Former Labour prime minister Tony Blair, said in an interview that Remainers must accept that they have "lost the argument" and shift towards a new position, the New Statesman reported on Thursday.
It was “terrible mistake to ever agree to a Brexit general election, as people like me tried to tell the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats”, he said.
“But we did it, we paid the price for it. We’ve lost the debate and Brexit is now going to happen".
He called on remain supporters to “pivot to a completely new position...We’re going to have to be constructive about it and see how Britain develops a constructive relationship with Europe and finds its new niche in the world", the day before the UK is geared up to leave the European Union.
Following Labour's fourth-consecutive defeat, Blair questioned the claim of the Labour leadership to the title of "radical".
“The thing I would emphasise more than anything else is that we’ve got to redefine the word ‘radical’, because what the Labour Party – and not just the Labour Party, we see this around the world – puts forward as radical today is not actually radical, it’s small-C conservative”.
“I wish that… we didn’t have a Tory government, but my anxiety at the moment is that Labour learns the lessons of defeat", the former Prime Minister said in response to a question Boris Johnson's record in power.
“It’s got to learn those lessons properly otherwise we are going to carry on having Tory governments.” Blair noted that the 120th anniversary of the Labour Party’s creation was approaching in February. “It will be a time for reflection about how many years of that 120 the Labour Party has spent in government".
These comments from the former Labour leader come after a scathing defeat for the party in the December 2019 general election, which saw the Conservatives reelected with a substantial majority.
Boris Johnson's slogan and effective platform throughout the election campaign was "Get Brexit Done".
Tony Blair has been a fierce opponent of Brexit since the referendum and has frequently stood on a platform of advocating a second referendum.
He has ever attacked outgoing Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn for what he considers to be a failure of leadership in opposing Brexit and for turning the Labour Party into a "glorified protest movement".
Corbyn oversaw a fundamental shift in the Labour Party since his election to leader in 2015, seeing it rededicate itself from to nationalisation of utilities, anti-interventionist foreign policy aims, and green politics.
