When I read last week that Tony Blair had published a 5,600-word essay on everything that ails Britain, every instinct told me not to read it. But I could not help myself and read it anyway.
The essay, published by Blair’s own institute, covers the world order, AI, China, the transatlantic alliance and the Labour Party’s future. It is a grand “world explanation” piece, just as one would expect from Sir Tony. His arguments are lucid, his diagnosis sharp, and the prose, as always with Blair, elegant.
And yet, knowing it was Blair, I could not bring myself to believe it. For me, this was not a new feeling but something between déjà vu and whiplash because I have read and lived through all of it before.
In 2004, I moved from Germany to London, escaping Gerhard Schröder’s dysfunctional government and a German economy in the doldrums, expecting something different in Britain.
What I found was a country that performed better, at least on paper. Yet as I argued at the time, writing for German and Swiss publications, this was mostly a mirage. The growth was driven by house price inflation, private debt, public borrowing and record levels of migration. But it was not real productivity. And it was not sustainable.
To make matters worse, the British government under Blair was just as dysfunctional as Schröder’s. It was recovering from the Iraq war a year earlier and paralysed by the ongoing war between Blair and his Chancellor Gordon Brown. One scandal followed another.
Yet Blair seemed unfazed by all of it. He still commanded Prime Minister’s Questions with effortless eloquence. He smiled through every crisis and radiated a confidence disconnected from anything happening around him. Never mind the country did not feel like the “Cool Britannia” he had promised, and things were not obviously only getting better, as his 1997 election anthem had vowed.
Under Blair and Brown, the government produced a new law every three hours and fifteen minutes on average. The state’s share of GDP crept above 45 percent. In the industrial regions of northern England, government spending reached levels that the historian Niall Ferguson called “quasi-Soviet.”
Two Fleet Street economics editors, one from The Guardian and the other from The Mail on Sunday, christened Blair’s knowledge economy “the bullshit economy.” What they meant was a country where with luck and attitude, you could make a tiny amount of talent go a very long way. You could even become Prime Minister.
And now, twenty years on, Blair has published an essay that diagnoses these same problems.
The regions Blair now wants to “reindustrialise” were undoubtedly hurt by Thatcher’s reforms in the 1980s. Blair would have had the opportunity to revive them in his decade as Prime Minister. But he expanded the state instead.
Blair does not just have big ideas for the British economy. He has them for his own party too, just as Labour tears itself apart over Keir Starmer’s faltering leadership. His first piece of advice to them is charming: the party only won the 2024 election by default and has no real plan for anything.
His prescription is for targeting what he calls the “Radical Centre”. What he means by that are policies like cheaper energy over net zero, planning deregulation, welfare reform and AI adoption. Stripped of the spin, it is a relatively conventional centre-right programme Thatcher might have recognised but dressed up for a Labour audience. Blair calls it the place where “policy comes first and politics second,” but the label itself is pure politics.
His warning that AI will reshape economies and governments faster than anyone is prepared for is probably the strongest passage in the essay. He is also right to observe that the real crisis of democracy is not transparency or honesty but efficacy, the ability of governments to get big things done. Both points are sharper than anything coming from the current Labour front bench.
But with all of these points, the problem is not what Blair says. It is who is saying it.
This is a man of grand ambitions and no shortage of ego who, in office, achieved little of lasting substance and glossed over the gap with good PR. Often the same PR, recycled.
Ever since leaving Downing Street, Blair has been working hard to keep appearing globally relevant. For a while, he was Middle East peace envoy for the United Nations, the EU, the United States and Russia, all at once. Anything below world problems was beneath him. Little wonder the essay spends far more time on China, India and the transatlantic alliance. Amazing he is still finding the time to lecture his old party on the mechanics of winning a British election.
The same act has been touring for years. When Blair came to Australia a few years after leaving office, giving paid speeches on leadership and innovation, the event was sponsored by a paper company. On the back of the invitation card was a logo reading “Recycled Content,” and I thought it was rather apt.
And now we have Blair’s grand new essay. Which would be fine if the essay did not also contradict itself in ways that only Blair can make sound coherent.
He wants Britain back in a “structured relationship” with Europe but spends several paragraphs explaining why Europe’s technology regulation may make this impossible. A contradiction? Perhaps. But he does not make it feel like one.
Blair also calls for a state where “taxes and spending can be lower.” That is nice, but it collides with his record in office in which he presided over one of the largest expansions of the British state in peacetime history.
There has always been a certain unseriousness to Blair. Do not mistake for boldness or cynicism because it is neither. What it really shows is the quality of a politician who is more interested in the diagnosis than the cure and much more committed to the performance of leadership than to its substance.
In this way, Blair became the prototype for an entire generation of leaders: Angela Merkel, David Cameron, Kevin Rudd and perhaps Jacinda Ardern. They were all practitioners of this kind of performance-centred politics. These are politicians that get the diagnosis at least half right, communicate their ambitions superbly but then often fall flat on delivery. Blair did it first.
And so, Blair’s essay intervention leaves a strange aftertaste. He is right that Britain needs radical reform and that AI will change everything. Perhaps he is even right that Labour is sleepwalking into irrelevance. But it feels like in a previous life, he said all this before, in different words, with different buzzwords attached. And then nothing followed from it.
Britain, meanwhile, still waits for someone willing to do the unglamorous reform and policy work Blair only ever described.
To read the article on the Newsroom website, click here.