Keir Starmer’s Labour must accept it will not be able to tax and spend its way out of financial trouble, Tony Blair has warned.
The party’s former leader and ex-prime minister told the Financial Times the Conservatives had “taxed and spent to the point [of]… economic crisis” and said Starmer would be facing an even gloomier situation than he had inherited from John Major.
“If Keir Starmer wins the election, which I think he’s got a good chance of doing, he’ll be the sixth prime minister in eight years,” said Blair, who served as prime minister from 1997 to 2007. “That’s a country that’s in a mess. We are not in good shape.
“The Conservative party has taxed and spent to the point where we’re in an economic crisis. The radical agenda today is all about understanding, mastering, harnessing the technological revolution – everything else is secondary to that.”
Blair said he met the current Labour leader “reasonably frequently” and said Starmer’s critics who said his policy offering was too bland were talking “nonsense”.
However, he said Starmer was “his own person” and praised him for making the party electable again. Blair also said it was a “shocking indictment” that he remained the only Labour politician born in the past 100 years to have won a general election.
“I’m afraid it has not been a successful political project,” he said, adding: “I didn’t give up on Labour. But I think the Labour party would have been finished if we had carried on under Corbyn.”
Blair’s intervention comes weeks after the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, explicitly ruled out Labour imposing a wealth tax if it won the next election, as the party doubled down on its efforts to demonstrate economic competence.
She confirmed that a Labour government would not bring in a mansion tax on expensive properties, increase capital gains tax or put up the top rate of income tax.
“We have no plans for a wealth tax,” Reeves said. “We don’t have any plans to increase taxes outside of what we’ve said. I don’t see the way to prosperity as being through taxation. I want to grow the economy.”
• This article was amended on 13 September 2023. Tony Blair said he was the only Labour politician born in the past 100 years to have won a general election; not in the “last century” as a previous version had it.
