Andy Burnham has hit out at Sir Tony Blair by suggesting the former Labour prime minister is out of touch and partly to blame for the rise of politicians like Nigel Farage.
His rebuke comes after Sir Tony warned that Labour was “playing with fire” on the future of the country, as he urged the party not to move further to the left, saying it should instead occupy the “radical centre”.
In an interview with The Observer, Mr Burnham, who is fighting to win a parliamentary by-election to return to Westminster, a prerequisite for challenging Sir Keir Starmer for the top job, criticised the former PM, who he said did not “mention inequality once”.
“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,” he said.
Mr Burnham also insisted it was centrists, like Sir Tony, who had failed voters and fuelled the rise of Mr Farage’s Reform UK.
The Greater Manchester mayor said his former party leader “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,” he added.
Mr Burnham also attacked what he described as Sir Tony’s “obsession” with universities.
Early in his time in No 10, the former PM famously set a target for 50 per cent of young people to go on to higher education. Mr Burnham said there should be a greater focus on technical education, such as apprenticeships.
“The prioritisation of universities is a significant part of the problem that has left out too many people and has impacted on the welfare system,” he said.
Sir Tony’s scathing attack on Labour, in the form of a 5,600 essay, said the party had no clear plan for the future and warned it risked doing long-term damage to both itself and the country unless the government underwent a fundamental reset.
In a damning indictment of nearly two years of a Starmer government, he said: “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.”
But he warned trying to force Sir Keir Starmer out of No 10 without a clear policy direction “is not a serious way of conducting ourselves”.
He called on Labour to occupy the “best political space” which he described as “the radical centre”.
He warned that in a new world order, 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”.
But in a blow to one of Mr Burnham’s potential rivals, Wes Streeting, who has called for the UK to rejoin the European Union one day, Sir Tony also warned that the UK is “too weak” to reset its relationship with the bloc and cannot even discuss rejoining until it regains its lost strength.
