Corbyn has made Labour a fringe party, moans Blair: Former PM says the rise of the current leader is a tragedy

• e-mail

Tony Blair has launched a lacerating attack on Jeremy Corbyn, who he accused of reducing the Labour Party to a ‘fringe protest movement’.

The former prime minister said the current predicament of his party was a ‘tragedy’ and suggested the current leadership do not even aspire to govern the country.

In an article for the Christmas edition of the Spectator magazine, he launched a passionate defence of New Labour, saying it had a clear ‘moral purpose’ but was also pragmatic about policy decisions.

Tony Blair has launched a lacerating attack on Jeremy Corbyn, who he accused of reducing the Labour Party to a ‘fringe protest movement’

By contrast, he said Mr Corbyn and his allies were guilty of ‘boasting’ about their values as a way of ‘avoiding... hard thinking’ about the real world.

The article is Mr Blair’s first intervention in domestic politics since the hard-Left Islington MP Mr Corbyn won the Labour leadership in September.

Since then Labour has been engulfed by internal division as Mr Corbyn and his MPs clashed over his policy positions on the Trident nuclear deterrent and bombing in Syria.

In his article, Mr Blair said ‘all wings of the Labour Party which support the notion of the Labour Party as a party aspiring to govern, rather than as a fringe protest movement, agree on the tragedy of the Labour Party’s current position.’

The party was now ‘in danger of not asking the right questions never mind failing to get the right answers,’ he wrote.

‘All of it is about applying values with an open mind; not boasting of our values as a way of avoiding the hard thinking the changing world insists upon,’ he added.

‘Many – especially in today’s Labour Party – felt we lost our way in Government. I feel we found it.

‘But I accept in the process we failed to convince enough people that the true progressives are always the modernisers, not because they discard principle but because they have the courage to adhere to it when confronted with reality.’

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn (right) welcomes newly elected Oldham West and Royton MP, Jim McMahon to the Houses of Parliament in London

In an article for the Christmas edition of the Spectator magazine, Blair launched a passionate defence of New Labour, saying it had a clear ‘moral purpose’ but was also pragmatic about policy decisions

On his record, Mr Blair concluded: ‘Of course we made mistakes, but we were a radical reforming Government.

‘And we tried to put the moral purpose of the Labour Party into practice, the only sort of morality worth very much.’ The former prime minister said New Labour had ‘effectively discarded’ ideological socialism but still had ‘very well articulated’ values.

On foreign policy, Mr Blair defended his attempt to counter Islamist extremism, and ally with the US.

In an echo of Hilary Benn’s speech to the House of Commons last week in the debate on bombing Syria, Mr Blair said Islamist extremism was a ‘modern form of fascism’.

During the Labour leadership election campaign, Mr Blair made a series of interventions in which he attacked Mr Corbyn’s politics. He urged Labour supporters not to walk ‘over the cliff edge’ into ‘annihilation’ by backing Mr Corbyn.

Green MP Caroline Lucas has quit as a patron of the Stop the War Coalition – piling further pressure on Jeremy Corbyn over his links to the hard-Left group. Miss Lucas, who had served as vice-president, said she was ‘stepping back’ due to work commitments and because she ‘didn’t support’ some recent positions it had adopted.