Competence Is Not a Political Project.
Blair Is Wrong. That Is Not the Same as Being Useless.
There are few easier pleasures in Labour politics than dismissing Tony Blair.
It can be done in several registers.
There is the moral register, which reaches almost automatically for Iraq.
There is the generational register, in which Blair is treated as a man still trying to govern the country from the politics of 1997, like a ghost haunting the Downing Street sofa.
There is the ideological register, in which every mention of the ‘radical centre’ is presumed to be a coded demand for privatisation, triangulation and a nice lunch with someone from a management consultancy.
And there is the simpler, more tribal version: he is Tony, therefore he is wrong.
None of these responses is entirely unfair. That is what makes the problem awkward.
Blair’s recent essay on Labour’s direction contains plenty that any credible Labour person should reject. A Labour government should not abandon new net zero projects as though the climate crisis can be postponed until the bond markets are in a better mood. It should not treat laws for workers’ rights as a dispensable luxury. It should not ignore the need for a higher minimum wage, nor retreat from changes to non-dom tax status because the very wealthy have once again discovered their deep emotional vulnerability to being taxed. Nor should a Labour Prime Minister treat alliance management as a moral blank cheque for Donald Trump’s military choices in Iran.
If that were all Blair had said, the response could be short, satisfying and almost entirely useless.
The problem is that Blair has also said something true. Labour is in danger of confusing office with purpose. It won the 2024 election not as the author of a fully believed national project, but as the acceptable alternative to Conservative collapse. That was enough to win. It was even enough, for a time, to govern. But it was never going to be enough in the long run.
This is the uncomfortable part. Blair’s answers are often too thin, too technocratic, too impatient with the moral commitments that make Labour worth having at all. But his question is the right one. What is Labour for?
Not what is Labour against. We know that already. Labour is against Conservative Party’s austere selfishness, Reform’s authoritarian racist pantomime, the Green party’s magical thinking, The Liberal Democrats’ opportunism, and the general political habit of setting the house on fire then congratulating ourselves for having produced warmth.
The harder question is what Labour is trying to build.
The official answer still exists. Labour has its five missions. The government’s ‘Plan for Change’ still talks about milestones for mission-led government, built around economic growth, the NHS, safer streets, opportunity and clean energy. The language remains formally intact. There is still an architecture, a set of headings, a structure under which announcements can be filed.
But a filing system is not a governing story.
That distinction matters. A mission is only politically useful if it disciplines choices. It has to tell ministers what matters when two good things conflict. It has to tell the Treasury what cannot be sacrificed. It has to tell the public why pain is being asked of them, what trade-offs are being made, and what sort of country should exist at the other end of the work. Without that, a mission becomes a brand category. It gives announcements somewhere to live, but not necessarily a reason to exist.
This is where Ian Dunt’s essay, ‘How to build a good Prime Minister’, gets closer to the problem than Blair does. Dunt’s argument is not merely that Starmer needs better slogans, though God knows a few would not hurt. It is that successful government requires a relationship between vision, policy and delivery. You begin with a sense of direction. You translate it into practical measures. Then you build the machinery capable of making those measures real. Dunt’s criticism of recent prime ministers is savage, but the analytical point beneath the savagery is quite simple: Britain is not ungovernable, just badly governed.
This is, in one sense, an old Blairite lesson. The first New Labour government did not simply say ‘Education, education, education’ because somebody in the comms team had discovered repetition. It said it because the phrase did actual political work. It told voters what mattered. It told Whitehall what mattered. It gave ministers a test against which decisions could be judged. It allowed delivery mechanisms to form around something more substantial than the Prime Minister’s inbox.
This is also why the comparison is so uncomfortable for Labour now. Starmer’s government has done real things. Its defenders are not wrong to point to serious achievements. But the public impression remains one of drift, because the actions do not yet add up to a project. Too often the argument seems to shrink at the moment it should expand. We were promised national renewal. We are offered administrative reassurance. We were promised transformation. We are told that the grown-ups are in the room.
The grown-ups do need to be in the room. This is an underrated point in politics, mostly because people who sneer at competence have usually not had to deal with the consequences of incompetence. The country suffered badly under recent governments that seemed to treat seriousness as an optional extra. There is nothing trivial about restoring some basic capacity to the state.
But competence is not a political project. It is the precondition for one.
This, I think, is the trap Starmer’s Labour has fallen into. In opposition, competence was an electoral argument. It was necessary and, after Johnson, Truss and Sunak, rather more emotionally resonant than people sometimes admit. Labour did not have to persuade the country that it was thrilling. It had to persuade the country that it was sane. The campaign could contrast steadiness with chaos, adulthood with theatrical irresponsibility, the modest promise of repair with the exhausted absurdity of Conservative rule.
That was enough to win the election. It is not enough to govern through a period of national insecurity.
People do not merely want ministers who can operate the machine. They want to know what the machine is for. They want to know why their lives are still hard. They want to know why a Labour government, elected after fourteen years of Conservative decline, so often sounds as though the limits of politics have already been reached. They want to know whether the future being built is one they will have a place in.
