Andy Burnham Fires Back At Tony Blair After Ex-PM’s Attack

Andy Burnham has hit back at Tony Blair after the former Labour prime minister urged the party not to go further left.

The Greater Manchester mayor is currently campaigning for the Makerfield by-election so he can get a seat in parliament and challenge Keir Starmer’s leadership.

He has promised to implement change after what he has described as “40 years of neoliberalism.”

While the ex-PM told BBC Radio 4′s Today programme that he hopes Burnham – who used to serve in Blair’s government – wins the crunch Makerfield contest, he questioned his analysis.

Blair said: “We’re in 2026. Let’s go back to 1986. So we assume he doesn’t mean the first seven years of Margaret Thatcher. So back to the 70s? Nothing good in that period of Thatcher with the business community or New Labour?

“I don’t think he [Burnham] really means that, but what I’m saying is if you’re going to change leader you’ve really got to force people to say where they stand.”

He also called for Labour to govern from the “radical centre”.

But Burnham suggested to The Observer that Blair was missing the point, saying: ”[He] criticises my phrase about 40 years of neoliberalism but the last 40 years has given us wide inequality – that’s what’s responsible for the abandonment of the centre.

“People don’t think the centre has delivered for them in terms of their lives, therefore they’ve gone further to the extremes.”

It comes after Blair penned at 5,600 word essay calling for Labour to take a completely new approach to its policies rather.

The ex-PM accused Labour of suffering from a “perennial delusion”, believing “that when we lose seats to the right the country is really signalling it wants Labour to move left”.

He also claimed the party was “playing with fire” by trying to replace Starmer without first deciding on a different policy direction, and therefore risks consigning the UK to “relegation from the Premier League of nations”.

But Burnham tore into Blair’s vision of what the UK should look like.

“He doesn’t mention inequality once,” he said. “If you don’t get how that’s driving politics now, if you are not rooting your analysis in the fact that people are unable to live and that things that were taken for granted are no longer affordable, then you are not understanding what’s going on.”

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