Andy Burnham and Wes Streeting have hit back at Sir Tony Blair, accusing him of misunderstanding modern politics in his attack on the Labour government.
The former Labour prime minister urged his party not to move to the left and to embrace the “radical centre” in a highly critical 5,700 word essay published on Wednesday.
Sir Tony also warned Labour that they were “playing with fire” over the UK’s future and lacked a “coherent plan”, while urging Labour MPs to avoid a “personality contest” or backing a change at the top without first deciding on its policy direction.
However, Mr Burnham and Mr Streeting, who are both potential Labour leadership challengers to Sir Keir Starmer, suggested the former leader had overlooked how inequality is shaping modern politics.
Mr Burnham, who is hoping to win a parliamentary seat at the Makerfield by-election next month, suggested that Sir Tony was out of touch and partly to blame for the rise of politicians like Nigel Farage, while noting that Sir Tony "doesn't mention inequality once" in his essay.
Mr Burnham told the Observer : “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.
“People don’t think the centre has delivered for them in terms of their lives, therefore, they’ve gone further to the extremes.”
The Greater Manchester mayor, who was a junior minister in Sir Tony’s government, added: "The last 40 years has given us wide inequality - that's what's responsible for the abandonment of the centre.
Asked if he considered himself to be left wing, Burnham said: "If you want to call it left wing that's fine by me.
"It's knowing where you need to take a more left solution and where you want to be pro-business. Blairism sometimes saw the market as always the answer. That's its problem."
Mr Burnham also said it was centrists like Sir Tony who had failed voters and fuelled the rise of Mr Farage’s Reform UK.
Former Health Secretary Mr Streeting took a similar view on the essay, arguing the “striking weakness at the heart of Sir Tony Blair’s intervention” is the lack of mention of inequality.
Writing in The Guardian, he said: “Across thousands of words about technology, geopolitics and political strategy, the defining issue of our age is barely confronted at all. Inequality - the economic, social and democratic fracture running through modern Britain - is treated as peripheral rather than fundamental.
“But inequality, rather than being incidental to the crises reshaping western democracies, is actually their cause.
“People are told Britain is succeeding while they cannot afford a home, and that opportunity exists even though their children face lower living standards than their parents enjoyed. They are told to work harder while wealth accumulates ever-more narrowly at the top. And they notice the unfairness.”
In Sir Tony’s essay, he wrote: “We don’t have a worked-out, coherent plan for the country in a fast-changing world, and are in the wrong political position from which to devise one and win a second term.”
He called on Labour to occupy the “best political space” which he described as “the radical centre”, while warning that Britain was “caught between the isolationist tendency of parts of the right, and the misguided progressivism of parts of the left, which combined are in danger of leaving Britain marooned on an island of irrelevance”.
The former prime minister also called on Sir Keir Starmer to rip up net zero targets and reduce the welfare budget, which he said risks outpacing defence spending by the end of the decade.
In an interview on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Sir Tony said that “at some point you’ve got to be able to stand up and have an honest debate with the public, which is to say, look, ultimately we’re probably taxing people too much, spending too much, borrowing too much at the moment”.
He also criticised Burnham for claiming Britain has been "on the wrong path for 40 years" - a period that includes Sir Tony's 10 years in power, from 1997 to 2007.
He said: "I hope Andy wins Makerfield, I think he's a great guy, I want to see him in Parliament.
"But you know, when he does this thing about 40 years of wasted… I mean, OK, and what, nothing good happened in that period of Thatcher with the business community, or New Labour?
"I don't think he really means that."
