Recent speech by Tony Blair.
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Don’t allow Labour become trans ‘pressure group’, pleads Tony Blair
Labour will lose the “culture war” with the right if it makes transgender rights “our big thing”, Tony Blair has said.
The former prime minister said that Labour needed “complete renewal” if it is to stand any chance of winning power again and warned that the party must not become an “NGO or a pressure group”.
Transgender rights have become central in the Labour leadership contest. Rebecca Long-Bailey and Lisa Nandy signed a pledge card calling for the party to expel “transphobic” members. However, Sir Keir Starmer, the frontrunner, has refused to sign it.
The 12-point pledge card produced by the Labour Campaign for Trans Rights describes some organisations, including Women’s Place UK — a group that campaigns for “safe spaces” for women — as “trans-exclusionist hate groups”.
In a speech at Kings College London, Mr Blair said: “You have got to distinguish between the advocacy of things that are right — gay rights, transgender rights, whatever it is — and launching yourself politically into a culture war with the right.
“If you go, ‘Transgender rights is our big thing,’ and the right goes, ‘Immigration controls is our big thing,’ you’re going to lose that. You’re not going to be advancing any of the things you want to do.”
Asked if he would sign the pledge card, Mr Blair said: “No, I wouldn’t. There are all sorts of difficult things that have to be resolved. There’s a proper consultation going on, we should do it in that way.
“If you’re going out there and trying to advocate things in a finger-jabbing, sectarian way — ‘If you don’t sign up to what I’m saying, I’m going to come and disrupt your meetings and shout at you’ — you’re not going to win that battle. You’re just going to put a whole load of people off.”
Mr Blair earlier said: “The Labour Party is not an NGO and not a pressure group. Its aim is not to trend on Twitter or have celebrities fawn over it or glory in a bubble of adulation.
“Our task is to win power, to get our hands stuck into the muddy mangle of governing, where out of it can be pulled the prize of progress. Our mission is to take pauses and make them practical, to say ‘yes’ to ambition and ‘no’ to over ambition. To go to where the people are and show them together we can do better.”
Mr Blair said that the public had “shut the door in our face” during the election. “Our latest defeat was entirely predictable and predicted. We went into the election with a leader with a 40 per cent approval rating on political ground chosen by our opponents and a manifesto promising the Earth, but from a planet other than Earth.
“We have exhibited an extraordinary attachment to retreating into a narrow part of the left which has always ended in defeat. When defeated we say we will listen to the people before deciding what they are saying is too uncomfortable and lapse into our comfort zone only to edge with agonised slowness back to where we should have been in the first place,” he said.