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The News Agents' Jon Sopel and Shelagh Fogerty analyse Tony Blair's 5000 word attack on Keir Starmer's Labour. Sir Tony Blair has warned Labour against forcing out the prime minister without having a proper policy agenda to follow him. The former PM also said Labour is “lacking a project” and was “playing with the future of the country”. Having recently interviewed Tony Blair, Jon Sopel weighs in on why the ex-Labour leader chose to launch this criticism of the government at this time. Sopel calls it a 'cry from the heart', but also suggests the attack sounds Kemi Badenoch-esque... Listen to the full show on the all-new LBC App: https://app.af.lbc.co.uk/btnc/thenewlbcapp #shelaghfogarty #jonsopel #ukpolitics #tonyblair #keirstarmer #labour #LBC LBC is the home of live debate around news and current affairs in the UK. Join in the conversation and listen at https://www.lbc.co.uk/ Sign up to LBC’s weekly newsletter here: https://l-bc.co/signup
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0:00
I feel really anxious that we are continuing to slide towards relegation, as I say in the essay
0:07
relegation from the Premier League of Nations. And we've got to halt that. And we can only halt it
0:11
by starting by understanding how the world's changing and where Britain fits in that, both in
0:17
terms of its foreign policy and its domestic policy. We're living through the 21st century
0:22
equivalent of the 19th century industrial revolution. It's going to change absolutely
0:26
everything and we're not prepared as a country to shape ourselves in response to that change
0:32
And if we don't, we're going to continue our slide. What is so striking about the argument
0:38
that you're making now is that it is the preparedness of the party that you once led
0:45
where you were once prime minister, where you're absolutely scathing. The Labour Party is playing
0:49
with fire or more accurately with its future and that of the country. What does that mean by playing
0:55
with fire? Well, the Labour Party was elected to govern in part in response to all the instability
1:03
of the Conservative years. We're not even two years into the government, we're already thinking
1:07
of changing the Prime Minister. And we're thinking of doing so in very much the similar way that the
1:12
Tories did. It's like shuffling the cards. You take one Prime Minister, you throw them out
1:17
you get another Prime Minister, you throw them out. We can't carry on like that. And so what I'm
1:21
saying to the Labour Party is, first of all, you've got to work out what the direction of the
1:25
countries that you want. And then you could debate who should be leader. What's happening
1:30
at the moment is the absence of a real policy debate. And so far, the contributions of
1:36
you know, and I praise Andy Burnham and West Street, indeed, I praise Keir. You know, look
1:41
these are people, I understand that they're good people, they're trying to do their best
1:46
But there's no point in deciding on the basis of personality who leads the country
1:51
unless you understand what's our project for governing, what's our purpose, in governing. And you end by saying with a question, which is, we need a fundamental change
2:00
in our politics and that we've done it before, but will we be able to do it again? Do you think
2:05
there is a cat's chance in hell that is going to happen? Yeah, I think there's a chance because I
2:11
think... A big chance? I don't know. I mean, the reason I put it as a question is because I can't
2:19
be sure. And I'm, you know, recently I've been quite pessimistic. But yes, I mean, this is still
2:27
a country with smart people. It's still got enormous strengths, for example, in this technology
2:31
revolution. I mean, the irony is we could be one of the leading players in it. So yeah, we can do
2:37
this. But the reason I did the essay was we're only going to do it if we have an honest debate
2:43
with ourselves about what's gone wrong and how we put it right. John, I don't know about you
2:46
but I got a few feelings while I was reading this. I thought, what's the overarching thing going on here
2:51
And I was reminded of, you know, in-laws that don't want to interfere too much
2:56
but they see their grandchild being raised by incompetence and weighed in at speed and say
3:00
right, enough of me staying quiet. Pull yourselves together. There's something of that in it, isn't there
3:06
I thought your characterisation at the top of the show was absolutely spot on
3:11
I think it was a cry from the heart. I think it was desperate
3:15
I asked him, was he at his wits end? And he just paused. You could see he wanted to say
3:23
yeah, totally. And I think that is the sort of sense of it, that he thinks that everyone
3:28
is obsessed by politics and no one is thinking about policy. And all that people are doing is
3:36
can Keir survive? Will Andy Burnham take over? Will West Streeting compete? What about Angela
3:41
and so it goes on and Blair is you know what was so unusual about this is that normally
3:47
what you get from a former party leader is him deciding to put his hand on the shoulder of a preferred candidate this wasn any of that he was saying you all mad Stop it Why don you just try and work out where you going and then you have a better idea of how
4:07
to get there. And actually changing the leader, unless you answer some of these fundamental
4:11
questions. Now, look, I think there is a lot of Labour people will say, hang on a minute
4:18
It's not that Keir Starmer doesn't have a direction. It's just that you don't like the
4:22
direction in which he's traveling and in this interview I mean for example he is absolutely
4:28
