Labour needs 'fundamental reconstruction' to survive, Blair warns to mark party's 120th anniversary

Labour needs to undergo “fundamental reconstruction” in order to survive, Tony Blair will warn the leadership candidates as he marks the 120th anniversary of the party’s founding.

As Sir Keir Starmer, Lisa Nandy, and Rebecca Long-Bailey compete to succeed Jeremy Corbyn, the former Labour prime minister will insist that “retreating to a narrow part of the left” always ends in defeat.

Recognising his own toxicity among party members – 62 per cent viewed him unfavourably in recent poll – Mr Blair will stop short of endorsing a candidate vying to take the party into the 2024 general election.

His intervention comes as Labour prepares to send out ballots to its half a million members in the coming days before the party unveils its next leader at a special conference on 4 April.

But Mr Blair will warn the candidates that “nothing less than ‘born again’ head to toe renewal will do” if the party is to win back power from Boris Johnson and deprive the Conservatives fifth term in office.

Speaking in Westminster on Thursday, Mr Blair, who won three consecutive general elections, will say: “Out of 120 years, Labour has been in power for just over 30 of them.

“That is a stark statistic. We now have another Tory government for five years; and possibly for ten. Were that to happen, Labour would have been in office for less than a quarter of its existence.”

He will claim that Labour has won previously when it secured the centre-ground in British politics, and “despite this obviously being true, we have exhibited an extraordinary attachment to retreating to a narrow part of the left which has always ended in defeat”.

Mr Blair will add: “The Labour Party faces challenges peculiar to its own history, magnified by the contemporary ones of its global family. I can’t honestly see any path forward other than fundamental reconstruction”.

He will say that Labour needed to discover a "radical" form of politics for the 21st century, rather than adopt a left-wing approach propagated in the last. “The problem is that we have defined radical politics by a policy agenda which is hopelessly out of date, with 'moderate' politics being just a milder version of it.

"We must redefine what radical means. We're living through a technology revolution which is the 21st century equivalent of the 19th century Industrial Revolution.

"It will change everything and therefore everything should change including radical reorientation of government. This is the context in which we tackle inequality, promote social justice and redistribute power."

Asked in the most recent leadership hustings who they believed was the greatest Labour leader of the last 50 years, all three of the leadership candidates avoided mentioning Mr Blair.

Admitting that his “advice isn’t particularly welcome” to today’s Labour Party, however, Mr Blair will add: “But then it occurred to me that there are only two people born in the last 120 years who have actually won an election for Labour. And alas Harold Wilson is long gone."