Blair decries Corbyn’s ‘terminal ineptitude’ as leader of a cult-like, ‘glorified protest movement’ Labour Party

Tony Blair, the former Labour Party leader and British prime minister from 1997 to 2007, has warned that his party is “marooned on fantasy island” and faces an existential crisis as a result of its shift towards the far left.

Pulling no punches in a speech in central London Wednesday morning, Blair claimed that the rout of Corbyn’s Labour Party in last week's UK general election was “no ordinary defeat.”

“The takeover of the Labour Party by the far left turned it into a glorified protest movement with cult trimmings, utterly incapable of being a credible government,” he said. 

“The result has brought shame on us; we let our country down.”

Referencing Labour’s defeat to ex-prime minister Margaret Thatcher in 1983, Blair remarked that not only is the UK different, but that politics itself is different in the digital age, something which his former party has failed to grapple with effectively.

The former PM lamented Jeremy Corbyn’s “combination of misguided ideology and terminal ineptitude,” by agreeing to a general election while simultaneously pursuing “a path of almost comic indecision” on Brexit, the defining issue of the general election, that alienated all but the most fervent Corbynites. 

The former PM lamented Jeremy Corbyn’s “combination of misguided ideology and terminal ineptitude,” by agreeing to a general election while simultaneously pursuing “a path of almost comic indecision” on Brexit, the defining issue of the general election, that alienated all but the most fervent Corbynites. 

Blair was careful to emphasize that it was Corbyn’s policies, which he distilled as “quasi-revolutionary socialism” and not the man himself he was criticizing. 

Blair won three elections as Labour leader and remains the only Labour leader to have won a general election in the last 45 years. 

The former PM’s remarks accompanied a report just published by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change which states that, despite a clear mandate to win back the hearts and minds of Labour voters in the midlands and the North, Corbyn’s brand of progressivism instead drove them further away: Labour hemorrhaged numerous seats in many of its election heartlands, including the industrialized north.

Meanwhile, Wigan MP Lisa Nandy, Shadow Brexit secretary Keir Starmer, former cabinet minister Yvette Cooper and Birmingham Yardley MP Jess Phillips shadow business secretary Rebecca Long-Bailey are all reportedly considering running to take over from Corbyn.

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