“The people don’t want ‘politics as usual’. The real reason behind the rise of the leaders from Donald Trump to Giorgia Meloni to Javier Milei is that they answer this call. You can like them or dislike them, but their chief characteristic is they appear to be unbound, not constrained by conventional thinking.”
So says Tony Blair in his essay “The Labour party is playing with fire over its future and the future of the country”, published by his Institute for Global Change this week. Reading his essay as a whole, it seems like Blair feels the same way about himself. He thinks of himself as the disrupter, the one who is prepared to stir things up when others shy away. And there is an unshakeable self-belief that he is always right.
To be fair to Blair, his ability to understand the zeitgeist and to blend it into an explanation of his political and personal agendas have been important parts of what enabled him not only to be the only Labour Leader to have ever won three General Elections but also one of the most consequential British Prince Ministers of the twentieth century. Yet the self-belief that came with these talents has sometimes also led him to fail to see what has been clear many others and to make grotesque errors of judgement that will always mar his legacy – most famously over the invasion of Iraq.
A new world order?
His latest exposition of his world view embodies both the perceptiveness and self-justified blinkers that have characterised much of his life in political leadership.
First the perceptiveness. Blair is right to warn that the future of Labour has to be about much more than personalities. Changing the leader cannot be a substitute for a serious discussion about political direction. He also makes a very strong point about how today’s pace of technological change is no less significant than the industrial revolution was to Britain in the early nineteenth century; about how it will reach into every corner of people’s lives and how addressing this new reality will be central to the efficacy of any serious political strategy.
He is also right to identify the depth of what he describes as epochal changes in geopolitics taking place in our world. Unfortunately, this is also an area where he puts on his blinkers. For Tony Blair, geopolitics seems to come down to superpower politics, where the leaders of the world’s major politics are “Masters of the Universe” and where the task of states like the UK revolves around how to stay close to powerful allies and hopefully both exert some influence over them and secure the economic prosperity that will come from those relationships.
Of course it would be naïve to underplay the importance of the Trumps, Xis and potentially Modis of this world to shaping world events. But they are not the whole story. If they were, how could threat of low-tech Iranian mines and ramshackle gun boats block access to one of the most important waterways in the world with the largest superpower on the planet seemingly unable to do very much about it, however many missiles it has been able to rain down on Iran in recent months.
Come to that how was it that the overwhelming firepower and geopolitical strength of the USA could not follow up its military defeat of Saddam Hussein by bringing the kind of stable “new world order” to the Middle East that Blair and Bush promised? Instead, Iraq was plunged into chaos for years and the kind of extreme Jihadism that previously had little influence in most of the Islamic world (even after 9/11) was given a new lease of life. The legacy of the decision to invade Iraq in 2003 has brought horrific consequences that have extended well beyond the Middle East.
In the opening paragraph of the section of his essay sub-headed “the New World Order”, Blair is clear in his view that:
“Politics – at an international level – has always been primarily about power. It doesn’t mean values are irrelevant. On the contrary. But protection of those values also requires power. Because powerful nations have a habit of getting what they want. And less powerful nations don’t.”
I am not sure the experience of Iraq entirely bears that out. It is not only the decisions of global superpowers that shape what happens in our world but the exercise of asymmetric power too.
Not only that, but maybe if the UK had been more consistent in our defence of values such as the primacy of international law when dealing with Bush over Iraq, and later in our response to some of Trump’s “might is right” foreign adventures before Iran, then maybe, just maybe, we might have helped make today’s world a slightly less dangerous place. I don’t think that was a million miles away from what Canadian Prime Minister, Mark Carney, was getting at in his seminal speech at Davos a few months ago. Tony Blair refers to that speech too in his latest essay, but I think he may have missed the point of it.
A radical centre for politics in the UK?
Let us also not forget the effect that international blunders can have on politics here at home. Tony Blair rightly identifies the increasing disaffection which large numbers of people in Britain feel about what they see as “politics as usual”. There are many things that contribute to that disaffection, and Blair identifies some of them in his essay. But I know from my own 27 years as an MP that a big part of what people feel is that politicians cannot be trusted to tell the truth. Tony Blair may not want to recognise it, but the fact that Britain was taken to war on what turned out to be a false prospectus of protecting our country from weapons of mass destruction that Saddam did not have contributed significantly to the atmosphere of mistrust that has now grown so big. The fact that Tony Blair believed his own propaganda at the time does not alter that.
Tony Blair also provides a highly selective description of what has been happening in the Labour Party In the past few years. He characterises the Starmer government as governing from a traditionally “soft left” position, parked firmly in the party’s “comfort zone”. He chastises Labour for clinging to ambitious manifesto commitments that he says the country can no longer afford and for not levelling with the British people about this.
But Labour’s 2024 manifesto was not full of ambitious commitments. Indeed it was noted more for its blandness. Not only that, but the issues on which the Starmer government has got itself into most trouble – and led to embarrassing U-turns – have been initiatives that did not feature in Labour’s 2024 manifesto at all. The debacles over cuts to the disability benefits, the Winter Fuel Allowance and the tax treatment of family farms are three notable examples.
But Blair is right that the unprecedented unpopularity of the Starmer government is deeply rooted in the public’s perception of its symbolising “the politics as usual” of a political class that feels remote from the reality of their lives and which is unresponsive to their concerns.
That, of course, did not start with the decisions Labour has made in government. The Party won a landslide majority in 2024 with just under 34% of the vote. It was the deep unpopularity of the Conservatives and the eccentricities of Britain’s First Past the Post electoral system that carried Labour to such a decisive victory, not a groundswell of support for what the Party was saying. Indeed, comments about people not knowing what Keir Starmer believes in were commonplace in doorstep conversations well before the General Election.
