The message could hardly be clearer. Embroiled in a row with his party about spending plans, opposition Labour leader Keir Starmer took to the stage with former Prime Minister Tony Blair — a first symbolic embrace of the last man to win a general election for the party almost two decades ago.
(Bloomberg) — The message could hardly be clearer. Embroiled in a row with his party about spending plans, opposition Labour leader Keir Starmer took to the stage with former Prime Minister Tony Blair — a first symbolic embrace of the last man to win a general election for the party almost two decades ago.
Starmer’s speech and on-stage interview with Blair on Tuesday bore all the hallmarks of a baton change. Recent Labour leaders have distanced themselves from the three-time election winner, who is an influential but controversial figure in British politics in large part due to public opposition to the Iraq War.
But Starmer has developed close ties with Blair and uses his eponymous think tank to help draw up Labour’s prospectus for government. One of Starmer’s top team, Marianna McFadden, was hired from the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change.
The UK needs three things, Starmer told the think tank’s ‘Future for Britain’ conference in London: “Growth, growth, growth.” The rhetorical flourish was a conscious call-back to Blair’s famous “education, education, education” line as he geared Labour up for the 1997 general election.
Given Britain’s current moribund economy and crumbling public services, Starmer has a political motivation to try to present his party as a Blair-like government-in-waiting in the minds of voters. The years up to the 2008 financial crisis are seen as the last real boom period, especially set against austerity and Brexit turmoil under Conservative governments since 2010.
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Yet sitting together on stage, Blair lamented that Starmer faced a “grim” economic inheritance compared to what he took over in 1997. “We had a lot of things to do, but on the other hand we could see that growth had stabilized.”
Starmer responded that Labour would have to make “tough choices,” and referenced the turmoil under seven-week Tory premier Liz Truss as proof of the economic damage from unfunded spending plans. “I will not let the next Labour government get anywhere near what Liz Truss did,” Starmer said.
The Labour leader acknowledged his determination to maintain fiscal restraint is causing internal party strife, including the current “row” over his promise to keep the Conservative government’s controversial two-child cap on welfare payments that is despised by many of his MPs.
But there was no sign of a change of course. “The next stage is where we’ve got to be even tougher, even more focused, even more disciplined,” he said. “People are inhaling the polls” showing Labour with a double-digit lead over Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives, he said. “That is a big, big, big mistake.”
For Blair, the love-in was complete. “If how far you’ve taken the Labour party in the last four years is any guide to how far you can take the country,” he told Starmer, “we’ll be in the good hands.”
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