Blair sees part of this. His essay is strongest when it insists that Labour cannot retreat into self-delusion, nostalgia or factional comfort. He is right that the country faces a world being remade by artificial intelligence, geopolitics, energy insecurity, demographic pressure and a changed global economy. He is right that government has to be serious about technology, growth, skills, state capacity and Britain’s place in the world. He is right, too, that politics cannot simply be the art of giving one’s own side comforting things to say to itself.
But Blair’s account is incomplete in precisely the way Blairism is often incomplete. It sees change more clearly than it sees security. It sees adaptation more clearly than it sees equality. It sees the need for Britain to face forwards, but not always the equally important need for people to believe that the future is being made with them and for them, rather than done to them by clever people who will not live with the consequences.
That is where Tom Watson’s response is useful. Watson’s argument, as I read it, is not that Blair is wrong to demand adaptation. It is that adaptation without fairness is not enough. The radical centre cannot be only a doctrine of reform, technology and growth. It has to be a doctrine of equality, security and democratic consent. Otherwise it becomes modernisation with the moral content stripped out.
This is the distinction the next Labour argument needs. The choice is not between Blairite modernisation and left-wing comfort politics. That is too neat, and much too convenient for everyone involved. The real question is whether Labour can produce a politics that is modernising and egalitarian at the same time.
New Labour, at its best, was able to do that because Blair and Brown, in their different and often mutually poisonous ways, held together two necessary truths. Blair understood change, national adaptability, the need to make Britain face forwards. Brown understood inequality, poverty, the role of the state in altering life chances, and the moral seriousness of redistribution. This is a simplification, obviously. All useful political memories are simplifications. But it captures something real.
The last successful Labour project was not simply a cult of managerial competence. Nor was it simply a programme of redistribution. It combined modernity with investment, reform with social mobility, constitutional change with public service improvement, and national confidence with a moral concern for those excluded from opportunity. It did not always do this well, and when it did, it often did it with an unbearable degree of self-congratulation. But it had a story.
The country Blair governed no longer exists. That is the point his admirers sometimes miss. The economy is weaker. Housing is more punishing. Work is less secure. Trust is lower. Public services are more strained. The promise that globalisation and technological change would lift all boats now sounds, to many people, less like optimism than a cruel joke told by someone who owns a boat.
So yes, Labour needs growth. Of course it does. Without growth, social democracy becomes an argument about how to distribute disappointment. But growth by itself is not a moral purpose. People have lived through too many versions of national success that did not quite reach them. They have heard too many clever people explain why the graph is improving while their rent rises, their bus disappears, their GP surgery becomes unreachable, and their children cannot imagine buying a home.
This is why AI cannot be treated only as a productivity question. Blair is right that it will reshape government and the economy. He is right that a state which cannot use modern technology will become slower, weaker and more expensive. But a Labour account of AI has to ask different questions too. Who owns the gains? Who bears the risks? What happens to young people if entry-level work is automated away before they have acquired the experience that makes them employable? What happens to training if every firm praises it in public and avoids funding it in private? What happens to dignity when work becomes more monitored, more precarious, more easily replaceable?
The same is true of welfare reform, public service reform, policing technology and the green transition. The question is not simply whether change is necessary. Often it is. The question is whether Labour can make change legitimate. That requires more than a plan. It requires a social contract.
This is also why the current debate cannot be reduced to Starmer’s personal limitations, though those limitations are real. Dunt’s sharper point is about the qualities required to govern: vision, delivery, courage, decision-making and curiosity. Those are not always the qualities British politics selects for. Parties often reward loyalty, message discipline, caution and the ability to survive internal systems without frightening anyone important. These are not useless qualities. But they are not the same as curiosity, strategic imagination or the capacity to make decisions under pressure.
Starmer’s particular tragedy may be that the traits which made him electorally plausible after 2019 are not the traits the moment now demands. His caution was once reassuring. His seriousness was once a relief. His refusal to emote theatrically was once a useful contrast with Johnsonian narcissism. But government changes the test. What looked like discipline in opposition can look like drift in office. What looked like restraint can become an inability to define the argument. What looked like seriousness can become a fear of politics itself.
There is a danger here, though. The Labour Party is very good at turning strategic problems into leadership psychodrama. It is perhaps the one national industry in which we remain world-leading. A party can always persuade itself that somewhere, just offstage, there is a leader who will resolve all tensions by force of personality. The right speech. The right accent. The right regional biography. The right soft-focus video. The right mixture of toughness and empathy, which usually means whatever the person speaking already wanted.
But the question is not simply whether Labour has the right Prime Minister. It is whether Labour has a governing project capable of surviving whoever the Prime Minister is.
That project cannot be a memory of New Labour. Nor can it be a retreat into a comforting left politics that treats public anger as proof of its own virtue. It has to begin from the world as it is: poorer than it should be, angrier than it used to be, more insecure than polite politics likes to admit, and increasingly vulnerable to parties which turn decline into resentment.
