Ex-UK PM Blair hints at possible return to frontline politics

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair on Friday hinted at a possible return to frontline politics as he asserted that the UK at present seemed a “one-party state”.

The former Labour party leader described it as a “tragedy” that the only two choices facing the British electorate were the Conservative party pursuing a hard Brexit and “an ultra-left Labour Party”.

“I don’t know if there’s a role for me...There’s a limit to what I want to say about my own position at this moment,” he told the ‘Esquire’ magazine.

All I can say is that this is where politics is at. Do I feel strongly about it? Yes, I do. Am I very motivated by that? Yes. Where do I go from here? What exactly do I do? That’s an open question,” he said.

Blair, who is unpopular with a section of the party and electorate for his decision to lead Britain into war in Iraq in 2003, had recently announced a scale back of his consultancy business to focus more on charity work.

“It’s a tragedy for British politics if the choice before the country is a Conservative government going for a hard Brexit and an ultra-left Labour Party, that believes in a set of policies that takes us back to the sixties. In the UK at the moment you’ve got a one-party state,” he said.

Blair said Labour under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn had shifted from a party of government to an “ultra-left” culture “which believes that the action on the street is as important as the action in Parliament”.

“It’s a huge problem because they live in a world that is very, very remote from the way that broad mass of people really think. The reason their policies shouldn’t be supported isn’t because they’re wildly radical, it’s because they’re not,” Blair said.