Calls on party to ditch ‘misguided ideology’
Ex-British Prime Ministers on Wednesday urged members of the Labour Party to abandon the policies and political leanings of Jeremy Corbyn to ensure the survival of the party.
Blair warned that if Corbyn’s wing of the party remains in charge, then Labour will be finished as a political force.
Speaking to BBC, the three time election winning former Prime Minister said, “The Labour party, by its self-indulgence – and that’s what it was in the end – was the effective handmaiden of Brexit. It’s not our fault, because the fault is with those who advocated it.
But our combination of misguided ideology and utter incompetence allowed it to happen.”
“The far left that has taken over the Labour party … If they’re in charge of the Labour party going forward, then I think the Labour party is finished,” he added.
Labour won 203 seats in the election, down 59, and saw its share of the vote fall by 7.8 percentage points to 32.2%, while the Conservatives won 365 seats, up 47, with 43.6% of the vote.
Earlier on Wednesday, Blair delivered a speech in central London in which he described the takeover of Labour by the left as a “glorified protest movement with cult trimmings, utterly incapable of being a credible government”.
He said few would bet against a decade of Conservative rule given the state of Labour, and that unless the party changed course, it faced the threat of never winning power again.
