“Once again, Tony Blair has demonstrated his impeccable political timing,” said The Telegraph.
Just days before tricky local elections for the Labour government, Blair, writing in a report by the Tony Blair Institute, said his former party needed to take a different approach to reaching net zero targets. Voters, he said, are likely to recognise the expanding “credibility gap” between being “asked to make financial sacrifices and changes in lifestyle” knowing that their “impact on global emissions is minimal”.
The Tony Blair Institute eventually issued a statement clarifying that the former PM’s position is that the government’s direction on climate is the “right one”. Furious government insiders, however, told The Guardian that Blair had undermined Keir Starmer on a key issue, at a crucial moment. One said: “Tony fucked up.” Another said: “He has completely lost his touch.”
Speculation over the timing of the comments has gone into overdrive in Westminster. Was this “just another scrap in [Blair’s] polite but long-running tussle with Ed Miliband over the future of Labour?”, asked The Telegraph. After all, the relationship between Blair and Miliband “is a very British acrimony, a tale not of all-out war but of passive-aggressive disagreement stretching back two decades”.
Miliband’s ‘self-destructive goal’
The comments only heighten pressure on the government and Miliband over their net zero plans. “Rumours persist” that the energy secretary could even be “shunted out of his role” in the next cabinet shuffle, said Christian May at City A.M. Starmer could use the “perfect excuse”, that the “world has changed”, to depose Miliband, who is “doubling down” on the “arbitrary and self-destructive goal” of net zero.
Critics are arguing that “the pace of change” is the problem, not the “long-term necessity”, said The Telegraph in an editorial. But Miliband has been “unprepared to countenance any suggestion” that it may be “reckless” to push forward with his current targets.
Former Labour leader Miliband has become an easy “target” for right-wing critics, and is often “undermined by his own side”, said Andy Beckett in The Guardian. He has spent much of his 10 months as energy secretary “trying to justify the government’s climate compromises” and critics on each side are asking “when he will resign – or why he hasn’t already”.
But while he is “hardly a perfect politician”, the ire directed at him is really a “displacement activity”, as it is “much easier to think about the end of Miliband than the end of the world”.
Blair’s ‘tantrum’
The “anger in the Labour ranks was palpable” following Blair’s comments, said Politico, particularly coming ahead of local elections in England. One insider said it was “the tantrum of ‘someone struggling for influence'” and had given all sides “fodder to attack Labour”.
In “a sign of the acrimony swilling around this debate within Labour”, said the BBC‘s chief political correspondent Henry Zeffman, one government source told him that Blair’s comments “may have been affected by the Tony Blair Institute having received funding from oil rich Saudi Arabia”.
The government, for now, is standing by its net zero plans, viewing it as not just a “moral issue” but an “economic” one as well, said Rob Stait on LBC. But Blair’s critique “speaks to this new phase of the net zero culture wars; one in which net zero is becoming as politically totemic as Brexit”, said The New Statesman‘s Megan Kenyon.
Comments by former PM Tony Blair have opened up Labour to attacks over its energy policies