Labour’s answer cannot be to triangulate around Reform in slightly softer language. That is not realism. It is a category error. Reform’s strength does not come merely from its position on immigration, or from culture war theatre, or from Farage’s apparently inexhaustible ability to look like a man complaining about a hotel breakfast. It comes from the fact that too much of life in Britain feels broken, expensive, insecure and rigged. Mimicking Reform’s language does not answer that. It confirms their premise.
A serious Labour project would start somewhere else. It would say that Britain needs to adapt to the future, but that the future must be made fair. It would say that growth matters, but that growth must improve ordinary lives rather than merely decorate Treasury forecasts. It would say that technology matters, but that people are citizens, workers and neighbours before they are data points. It would say that public services need reform, but that reform must be done with the people who use and deliver them, not imposed from a sealed room in Whitehall. It would say that the state must become more capable, but also less remote. It would understand that equality is not only about income, but about power, security, place, dignity and childhood.
This would be neither nostalgic nor timid. In fact, it would require more courage than either Blairite adaptation without equality or left comfort politics without delivery. It would require Labour to say hard things to the public. Not everything can be fixed by taxing a handful of billionaires. Not every demand can be met at once. The state cannot repair fourteen years of damage instantly. Immigration is economically and socially necessary, but it has to be governed well and explained honestly. Net zero will require disruption, but the alternative is worse. Public services need more money, but money without reform will not be enough. Europe matters, and Britain will not prosper by pretending geography is optional.
That is what leadership is for. Not to recite public opinion back to itself, but to shape it. Not to avoid trade-offs, but to explain them. Not to make politics feel painless, but to make sacrifice feel purposeful.
The mistake Labour must avoid is assuming that because Blair’s prescription is flawed, his diagnosis can be ignored. This is a comforting error. It allows the party to preserve all its existing habits. Blair can be dismissed as out of touch. Starmer can be defended as merely unlucky. The missions can remain on the website. The machine can continue producing announcements. Everyone can agree that the alternative is worse, which it is, and then wonder why the public remains stubbornly ungrateful.
But the public is not obliged to be grateful for the absence of catastrophe. It is not enough to say that Labour is better than the Conservatives. It is not enough to say that Reform would be worse. Both things are true. Neither is a project.
This is why ‘competence’ becomes such a seductive but dangerous word. It sounds serious. It sounds adult. It sounds like the opposite of everything that went wrong before. But competence without direction becomes maintenance. And maintenance, however necessary, cannot meet a moment of national decline.
Labour needs something larger. It needs a story about work, power, technology, climate, security, care, place and democracy. It needs to connect the everyday frustrations of people’s lives to a plausible account of national repair. It needs delivery machinery, yes, but machinery pointed at something. It needs to stop treating values as decorative language attached to policy, and start treating them as the test by which policy is judged.
Blair is not the answer to Labour’s present crisis. The country has changed too much, and his own account leaves too much out. But he has put the right question back on the table. Dunt sharpens it into a question of governing capacity. Watson sharpens it into a question of equality and social contract. Taken together, they point towards the real problem.
Labour does not need to become Blairite again. It does need to remember that government requires purpose as well as process. It does not need to worship at the altar of the radical centre. It does need to become radical enough to face the future, and Labour enough to make that future fair.
The question is not whether Labour should listen to Tony Blair. It is whether Labour can answer him.
What is this government for?
Annotated bibliography
Tony Blair, ‘The Labour Party Is Playing With Fire Over Its Future and the Future of the Country’, Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. Used as the main irritant and provocation for the piece: Blair’s critique of Labour’s lack of coherent plan, his emphasis on the radical centre, technology, growth and state reform, and the points where his policy prescriptions become morally and politically contestable for Labour. (https://institute.global/insights/politics-and-governance/the-labour-party-is-playing-with-fire-over-its-future-and-the-future-of-the-country)
Labour Party, ‘Plan for Change’. Used to ground the claim that the five missions and formal language of mission-led government still exist; the argument is not that Labour has literally abandoned the missions, but that they are not presently functioning as a governing story. (https://labour.org.uk/plan-for-change/)
UK Government, ‘Plan for Change’. Used as the official government framing of the missions: growth, NHS, safer streets, opportunity and clean energy, set within a wider promise of national renewal. (https://www.gov.uk/missions)
Institute for Government, ‘Keir Starmer’s “Plan for Change” is necessary — and overdue’. Used to support the point that Labour’s mission language has shifted through several framings, and that consistency and staying power are essential if missions are to discipline government rather than merely organise announcements. (https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/comment/keir-starmers-plan-change)
Ian Dunt, ‘How to build a good Prime Minister’. Used for the distinction between vision, policy and delivery, and for the wider argument that Britain is not ungovernable but badly governed.
Tom Watson, ‘Blair is right. But the radical centre needs equality‘. Used for the balancing argument: Blair is right about adaptation, but incomplete without equality, democratic consent and a new social contract.
The Guardian, ‘Keir Starmer defends policy choices in rebuttal of Blair’s criticism’. Used for live political context around Starmer’s response to Blair, including the dispute over workers’ rights, net zero, and Blair’s criticism of Starmer’s position on Iran. (https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/may/28/keir-starmer-defends-policies-tony-blair-criticism-labour)