Tony Blair: Labour must be rescued from the far left
Tony Blair delivered a scathing verdict on Labour’s 2019 General Election campaign and urged the party’s leadership hopefuls not to “whitewash” the result.
“Labour needs not just a different driver, but a different bus,” he said in a speech announcing his institute’s report into Labour’s biggest electoral defeat in modern history.
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In a speech , titled “Northern Discomfort: Why Labour lost the General Election”,
Blair attacked Labour leader Jeremy Corbybn, saying people saw him as “fundamentally opposing what Britain and western countries stand for”.
“He personified politically a brand of quasi-revolutionary socialism, mixing far left economic policy, with deep hostility to western foreign policy,” Blair added.
He said this “never has appealed to traditional Labour voters, never will appeal to them, and represented for them a combination of misguided ideology and terminal ineptitude which they found insulting”.
“No sentient political party goes into an election with a leader who has a net approval rating of minus 40 per cent,” Blair added.
“The takeover of the Labour party by the far left turned it into a glorified protest movement with cult trimmings, utterly incapable of being a credible government. The result has brought shame on us,” the former Prime Minister said.
He added: “Let us demolish the delusion that the manifesto was popular,” calling it “over a hundred pages of wish list”.
He called Prime Minister Boris Johnson and chief adviser Dominic Cumming’s strategy one for victory, and Labour’s one for defeat, noting “the cockiness of the Johnson visit to Sedgefield to rub salt in the wound”.
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Blair had intervened in the 2015 leadership contest which saw Corbyn elected, warning: “If Jeremy Corbyn becomes leader, the party won’t just face defeat but annihilation. Stop him before it’s too late.”
And looking ahead to the coming battle for the Labour leadership, he warned: “Labour can keep with the programme, and the positions, of Jeremy Corbyn with the new leader, in which case, it’s finished.”
“Or it can understand that it must recapture the party from the far left, make radical changes, and begin the march back to power.”