scathing about Ed Miliband's net zero policies and said it was quixotic fantasy that Britain was
4:37
going to lead the world in kind of renewables when we account for less than one percent of
4:43
the energy being you know and he said you know Xi Jinping doesn't give a care damn what Ed
4:48
Miliband is saying. And I think there was just kind of, it was like he had two very big buckets
4:54
of ice cold water, and he wanted to hurl them at Labour politicians, you know, wherever they may be
5:04
I also thought one other thing, Sheila, which I thought was interesting, he talked about
5:08
some of the mad policies that he, in his mind, mad policies that Labour had introduced
5:13
that I can, you know, employee rights from day one, you know, above inflation increase to the minimum wage
5:22
the net zero policies, and on and on and on. And he just kind of, you know
5:27
I think any of those critiques could have come from Kemmy Baden-Ock
5:32
So there's an element in which I think an awful lot of Labour people will say, well, hang on, who is Blair mixing with these things
5:37
Does he care about the working people? Does he care about the people that are fed up
5:42
And has he really got it? Now, his answer would be, yeah, look, I'm talking to business leaders around the country
5:47
And if you want to get growth back into the UK, this is what you need to do
5:51
You're right to say that he didn't anoint any particular leader because clearly his messages don't bother with this leadership
5:57
Get some ideas in your heads before you worry about who the personality is. But I thought the way he said in the section we played when he said, well, I praised Keir and Streeting and Burnham
6:08
Well, the way he did struck me as interesting. They were various, weren't they, these compliments
6:13
For Keir Starmer, he just got credit to Keir in brackets, which isn't a massive, it's not an A double star, is it
6:21
Where Streeting did get a proper compliment, he's a huge political talent
6:25
And in the next, he said, in the next breath, he describes Burnham in a way that I think can only be summed up, in my mind anyway, as a kind of excellent lieutenant, but not a leader
6:35
Well, I think he's also furious that Burnham talked about what has the last 40 years of neoliberalism done for us
6:45
And Blair, you know, kind of you can feel he's spitting about that saying, what on earth are you talking about, Andy Burnham
6:51
You know, what did we do? We introduced the minimum wage. We interviewed workers' rights
6:56
You know, we doubled spending on the National Health Service when Labour was a government and you were a member of that government
7:01
So I think that he took ill to the way Burnham has framed it
7:06
I just think he feels that, oh, it's a circus and that Labour isn't thinking about the challenges of AI, of economic growth and what you need to do to get that back again
7:19
And it was a cry from the heart. And look, the other thing that's striking is, you know, Sheila, for you and I, who've been doing journalism probably for far too long
7:28
we remembered when Tony Blair was absolutely ubiquitous and that you couldn't turn on a TV or a radio show without hearing Tony Blair replying on this or that
7:37
For the last two years, he has been totally below radar. He has wanted to keep out of it
7:44
He hasn't wanted to intervene. and you just feel, and I think you characterised it
7:49
brilliantly at the top of the show, where you said look he just felt desperate and it was heartfelt And I think it is I mean look like him dislike him but in that rare thing of Labour he is an election winner He has won three consecutive
8:04
general elections and no other Labour leader has come close to a record like that
8:10
And he again, in code, alludes to that, doesn't he, when he says, are we really going to ignore
8:15
the lessons of the 15 or so years in power that we did, you know, the second term in office
8:21
the third term in office, that we slash I did manage to get, because he was a key part of that
8:26
of course he was, his leadership. He was absolutely a key part of it. And there's another bit
8:31
in the essay where he talks about that it kind of, you know, Labour moved to the left in 2007
8:36
What happened in 2007? Oh yeah, he was deposed as Prime Minister and Gordon Brown took over
8:41
And who is it that Keir Starmer turned to after the disastrous local elections
8:47
It was Gordon Brown. Bring Gordon Brown back. And so I think that, you know, is there an element in which maybe Blair is miffed
8:55
that Brown is back in the inner circle, but he's nowhere near
8:59
I just think he thinks that Labour have got this wrong and that they've come up with a set of policy prescriptions
9:05
and you know you talk about those people on incapacity or invalid benefits and the way that
9:13
is just soaring and so that by the you know in a decade's time we'll be spending more on those two
9:19
benefits than we will on defense and Blair thinks this is utter lunacy. And there's a lot of voter
9:24
disquiet about that which he rightly points out. Exactly and I think that he's saying the things
9:31
Now, Keir Starmer's problem, the interesting thing, and I put this too, Blair
9:36
the interesting thing about Starmer is that Starmer probably agrees on the policy
9:40
but he's crap at the politics. And Blair is saying, stop worrying about the politics
9:45
just get the policy right. And I would think that Keir Starmer's rejoined. I'm trying, but I can't sway my backbenchers
9:51
They won't do a thing that I say. And I think that is part of the problem
9:56
that Keir Starmer has now. And when he talks about, when Tony Blair talks about the beginning of the revolution
10:02
