There is something both illuminating and deeply frustrating about Tony Blair's intervention in the current Labour crisis. The former Prime Minister is right about the diagnosis. He is significantly less right about the cure.
Blair's 5,600-word essay lands with precision on several of Labour's most uncomfortable truths. The government lacks a compelling economic narrative. Its approach to technology and the future of work is underdeveloped. It has struggled to articulate a positive vision of what Britain should look like in a decade's time that is distinct from the negative proposition of 'at least we're not the Conservatives.'
These are real failures, and the fact that they come from a man who won three general elections should not be dismissed simply because the political context has changed. Blair understands electoral politics in a way that most current Labour figures do not, and his warning that a government without a story to tell cannot win a second term deserves to be taken seriously.
“Blair understands electoral politics better than most current Labour figures — but his prescription misreads where British politics now stands.”
But Blair's prescription — a return to the centrist technocratic modernism of New Labour — contains a fundamental misreading of where British politics now stands. The economic model that New Labour presided over is the model that, in the eyes of a significant proportion of the electorate, created the conditions for the discontents that have driven them to Reform, the Greens and assorted forms of populism ever since.
The communities that Blair addresses from his think tank in Mayfair are not going to be won back by slightly better delivery of public services. They want something more fundamental: a sense that the system itself is being reformed in their interests, that the relationship between capital and labour is being rebalanced, that the geography of opportunity in this country is genuinely changing.
Starmer has not successfully articulated that vision either — that much is unarguable. But the answer is not to retreat to 1997. The answer is to find a language adequate to 2026. That is a harder task than Blair acknowledges, and one for which his own record provides limited guidance.