Tony Blair tells Labour to scrap the triple lock and rip up the welfare system
Key Points
- Tony Blair has called on the Labour government to scrap the pensions triple lock and fundamentally reform the welfare system.
- Blair warned the UK could spend more on incapacity and disability benefits than on defence by the end of this decade.
- The former prime minister said mental-health spending has exploded and the system at points incentivises people not to work.
- Blair urged Labour to accept any Conservative offer to work together on welfare reform.
- The intervention is part of a wider essay attacking the direction of Keir Starmer's government and calling for a "Radical Centre" agenda.
Tony Blair has told the Labour government to scrap the pensions triple lock and overhaul the welfare system, warning the UK could soon spend more on incapacity and disability benefits than on defence.
The former prime minister set out the demand in a lengthy essay published by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, arguing that Keir Starmer’s government is governing from a “traditional Labour ‘soft left’ position” and lacks a coherent plan for the country.
Blair said welfare reform was one of ten priorities Britain must address to avoid “relegation from the Premier League of nations”.
In one passage he wrote that by the end of this decade the UK could be spending more on incapacity and disability benefits than on defence, adding that “no serious country can do that”.
He said mental-health spending had exploded over the past five or six years, that the system at points incentivises people not to work, and that the pensions triple lock is unaffordable long term.
The triple lock guarantees the state pension rises each year by the highest of inflation, average earnings growth or 2.5%. It has been in place since 2010 and is currently backed by both Labour and the Conservatives, though the Office for Budget Responsibility has repeatedly warned of its long-term cost to the public finances.
Blair called for fundamental reform of welfare over time and said the British people “know, deep down, the necessity of doing it”.
He added that if the Conservative Party repeats its offer of working together on welfare, Labour should accept it.
The intervention forms part of a wider attack on the direction of the government.
Blair said Labour won the 2024 election by being “an acceptable default option” to a Conservative government the country had rejected, rather than by acclaim, and accused the party of having “no properly thought-through analysis of how the world was changing”.
He warned that trying to force the prime minister out before settling on a policy direction was “not a serious way of conducting ourselves”.
He also called for cheaper energy to be prioritised over net zero, for the remaining North Sea oil and gas reserves to be used, for a transformative programme of planning reform and deregulation, and for whole-system healthcare reform mixing private and public provision.
On the NHS, he argued for an end to the “old shibboleths which have turned the NHS into a point of theological principle rather than a modern service”.
Blair framed the entire agenda around what he called the Radical Centre, defined as the political space “where you put policy first and politics last”.
He said Labour’s only electorally viable strategy was to occupy that space, warning that the party risked being “sliced to the left and right of itself” by the Greens, Reform and a Conservative Party offering “Reform Lite”.
