Yves here. Although this post is a very long write-up on the vampire Tony Blair, I hope readers outside the UK will take note, as the type of case Blair is trying to make will surely be taken elsewhere. Blair’s warm neoliberal advocacy uses AI to legally undermine central worker protections and safety nets. Worse still, by insulting intelligence, he tried to portray radical, pro-class positions as radical centrism. The only big part is the durability.
By Richard Murphy, Associate Professor of Accounting Practice at Sheffield University Management School and director of Tax Research LLP. It was originally published on Funding the Future
Tony Blair published a 5,600 word essay on the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change this morning, which was presented across the right-wing and mainstream media (is there a difference?) as a warning to Labor about going left. That, however, is a gross misrepresentation of what Blair is saying. This is a blatant and hopeless attempt to revive the neoliberal establishment by dressing it up as a reality for the age of AI.
I commented here, only yesterday, on the Thatcherite term TINA – nothing else- and suggested that there is a TIARA situation – there is a real alternative. Blair still flatly denies that fact. His article is full on TINA.
Blair’s main argument is straightforward. He says Britain is entering an era of great disruption driven by artificial intelligence, globalization, the decline of Western power, climate pressures, demographic change and a new global economic order. He argues that politics as we know it is out of date, and says Labor has no coherent response to this change.
So far, so good, so even under Labor they don’t have an answer to those things, because they obviously don’t have one. What Blair doesn’t realize is that this is because neoliberal politics – of the kind he and Bill Clinton helped create – is not designed to have those answers. Its overall purpose is not to answer questions, but to suggest that these can be found in the market.
Accepting this point entirely, according to Blair, Labour’s natural reaction to political difficulties is to retreat into what he calls the comfort zone of left politics by suggesting:
- more or better social security,
- additional rule,
- high taxes, especially on wealth,
- strong labor rights,
- doubts about business, too
- adherence to environmental targets, in his opinion, harms competition.
Or managing the things people want, in other words. He thinks that this is dangerous for the election and it hurts him economically.
The essay instead advocates what Blair still mockingly calls a powerful institution. In practice, it seems that this would mean accepting that growth is always good and undeniably good, regardless of the consequences, with the following things from that consideration:
- a clearly pro-business economic agenda;
- accepting AI and technological disruption as inevitable;
- reorganizing what he calls welfare to force greater participation in the labor market as if we were all to be slaves to a machine to increase the wealth of the few;
- weakening what he sees as anti-growth regulations;
- prioritizing cheap energy over rapid decarbonisation;
- increasing links to global finance and private sector delivery, and
- rebuilding Britain’s geopolitical strategy in terms of economic competitiveness.
It also means (and I support this observation from his Radio 4 interview this morning):
- more private involvement in the NHS as the private sector has the knowledge to reform health care that health professionals do not have;
- embracing the full potential of AI;
- to deny that we have many disabled people now, because their number should be reduced as they cannot afford it, which is stated as a fact, and
- there is now no difference between left and right.
The last point is particularly important. He says there is only one solution now, and that is the one he is proposing. That means he thinks that this party called here is a single transferable political party exists, it should exist, and there is no room for anything else because, Blair suggests, it answers the challenge of democracy, that is it provides choice, and you have a problem with that because choice, he argues, gets in the way of business delivery. What Blair said at the time was anti-democratic.
This is also evident in his argument that Brexit cannot be truly reversed, and that Britain should seek a more structured relationship with Europe in the long term. Choice is not an option in this case, therefore, an implicit claim in his insistence that the UK must come to terms with a world increasingly shaped by the superpowers and technology oligopolies dominated by the US and China. In doing so, he exonerates Trump and suggests that those challenging him, such as Canada’s Mark Carney, are missing his point. Blair’s claim is that Trump is right: it is not, he says, the job of the USA to protect other countries. No wonder he’s in Trump Peace Board.
What stands out, however, is what Blair doesn’t seem willing to face.
First, the essay assumes that technological acceleration is inherently desirable and that the role of politics is to adapt to it, rather than to control democracy over it. AI is considered destiny, not choice.
Second, Blair continues to frame economic success primarily through the lens of competition, growth and business confidence, the very ideas that helped create the insecurity, inequality and political divisions that are now undermining Western democracies. He flatly rejected Andy Burnham’s challenge to neoliberalism in his Radio 4 interview, suggesting that Burnham is confused, if on this matter, out of place.
Third, the article largely ignores the deep question now facing politics everywhere, what happens when technological change destroys social cohesion faster than institutions can rebuild, leading to problems in security and property management?
And finally, there is a deep paradox at the heart of all interventions. Blair presents himself as identifying the failure of Labour’s political ideology, while at the same time proposing a return to the very neoliberal settlement that created many of today’s problems in the first place.
The result is an important essay not because it provides satisfactory answers, but because it reveals the intellectual exhaustion of the neoliberal establishment itself. Blair realizes that the world is changing fast. He sees AI disrupting labor markets, politics and social ownership. You see that old thoughts are breaking down.
But his answer remains the same as the one neoliberalism has offered for forty years: trust markets, trust technology, trust business, rapid liberalization, adaptation, and the growth of trust that ultimately resolves the resulting social tensions. He says TINA, in other words, if TIARA exists: we can have a politics of care and an economy of hope, and that is all the more important when Blair’s worldview is exactly what most reasonable people no longer believe.
