is capable... of reuniting the UK," he added.

Avoid the race to the bottom. Asked about the rise of Ukip, he said that disadvantaged people in seaside towns would be helped by better education and services, not by the arrival of fewer "Polish people." "I completely get that you need order and rules," he said, pointing to his support for identity cards as a measure to control immigration, "but you don't need prejudice." He suggested that Labour's attempts to tack to the right on immigration for tactical reasons were at odds with its open, compassionate strategic position, and were part of the reason the public didn't understand what it stood for.

Labour needs to hurry up and realise he's right. Never a man plagued by doubts, Blair is completely convinced that the 2015 defeat has vindicated his basic position; that Labour wins when it moves toward the centre. "To say let's go a bit further left... that's obviously not correct," he said. “We've got a history so let's learn from it, If we can shorten that process, then let's shorten it.” He said Labour gives too much attention to the issue of party unity: "Unity does not work if you're all together in the bus going off the edge of the cliff." As for those in the #Jezwecan brigade, he had a rebuke: "people who say their heart is with Corbyn, get a transplant."