Streeting Joins Burnham In Condemning Blair For Failing To Acknowledge Inequality

Wes Streeting has joined Andy Burnham in accusing Tony Blair of not acknowledging the inequality in the UK.

The ex-prime minister tore into Labour in a 5,600 word essay this week, saying the current shadow leadership contest is futile until the party reassesses its policies.

His warning came as Greater Manchester mayor Burnham is contesting the Makerfield by-election in the hope he can get a seat in parliament, where he is expected to challenge Keir Starmer’s premiership.

Streeting, who quit as health secretary earlier this month, has made it clear he intends to join any leadership challenge.

But Blair urged the party to resist drifting further leftward, and called out both politicians. He wrote: “Wes Streeting is a huge political talent and Andy Burnham was an outstanding member of my government.

“But this leadership debate has an extraordinarily retro 20th-century feel to it. Like most politicians, they’re anxious to distance themselves from the ‘Westminster bubble’.”

Speaking after Labour’s thrashing in the May elections, Blair said Labour’s declining popularity stems from a lack of “worked-out, coherent plan”, and urged the party to govern from the “radical centre”.

Streeting, often described as a Blairite though he rejects the term, wrote in the Guardian that there was a “striking weakness at the heart of Tony Blair’s intervention”.

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.”

Streeting also pushed back on Blair’s call for the UK to retain close ties with the US, despite the conflict with the Trump administration.

“When US presidents flirt with authoritarian leaders, undermine international law or pursue reckless military adventurism, Britain must have the confidence to act independently.

“We learned at terrible cost in Iraq what happens when loyalty replaces judgement. Britain’s long-term future lies in Europe,” the Labour MP for Ilford North wrote.

He also rejected the suggestion that Labour’s answer comes in longing for the 70s or the 90s.

Meanwhile Burnham told the Observer on Wednesday: “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.”

Burnham, known for being on the soft left of the party, 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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