Tony Blair is correct in observing that a big part of the appeal of right wing populist leaders such as Trump in the USA and Meloni in Italy has been that they appear “unbound, not constrained by conventional thinking”. The same can, of course, be said about Nigel Farage and Reform here in the UK. Their sales pitch is that they are not like the conventional parties that have dominated the political landscape for generations; that they are insurgents and, above all, that they stand for something.
But does Blair’s agenda for a new “Radical Centre” fit the bill to take on both the populist Right and overcome the drift of conventional parties that lack what he describes as the “ballast” that conviction politics brings?
To be fair, he does convey some important challenges. The impact that AI is having on our world is one. So too is his question about whether it makes sense for Britain to impose a moratorium on North Sea oil and gas licences even though it is known that fossil fuels will have to remain part of our energy mix for decades even as we accelerate our transition to green energy. He suggests that the result of withholding licences will not have much of an impact on climate change globally, but that it will leave the UK dependent for longer than necessary on oil and gas imports from countries still extracting fossil fuels in their own territories. These are valid questions and they require more convincing answers answer than they sometimes receive.
Unfortunately, in characterising the issue as “clean energy versus cheaper energy” in interviews following the publication of his essay, Blair has gone further, appearing to criticise the Labour’s commitment to massive investment in renewables and other parts of the green transition as both unaffordable and corrosive of the economic growth he says is the prerequisite for securing Britain’s future prosperity.
This is hardly the outlook of someone “unbound” or “not constrained by conventional thinking.” The threat of climate change is existential for both our country and our planet. Blair says he does not deny this, but does he really think that the transition to a greener economy can be done on the cheap? Would he say the same about investment in the future of AI? And where does he display any radical thinking in the economic and – yes – pro-growth opportunities that accelerated investment in green technologies can bring to the UK.
Perhaps the most obvious gaps in Blair’s agenda, however, are that inequality in Britain today does not seem to enter his thinking and that there is no commitment to do anything about it. Labour leadership hopefuls Andy Burnham and Wes Streeting have already criticised Blair’s essay for this, as has Labour pensions minister Torsten Bell. They are right to do so.
Does Blair seriously believe that the disaffection from politics that so many people feel is unrelated to their life experience of a society that seems to leave them behind, where the cost of living is a daily concern and where they genuinely worry about what the future may look like for their children? The populist Right uses these fears to peddle simplistic and distorted messages that divide communities and offer no future for our country. But the life experiences of today that underlie people’s fears for the future are real. It is a key responsibility of the progressive left – or even the “Radical Centre” to help change those life experiences by crafting policies that can tackle the gross inequalities that have long been a feature of British society and that create an environment which, down the line, feeds into persistent problems of low productivity and sluggish growth.
However, the life experiences of people in Britain as people do not really feature in Blair’s agenda for change at all. He readily advocates raising VAT, rather than taxes on capital gains, to cover revenue shortfalls. But he does not seem concerned that indirect taxes like VAT hit those on low or fixed incomes hardest. He chastises the Starmer government for failing to grasp the nettle of welfare reform but he gives no indication of what the bottom line of principle should be the foundation of social safety nets in the future. Indeed, he doesn’t appear to have noticed that the push-back from Labour MPs that killed off last year’s Welfare Reform bill was not an objection to the principle of reform, but rather the impact of cuts on vulnerable people with disabilities. They will have known from talking to their own constituents about the maze of complications that already face people who, for genuine reasons, apply for things like Personal Independence Payments. There was every reason to believe that the changes the government was attempting to bring in last year would have made a bad system even worse. Tony Blair probably no longer has those personal experiences of vulnerable people trying to navigate their way through opaque bureaucracies to get a bit of support with their living costs. But maybe he should remember that there are others who do.
Just as the lens through which Tony Blair sees world affairs being shaped sees the decisions of superpower leaders as decisive and leaves countries like the UK with an overriding responsibility to stay close to those leaders, so too he displays a somewhat blinkered approach to policy at home. In his eyes, big tech entrepreneurs become the masters of the new domestic universe. They must not be alienated at all costs and conventionally-defined burdens on business must be avoided if growth is not to be jeopardised. As usual, he is not entirely wrong about all of this. The UK would indeed be foolish to concentrate solely on regulating to protect society from the dangers of big tech, without also embracing the massive opportunities AI can bring to transform economies, public services and life chances. At the level of specific policies, he is also right that some of the policy decisions that the Starmer government has made have had negative consequences for employment that really should have been foreseen. Raising revenue by increasing the rate of employers’ contributions to NI rather than looking to other forms of direct taxation to do so is one such example.
But the blinkers are still there, and, in Tony Blair’s eyes, the people of this country, including though civil society, qualify for no more than a walk-on part in shaping the future direction of the UK.
It does not have to be like that. The explosion of anger against conventional approaches to government is being exploited by the populist Right but they did not create it. It comes from real life experiences and real feelings of powerlessness. Progressives need to develop a policy which both tackles inequality and the climate emergency while also embracing the opportunities offered by the technological revolution. But it is also not just about having the right menu of specific policies. It too needs a sense of insurgency; a mission which diffuses power so that people feel more control over their own lives. That mission must contain many elements and it must extend well beyond the world of politics. Civil society must be supported to be a major players in shaping events, not simply a recipient of government policies and a mechanism to compete for government contracts.
We can also make a start by grasping the nettle of long-overdue reforms to the constitution. First in line should be Britain’s archaic electoral system; a system which encourages parties to shun cooperation in favour of telling the electorate that their only role is to deliver just enough votes to enable party leaders to claim a mandate for exercising monopoly power at Westminster even when they have far from majority support across the country as a whole.
It is far from being the whole answer, but the time for a fairer and more democratic electoral system is now.
