Blair necessities

I met Tony Blair once. It was in 2000, on a Wednesday, immediately after prime minister’s questions. It was during the period when the seemingly invincible Blair had begun to take a bit of a bashing from the then leader of the Conservatives, William Hague.

At first he was clearly preoccupied, probably wishing he hadn’t agreed to this photo opportunity with a group of eager teenagers. But then he suddenly snapped out of it, chatting away and asking me where I’d got my suntan (I’d just come back from my first holiday with friends).

Later, I would be embarrassed by the photos that were taken that day, having come to view Blair as someone with incomprehensible morals and motivations.

But there’s still no doubt that he was one hell of a politician. And today, once again, he’s set out the right questions for Labour to be asking itself in order to be a party that appears to have a plan.

In the article he’s written for the New Statesman, the first question he suggests the party should ask is:

‘What is driving the rise in housing benefit spending, and if it is the absence of housing, how do we build more?’

He says that Labour’s fierce resistance to austerity and welfare cuts risks reducing it to a party of protest, and unless it asks the right questions and comes up with some answers that will be the case.

At the moment some Labour politicians are tweeting every time they meet somebody hit by the bedroom tax - but we already know how terrible welfare reform is going to be for communities across the UK. They’re saying no more or no less than the hundreds of others who are trying to highlight the impact of the coalition government’s actions.

What is needed from Labour is something concrete. If they got back into power at the next general election in two years’ time, how would they make things better for their constituents who are having to choose between heating their homes and feeding their children? And how will they go about building more much-needed homes?

I won’t be dusting off the photos of my grinning 18-year-old self with Tony Blair, but I do think that at least some of the points he raised in his New Statesman article have come at the right time.