Andrew Duff / Jun 2026
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Those of us who are not Labour party members are mightily curious about Tony Blair's recent, earnest, essay The Labour Party is Playing with Fire. Its publication has provoked columns of negative reaction from inside Labour, including from the two leading candidates for the leadership, Andy Burnham and Wes Streeting. Labour is in an unhappy state and Blair pours salt on the wounds.
The former prime minister makes some telling points, uncomfortable though they may be for the ruling party. Where he goes awry, however, he goes big. Characteristically, Blair pleads for Britain to seek ever closer relations with the USA. In this he copies Peter Mandelson's doomed Ditchley lecture of last September. The somewhat desperate yearning for America skews Blair's attitude to the European Union, as it did indeed during his premiership from 1997 to 2007. At that time Blair blundered in tying the UK closely to the Middle East adventures of President George W. Bush. To repeat the mistake today under President Donald J. Trump would be a terrible disaster, only adding to Britain's very isolation against which Blair, rightly, warns.
"The cumulative risk for Britain is that we become frighteningly insular: wary of America because of President Trump; out of Europe because we think it inconsistent with national sovereignty; considering China as an ‘enemy state’; nervous allies of the Gulf States because they’re not democracies; and not much interested in the developing world because they’re poor and potentially liable to immigrate. The hardest part is our relationship with Europe."
Blair the European has always been a bundle of contradictions. While believing himself sincerely to be 'pro-European', Blair has never liked or trusted the institutions of the European Union. As Margaret Thatcher before him, Blair resented the criticism he faced at the level of the European Council. He writes: "No one who has been through the maze of European Councils, Commission bureaucracy and the often ugly compromises of EU membership can be a starry-eyed proponent of Europe as presently constructed." Blair disliked in particular the European Parliament, not least the contingent of British left-wing Labour MEPs.
Tony Blair the prime minster used to bang on about the reform of Europe, just as David Cameron did later. But in practice both men proudly adopted eurosceptic 'red lines', giving ground to federalist reforms only when they had to. While protesting to the Liberal Democrats' Roy Jenkins and Paddy Ashdown that he really wanted to join the euro, Blair let Gordon Brown easily outmanoeuvre him to frustrate that endeavour. He clung to the Tory government's UK opt-outs in EU justice and home affairs; he attempted to cop out of the EU's Charter of Fundamental Rights; he fiercely defended the national veto in foreign policy and resisted the development of an EU defence policy that challenged NATO. Blair's support for EU enlargement was motivated by the belief that the new member states from central and eastern Europe would serve to dilute the move to federalism. He sent the arch-Brexiteer Gisela Stuart as his representative at the constitutional convention on the future of Europe in 2002-04 and was relieved, with her, when the French referendum in 2005 scuppered the new constitutional treaty.
The nub of Blair's argument today is that although Brexit was highly regrettable, it need not and cannot be overturned in the foreseeable future. Britain must become richer and stronger before it will be ready to negotiate terms with the EU. Quite how Britain is to become richer and stronger without joining the EU first is not explained.
"There is a developing sense that as the country becomes more ‘European’, and British opinion moves against Brexit, then at some point it is ripe to enter a debate about ‘going back’. This is not a strategy. It is true that what is crazy is to be where we’re presently heading – that is, becoming ‘European’ in our practices while being out of Europe. But if we want to go back into some sort of structured relationship with Europe, we can only do so from a position of economic strength. We must be at the farthest end of European competitiveness. At present, we’re not. Any structured relationship will require a negotiation. And that negotiation will have to be from strength and not weakness."
Blair hopes that Germany's conservative Chancellor Merz will be forceful in the European Council in the implementation of the Draghi report on competitiveness (presumably without Mario Draghi's preferred elements of fiscal union). Ironically, Blair finds the current European Parliament, with its increasing number of far-right MEPs, "more pragmatic" than previously. Yet he deplores what he sees as the EU's essential hostility to and over-regulation of US-based technological innovation.
Instead of launching a new membership bid, Britain should now be busy lecturing Europeans about AI as well as seeking a "structured, formal relationship" with the EU based on the pillars of energy and defence. These are policies which, according to Blair, the UK must pursue from outside the Union in the expectation that Brussels will then adopt a variable and differentiated approach to integration more suitable for Britain. He concludes:-
"So, what Britain should do is to say to our European ‘partners’: we want to come back to a structured, formal relationship with Europe, but this can’t be a take-it-or-leave-it offer on either side. We want to engage now in the European debate about its future. We will build strong pillars of partnership with Europe on defence and energy, where already it is clear we have huge common interests. And we need a robust dialogue on technology policy."
None of what Blair says is either very new or, given his track record in EU affairs, surprising. But he will disappoint many in his party and across the wider plane of progressive politics that he hankers after the American relationship and clings to Britain's traditional inhibitions about joining the European federation. Tony Blair misses the opportunity to defend the values of the European Union against the deprecations of the Trump administration. Those of us who are not Labour party members may hope for a new Labour prime minister who, though it be hard, breaks with Blair on Europe.
Andrew Duff left the Labour Party to join the Liberals in 1974. He was a Member of the European Parliament from 1999 to 2014.
