‘Choose your direction first’: Blair says Labour needs debate before selecting new leader – UK politics live

Ex-PM issues highly unusual intervention with 5,700 word essay and accuses Starmer, Burnham and Streeting of putting Labour’s future at risk Tony Blair tells Starmer and rivals: abandon net zero and move closer to Trump Tony Blair has also given an interview to Times Radio. In it, he said the government should abandon its net zero target – implying that, if that meant Ed Miliband felt obliged to resign as energy secretary as a result, he would not view that as a problem. Asked if he was proposing getting rid of Miliband’s net zero targets, Blair replied: Yes, I am, and I’ll tell you exactly why. It’s not that I’m against renewable energy, clean energy, and it’s not that I’m a climate denier. It’s really a question of explaining to the country, and to Ed, that right now we need to get growth levels up, we need to recognise with this AI revolution that we’re going to need cheap energy. My advice is choose your direction first and make sure that before you have any leadership change, you make all the candidates set out in detail their policy, what the Government’s got right, what it’s got wrong, what we should do differently. 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 … what, nothing good happened in that period of Thatcher with the business community, or New Labour? Continue reading...

Original source: Guardian