If there is a single UK politician who should
understand what political irrelevance looks and feels like, it is surely ex-PM
Tony Blair, and it’s tempting to dismiss his critique of the way the UK is
becoming irrelevant under the leadership of his own party on that basis. That
would, though, miss the point, because for all the robust rebuttals of that
critique by current-day Labour figures, the whole episode serves to emphasise
not the difference between the Blair generation and the Starmer generation but
the intrinsic similarities.
It is clear, for instance, that both what Blair had
to say and what Starmer has been doing are predicated on an idea of the UK as a
great global power, with influence way beyond its size and economic importance
to the world. It’s a sort of post-imperial delusion on the part of people who
can’t quite get their heads around the idea of the UK as a medium-sized offshore
European archipelago, and expect the rest of the world to somehow take them at their
own evaluation of their relevance.
Some have been surprised at the similarity between
the responses of Burnham and Streeting, with their insistence that the idea of
inequality is missing from Blair’s response. But both men, like Blair himself,
are wedded to the neoliberal economic creed that ‘the markets’ can solve every
problem and that governments must do, fiscally, whatever they interpret the
bond markets as demanding. Increasing inequality is not only baked into that
creed, it is its main driving force. In his failure to pretend that he thinks
it important, Blair is simply being more honest than either. There is no great ‘battle
of ideas’ going on between the Labour leadership hopefuls, just a beauty
contest between two over-ambitious wannabe Messiahs. Irrelevant is quite an apt
description.
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