Tony Blair has defended his ten years in Number 10 against attacks by Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn .
In an unusual intervention the former three-time PM waded in to the debate about his government’s legacy.
Pointing the finger squarely at Jeremy Corbyn he said: “I don’t often respond to the Leader of the Labour Party’s attacks on the last Labour Government, but enough is enough.”
In a video on Twitter he picked up on two particular comments made by the departing Labour leader hitting back at suggestions he was the same as Thatcher.
Jeremy Corbyn told supporters: “For decades, we’ve been told that inequality doesn’t matter because the education system will allow talented and hard-working people to succeed whatever their background.”
Blair said: “This is the latest repetition of a charge that frankly has become something of a mantra.”
He continued: “Only last year, Jeremy said that working class communities had been ‘hit by decades of failed economic policies’ and that ‘for 30 years, the media and the establishment have tried to tell us that class doesn’t matter anymore and that we should ditch any idea of representing and advancing the interests of the working class.”
“Note the ‘decades’, the ’30 years’.
“In other words, Thatcher Government, last Labour Government, 10 years of Tory austerity. It’s all the same. All one unbroken line. Al one policy. All one ideology.”
“This is bad politics and worse history and it is time to set the record straight.”
In the clip he goes on to detail some of the improvements in public services as part of the New Labour government with the “largest ever peacetime investment in them”.
Blair’s legacy is a difficult one for the Labour membership.
Many supported the increase in public spending, the minimum wage and measures such a sure start, they disagreed with moves like PFI, Foundation Hospitals and Academies.
While a large number of members have not forgiven him for the Iraq War.
In his message he said: “Of course, like any government we had faults, failures and did things people disagreed with.”
“But don’t tell me or those who worked with me or those were part of the Labour Party at the time, that we did nothing for the poorest in our country or the world. We did and we’re proud of it.”
Earlier today Labour leadership contender Lisa Nandy insisted she did not want to “trash” the record of the last Labour government under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, but said that for too long it had accepted the Thatcherite economic consensus.
She said: “We tacitly accepted that four decades of economic conservatism was a bigger priority than people.
“That only by showing we could be as tight as the Tories could we buy legitimacy for helping people in the most need.”
But at his campaign launch fellow leadership candidate Keir Starmer refused to criticize Blair and Brown.
He said: “We are not going to trash the last Labour government… nor are we going to trash the last four years [under Jeremy Corbyn]”.
