Former prime minister intensifies warning to Labour leadership voters, urging them to reject Corbyn’s policies and ‘understand the danger we are in’
In a desperate appeal to Labour members and supporters, the former prime minister urged them to set aside their opinions about his three terms in power and save the party from self-destruction by rejecting Corbyn’s politics.
“It doesn’t matter whether you’re on the left, right or centre of the party, whether you used to support me or hate me,” he wrote. “But please understand the danger we are in. The party is walking eyes shut, arms outstretched over the cliff’s edge to the jagged rocks below. This is not a moment to refrain from disturbing the serenity of the walk on the basis it causes ‘disunity’. It is a moment for a rugby tackle if that were possible.”
He made his plea in an article for the Guardian after a YouGov opinion poll suggested Corbyn, a veteran leftwinger, is heading for a landslide victory, with Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall having failed to enthuse the electorate.
Last month, Blair urged people not to wrap themselves in a leftwing comfort blanket and claimed the Conservatives want Corbyn to win, while his former spin doctor Alastair Campbell this week called on Labour members to pick “anyone but Corbyn”.
If Jeremy Corbyn becomes leader it won’t be a defeat like 1983 or 2015 at the next election. It will mean routTony Blair
However, Blair’s latest article represents a significant intensification of the warnings and suggests there is mounting panic in the Labour party establishment about the idea that Corbyn is heading for victory.
His appeal is directed mostly at longstanding Labour members and newer supporters who have joined “without an agenda”. Yet some MPs who oppose Corbyn are concerned it will backfire because of their former leader’s divisive reputation and would rather the message came from Ed Miliband or Gordon Brown.
In the article, Blair said it was “laughable” to think that Corbyn was offering anything new and the situation was worse even than during the 1980s in the days of Michael Foot, who was at least a “towering figure”, and Tony Benn, who was “a huge political character with a long experience of government”.
“If Jeremy Corbyn becomes leader it won’t be a defeat like 1983 or 2015 at the next election. It will mean rout, possibly annihilation,” he wrote.
In response to Blair’s article, a spokesman for the Corbyn campaign said: “We are keeping our campaign positive and remain focused on our policies that offer the sound economic choice of investment and growth, not the politically driven agenda of austerity and cuts preventing economic recovery.”
In July, Corbyn dismissed Blair’s “silly” warnings about his campaign and highlighted the former prime minister’s loss of support after the Iraq war.
Michael Meacher, a Labour former minister and supporter of Corbyn, said Blairites need to understand that the surge in enthusiasm for the Islington North MP represents the dismantling of the New Labour era.
“It is the biggest non-revolutionary upturning of the social order in modern British politics,” he said. “The Blairite coup of the mid-1990s hijacked the party to the Tory ideology of ‘leave it all to the markets and let the state get out of the way,’ and when asked what was her greatest achievement Mrs Thatcher triumphantly replied ‘New Labour’.
“After 20 years of swashbuckling capitalism, the people of Britain have said ‘enough,’ and Labour is finally regaining its real principles and values. Understandably, the Blairite faction is disconcerted by their abrupt loss of power, but they have a duty to remain loyal to the Labour party as the left has always done.”
Blair made his intervention on the day there was a massive last-minute surge in new members and supporters signing up to vote before the deadline, as tens of thousands of activists appear to have been galvanised by Corbyn’s clear anti-austerity message.
In the last 24 hours, the trade unions have more than doubled the number of signed-up supporters to 190,000, and those who paid £3 to become registered supporters soared from 70,000 to 120,000. The surge in union-related support in particular is expected to benefit the Corbyn campaign, given that many of the biggest – including Unite and Unison – have endorsed him.
The party has been struggling to cope with almost 400,000 new members and supporters, taking the total possible electorate to more than 610,000, each of whom is being checked to make sure they are not “entryists” from other parties trying to influence the result.
At one point on Wednesday, the party’s website crashed amid a surge in people attempting to sign up at the last minute. Labour issued an apology and extended the deadline by three hours, but there were numerous complaints on social media about problems with signing up and worries, especially among Corbyn supporters, that they could be excluded.
Corbyn paid tribute to the Labour party’s staff, “who have worked so hard to deliver a robust selection system in totally new circumstances”.
However, his confidence in the system is not shared by the three trailing candidates – Burnham, Cooper and Kendall – who wrote to the general secretary, Iain McNicol, expressing concerns about the way the process is being handled.
The party has been struggling to cope with almost 400,000 new members and supporters, taking the total possible electorate to more than 610,000, each of whom is being checked to make sure they are not “entryists” from other parties trying to influence the result.
At one point on Wednesday, the party’s website crashed amid a surge in people attempting to sign up at the last minute. Labour issued an apology and extended the deadline by three hours, but there were numerous complaints on social media about problems with signing up and worries, especially among Corbyn supporters, that they could be excluded.
Corbyn paid tribute to the Labour party’s staff, “who have worked so hard to deliver a robust selection system in totally new circumstances”.
However, his confidence in the system is not shared by the three trailing candidates – Burnham, Cooper and Kendall – who wrote to the general secretary, Iain McNicol, expressing concerns about the way the process is being handled.
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