Tony Blair’s intervention could spark a Labour civil war

Prospero or Lear? Is Tony Blair today the magician, bringing resolution and harmony to this strange and fought-over island; or is he an exiled and bewildered king, raging against the ruined land he finds around him?

Thanks to Kenneth Branagh and the Royal Shakespeare Company’s much-praised Tempest, Prospero is having a moment. But however much we may wish for this, the dire politics of today’s Labour Party suggest Lear and his rebel daughters are an apter analogy.

The chances of Labour swinging dramatically to the right, which is effectively what Blair is calling for, are minimal. From his AI-focused, Atlanticist, big-business, monied perspective, his analysis is ruthlessly logical and coherent.

The sharpest blade of his attack on Labour today is over energy. Over the past year, Washington has been calling with ever greater urgency for the abandonment of the net-zero agenda. The central argument is that, because of it, Britain’s energy costs are far too high and therefore the UK cannot be the offshore zone of big tech it could otherwise be. Financing the enormous data centres simply won’t work here. We are losing out on the next industrial revolution.

But to abandon wind farms and solar panels, never mind insulation projects, would not bring down energy costs in the near future. Nor would allowing new drilling in the North Sea – although that might be wise resilience preparation, given what’s still going on in the Middle East. We do need more energy storage and more refining capacity, but that is a more sophisticated argument than the one we are hearing from across the pond.

Again, Blair’s argument that the combination of national insurance rises, the minimum wage and workers rights arrived at precisely the wrong moment and has done growth and employment real harm, is a strong one: it has been made, repeatedly, in the New Statesman.

But Blair’s assertion that Labour should just have listened harder to business fails to account for the growing desperation and fury of workers as their conditions are shredded, or for the poverty wages still being offered to too many people entering the workforce, or rather, choosing not to. It doesn’t speak to the anger of the country as it is now, adrift and in a quasi-revolutionary mood. It is a classic “ I wouldn’t start from here” tilt to the right which, as Labour MPs are already saying, forgets why their party was funded in the first place.

Blair is right to warn about the dangers of an early return to the EU, and to insist that border control is not a weird populist-right fetish but the demand of millions of swing voters, which Labour ignores at its peril – an issue of competence and authority as much as race. He’s absolutely right about the triple lock. He’s right, too, about the need to curb welfare spending overall.

So there is in all this, the interesting, embryonic programme of a theoretical government, which Blair calls “the radical centre”. But it has never won a general election because it has never had a party of its own, except for fleeting moments in the late 1990s. It is Blair’s own agenda, recast for a later age, and the putative manifesto of the party his supporters begged him to found during the Corbyn years, but which he never did.

So he is deliberately pushing aside what he knows to be the big voting blocks of the Parliamentary Labour Party are. He is pretending the so-called soft left is not dominant. That’s most glaringly obvious when he indicates Britain should be giving more support to Donald Trump, the single most disruptive and dangerous leader the West has ever had. It flicks aside almost contemptuously the single policy act – Iran – Starmer most prides himself on. Blair himself was announced as a founding member of Trump’s “board of peace” for Gaza: on what planet could that be part of the politics of a reformed Labour government today?

All of this is, of course, the prerogative of an outside commentator – someone who has essentially removed himself from current electoral politics and may even stand above it – but it is not a realistic strategy for a change of leadership.

Which is not to say that much of the Blair commentary isn’t relevant or incisive. The most withering and, for Keir Starmer, hurtful, part of the analysis is the lack of direction of the current government. Blair has kept his mouth shut for a long time, loyally holding his fire but “too often they seem to totter in the breeze, to lack ballast“ is pretty brutal.

So, to return to the first question: Prospero or Lear? I just don’t believe that in current circumstances, Blair has a prayer of shifting Labour to the right in the way he wishes to. But he remains very popular in the party. Indeed, according to polling by Survation for Labour List, he’s the most popular leader among party members of any in the past 40 years.

His essay is full of good ideas and uncomfortable but essential thoughts. But Prospero wouldn’t have published it. Prospero would have been wheedling, trying, behind the scenes, to bring Andy Burnham and Wes Streeting together around some, not all, of a refreshed agenda, recognising that imperfect unity and authority is more important than his version of ideological purity.

But remember that Prospero broke his magic staff and that Lear too had profound wisdom and poetry inside the rage and grief. The real danger of the Blair intervention is that it makes a classic left-right open battle across the Labour movement more likely, not less… and even in some sense, given that Gordon Brown is now a vocal backer of Starmer, returns the party to the old feuds. 

The most intense policy pressure is now on Ed Miliband, field commander of the soft left, over net zero: Blair has made it clear that Blairite support for the Prime Minister depends upon ripping the policy to pieces and Starmer appears to be in the mood these days to do whatever is necessary to bolster his position.

Blair is coming in these dangerous times to whip things up, not to calm them down. From his own point of view, philosophically frustrated, perhaps he’s right. But what about the politics? He says the Labour party is playing with fire and the country’s future. If so, is a full out ideological fight, the right response? Like Harriet Harman, I smell chaos, then an early election coming closer. 

In the end, Lear had good advice for former leaders, loved or not: “We’ll live/ And pray, and sing, and tell old tales…/Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out/ And take upon’s the mystery of things…”

[Further reading: What Britain won’t face]