Sir Tony Blair has revealed his true colours, perhaps.
He seems to have issued a document indicating that he’s to the right of me, if anything, rather than to the left.
What has happened? Why is it so different from what he did in Government?
The pamphlet as a whole is interesting. It has the normal platitudes you would expect of a former party leader.
He says sort of marginally condescending things about Andy Burnham. He similarly looks down upon Wes Streeting. He pats Keir Starmer gently on the head.
He makes a pretty feeble defence of the European Union, but he gets to the meat of his recommendations with 10 clear policy recommendations.
And it’s worth going through some of these because they’re quite a change from what happened when he was in charge.
So one of them, planning reform and deregulation, something he simply didn’t do when he was in office.
Jacob Rees-Mogg says Tony Blair has ‘revealed his true colours’
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GB NEWS
But I would agree, we need to get rid of the socialist Town and Country Planning Act and free up planning.
Even better, the author of essentially our net zero policy suddenly loved swanning around the world and signing accords to limit emissions wants cheaper energy. Well, so do I.
He doesn’t quite draw the conclusion that we need shale gas fracking, but he goes quite a long way down that path and indicates we should use all that we’ve got from the North Sea to make the cost of energy lower.
But it gets better. He wants to reform welfare. Now it’s worth looking at how welfare exploded when he was prime minister, because it’s slightly do as I say, not as I do. When he was prime minister, the welfare bill went up and up, particularly including pensions.
But realising as a former Labour leader that dealing with welfare is essential to making the sums add up for the British economy is really important.
Challenging the triple lock for pensioners is really important, because the country can’t afford to go on living beyond its means if it wishes to be a serious country.
This is something Nigel Farage isn’t brave enough to say, even people on the right have shied away from telling this uncomfortable truth.
But even further goes on, Sir Anthony Blair, in saying that we need to change the NHS. Whole system healthcare reform.
This is the sort of thing that if the Tories said it, we’d be accused of privatising the NHS. A really remarkable change from somebody who, in office just threw cash at the NHS.
That was his approach then, and perhaps best and most important of all, in terms of the one sinner who repented, is what he’s saying on immigration, because Tony Blair changed the nature of the country by immigration, it was a clear policy to change the culture of this country to set a year zero in 1997.
You can see the figures on immigration, up from 48,000 to 273,000 a year in his period of office. And now he says whatever it takes to solve the illegal immigration crisis, which must mean leaving the European Convention on Human Rights and repealing the Human Rights Act that Sir Tony himself introduced.
I rejoice, I open the champagne, I celebrate when people come round to conservative views. I noticed people grow up. They often become more conservative.
Perhaps he’s now reached the age when most people retire. He’s got some common sense.