Tony Blair has said Jeremy Corbyn as prime minister would be a “very dangerous experiment”
Tony Blair has warned the Labour Party and the British electorate against electing Jeremy Corbyn as prime minister in some of his most critical comments yet of the party leader.
Speaking to the BBC in an interview to be broadcast this afternoon, Blair, Labour’s most electorally successful leader in its history, said a Corbyn premiership would be a “very dangerous experiment”.
Blair has been a critic of Corbyn and has long argued that the Labour Party needs to adopt policies of the centre if it wants to return to power.
Corbyn is the product of the way the world works today and it’s a big challenge for the centre. When I’m not thinking about the middle east, I’m thinking about this, because I do think it would be a very dangerous experiment for a major western country to get gripped by this kind of policymaking left or right.
– Tony Blair
Since he left office Blair has been vilified by parts of the Labour party and the public in the UK, who direct anger at him for Britain’s involvement in the Iraq War of 2003 and the current state of the middle east. Blair, who won Labour’s biggest ever election victory in 1997 bringing to an end 18 years of Conservative rule, thinks something else may be behind the animosity:
“There are people who disagree with me for reasons they say are to do with Iraq,” he said, “but it’s because I won three elections for the Labour Party and they didn’t like it.”
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The former prime minister who spent a decade in Number 10, is preparing himself for the publication of the long-awaited and highly controversial Chilcot report into the UK’s involvement in Iraq on 6 July.
Blair and his foreign secretary at the time, Jack Straw, are expected to be heavily criticised. He said, however, that the whole issue of the Iraq War and the problems in the middle east more broadly were unlikely “to be resolved in six weeks”.
“The problems pre-dated it, post-dated it and will be with us for a long time.”
“The ideology of Islamism and the idea that you have a view of religion that governs politics, the economy and society … is certainly in its more extreme forms, the single biggest threat that we face today.”