that we are in, equivalent to the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century
10:07
And I think he's right along those lines. We were talking about it yesterday, Pope Leo's encyclical as well
10:13
Yeah, encyclical. And I think he's right to say we are. And he's critical, isn't he, of what he sees
10:19
as the lack of intellectual heft of the party and the thinking on those issues
10:27
And again, you and I will remember post-Michael Foote disaster, Kinnock, Smith, Blair, there was a process unfolding before our eyes of a party not just looking to get into power by accident, but looking to shape a political philosophy and a social philosophy to get back into power in a new way, in a different way, hence new Labour
10:50
But you could see that taking shape. You can't say the same for the McSweeney project, can you
10:56
That it's quite the same full frontal, visible transformation of a party for the age it's in
11:04
Look, I think that is a fair critique. I think that, you know, the change from sort of old Labour, union-based, class-based
11:13
which is what the party had become in, you know, 1983 when Labour went down in flames when Michael Foote was the leader
11:20
through to 97, when Tony Blair has sort of completed the modernisation project
11:26
to make it a much more like a European social democratic party
11:30
I think that Blair did do that. And I think that what happened after, you know, when sort of Starmer is coming to power
11:38
is that you've had the Corbyn experiment where Labour lose and lose badly
11:44
An intellectual wasteland, he called that, didn't he? An intellectual wasteland. And I felt that the 2024 election was OK we not the Tories Let just not say too much about policy We just keep our heads down
11:59
We won't be the Tories. Vote for us. We're not the Tories. It worked fantastically effectively
12:05
but I kind of know, I've spoken to senior civil servants who said to me, you know
12:10
they came into power. They didn't have much idea of what they wanted to do
12:14
or how they were going to do it or what they needed to do to make it happen
12:18
And I think that that has been the hallmark of these two years
12:22
And it's no wonder that people feel frustrated given the sort of inability
12:27
I mean, the one person, ironically, who's probably been the most successful in his government department at making his run and getting things done that he wants to do is Ed Miliband
12:39
who, of course, is precisely the person that Tony Blair thinks is the most off the rails in terms of policy
12:46
and so I just don't think there was that carefully thought through idea of what will this Labour
12:53
government be about what is it I mean yeah sure increasing opportunity sure yeah increasing
12:58
fairness you know those things are taken for granted it'd be paradoxical if you went into an
13:03
election saying we're against fairness we're against better standards of living for other
13:07
people you know that of course they're going to say that but how were they going to get there
13:12
And if economic growth was going to be the cornerstone of it, arguably, there's been an awful lot of policies that have added cost to business, which means they're not employing as many people as they might have been
13:24
I thought the line in the essay, I'm going to quote it, the sensible people aren't radical and the radical people aren't sensible
13:33
And the radical people aren't sensible. Such a good, I think that's a really, really pithy summary of where we're at, actually
13:40
Well, I think that, you know, and I think that when Tony Blair says that Keir Salmer's problem isn't his personality and isn't his presentation skills, I kind of think up to a point
13:53
You know, who is coining phrases like that? Blair was a genius
13:57
I mean, you know, like him or loathe him. And the Tories, you know, aped so much of what he did
14:04
The way he thought about politics, the way he could, you know, conduct an argument and set out a case
14:09
you know if the Iraq war hadn't happened and there's a whole interesting bit in this essay
14:15
about how you always have to be close to America and I'm kind of think well yeah but Stalin's done
14:22
pretty well by standing up to Donald Trump so you know he says it's it is indispensable that we have
14:28
to be close to the US and you think yeah are you right are you sure about that because isn't that
14:35
the stain on your legacy, that people think you got too close to George W. Bush and you made a
14:41
disastrous decision being involved in the invasion of Iraq and all that flowed from that
14:46
I actually thought that paragraph about, you know, even when it makes no obvious sense or even when
14:51
it's controversial, stick with America, was a sort of a flash of psychological injury in Blair that
14:57
still persists, I would imagine. And he knows that this is his legacy. He knows
15:03
that his, you know, the original criticism of Blair was that he was Bambi
15:09
he didn't really believe in anything. Actually, he's fantastically ideological. He might
15:15
not like the ideology, but he passionately believes this stuff. And, you know
15:21
and he used to say in debates, the scariest bit about what you're hearing from me is, I really
15:27
believe this, you know, when he would meet a doubting audience. And so I think it is
15:32
absolutely heartfelt. I think it's absolutely sincere. I think he thinks the party doesn't
15:37
stand a chance of winning another term at the next election if it carries on on the
15:42
way that it's proceeding and thinks that kind of just going into a leadership contest where
15:47
you replace one leader, put in another and think that everything will be all right is fantasy
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