Tony Blair has published a 5,600-word essay through the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change this morning, which is being presented across the right-wing and mainstream media (is there a difference?) as a warning to Labour about moving left. That, though, is to misrepresent what Blair is saying. This is a blatant and desperate attempt to revive the neoliberal centre by dressing it up as realism for the age of AI.
I commented here, only yesterday, on the Thatcherite term TINA - there is no alternative- and suggested that there is in the form of TIARA - there is a real alternative. Blair remains in full denial of that fact. His article is full-on TINA.
Blair's core argument is straightforward. He says Britain is entering an era of immense disruption driven by artificial intelligence, geopolitical fragmentation, declining Western dominance, climate pressures, demographic change and a new global economic order. He argues that politics as we have known it is becoming obsolete, and claims Labour has no coherent response to this transformation.
So far, so good, then, even down to Labour having no answer to those things, because it very clearly has not. What Blair does not notice is that this is because neoliberal politics - of the sort he and Bill Clinton helped create - is not designed to have those answers. Its whole purpose is not to answer questions, but to suggest that these may be found in the market.
Implicitly accepting this point, according to Blair, Labour's instinctive response to political difficulty is to retreat into what he calls the comfort zone of centre-left politics by suggesting:
- more or better social security,
- more regulation,
- higher taxes, especially on wealth,
- stronger labour rights,
- scepticism about business, and
- attachment to environmental targets that, in his view, damage competitiveness.
Or to govern in the interests of people, in other words. He thinks this is electorally dangerous and economically self-defeating.
The essay instead advocates what Blair still laughably calls the radical centre. In practice, it would seem that this would mean accepting that growth is always and unarguably good, whatever the consequences, with these things following from that assumption:
- a much more explicitly pro-business economic agenda;
- embracing AI and technological disruption as inevitable;
- restructuring what he calls welfare to force greater labour-market participation as if we are all to be slaves to the machine of increasing the wealth of a few;
- weakening what he sees as anti-growth regulation;
- prioritising cheaper energy over rapid decarbonisation;
- expanding links with global capital and private-sector delivery, and
- rebuilding Britain's geopolitical strategy around economic competitiveness.
It also means ( and I base these observations on his Radio 4 interview this morning):
- much more private involvement in the NHS as the private sector has the knowledge to transform healthcare that health professionals lack;
- embracing the full power of AI;
- denying that we have more people with disabilities now, because their number must be reduced as they are unaffordable, which is stated as a matter of fact, and
- there is now no difference between the left and right.
The last point is especially important. There is, he says, only one solution now, and that is the one he proposes. What that means is that he thinks what is called here the 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, which is that it provides choice, and he has a problem with that because choice, he argues, gets in the way of business delivery. What Blair says then is fundamentally anti-democratic.
This is also implicit in his argument that Brexit cannot realistically be reversed, and that Britain should seek a more structured relationship with Europe over time. Choice is not an option in this case, then, a claim that is also implicit in his insistence that the UK must adapt to a world increasingly shaped by major power blocs and technological oligopolies dominated by the US and China. When doing so, he exonerates Trump and suggests that those challenging him, like Mark Carney in Canada, miss his point. Blair's claim is that Trump is right: it is not, he says, the job of the USA to defend other countries. No wonder he is on Trump's Board of Peace.
What is striking, however, is what Blair does not appear willing to confront.
First, the essay assumes that technological acceleration is inherently desirable and that the role of politics is to adapt to it, rather than exercise democratic control over it. AI is treated as destiny, not choice.
Second, Blair continues to frame economic success primarily through the lens of competitiveness, growth and business confidence, which are precisely the assumptions that helped create the insecurity, inequality and political fragmentation now destabilising Western democracies. He explicitly rejected Andy Burnham's challenge to neoliberalism in his Radio 4 interview, suggesting Burnham is confused, when on this issue, he is anything but that.
Third, the essay largely ignores the deeper question now confronting politics everywhere, which is what happens when technological change destroys social cohesion faster than institutions can rebuild, resulting in crises in security and belonging?
And finally, there is a profound irony at the heart of the whole intervention. Blair presents himself as diagnosing a failure of political imagination in Labour, whilst simultaneously proposing a return to the very neoliberal settlement that generated many of today's crises in the first place.
The result is an essay that is important not because it offers convincing answers, but because it reveals the intellectual exhaustion of the neoliberal centre itself. Blair can see that the world is changing rapidly. He can see that AI is destabilising labour markets, politics and social identity. He can see that old assumptions are breaking down.
But his answer remains the same one neoliberalism has offered for forty years: trust markets, trust technology, trust business, liberalise faster, adapt harder, and hope growth eventually resolves the resulting social tensions. He is saying TINA, in other words, when TIARA exists: we can have a politics of care and an economics of hope, and that is increasingly important when Blair's worldview is precisely what very many rational people no longer believe.
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Ha – typical New Labour managerialism – the only answer is ‘to do the wrong thing righter’ as John Seddon would say, rather than face the bleedin’ obvious and intervene more. It is capital that wants Blair’s prescription – because they have paid him handsomely for it – not the people who just want help.
Also note the fear methodology – all those things happening and then ‘Lo!’ – here is the answer…………the very same stuff that made this happen but more of it!!
Woeful, Tony. You are nothing but a supplicant to wealth. Please shut up.
‘the only answer is ‘to do the wrong thing righter’ as John Seddon would say very good line, and that’s the essential criteria on the job description of these Billionaire lackeys.
Destruction dressed up as inevitable common sense.
I would put Bliar as more destructive and dangerous than Thatcher, at least you knew where you stood with Thatcher.
T. A, R. A.!
Currently, might “Caring” and “Exploitative” be appropriate poles for spectrum assessment, placing, and trajectory monitoting of political parties etc rather than “Left” and “Right”, which seem to date back to post French Revolution seating plans?
I thought it was a very dismal approach. True the current labour government does not have a clue but his suggestions are totally ridiculous and dangerous. He wants to cut welfare and abolish the triple lock – interesting that people who are well heeled with high incomes come up with that as a ‘solution’. He should probably pay more tax. As for getting rid of net zero – anyone with any intelligence would realise that the climate is breaking down – we are in a heatwave with temperatures way above what you should see in May. Also famers on ‘Farming today’ pointing out the problems that the weather is causing for crops. Where does Mr Blair thinks food comes from? Some sort of food data centre!
Clearly, it’s time to anoint Mr Blair as UK President for life and give him total power.
Then make him World President, and the TBI can become the world government “The Global Board of Peace”, modelled on the successful prototype in Gaza.
What are we waiting for?
Final thought – has he met Pope Leo yet? He could read Leo’s encyclical and Leo can read Tony’s.
Problem is Blair still thinks he is UK PM, Foreign Secretary, Chancellor of the Exchequer and World President. Time he had therapy to cure his delusional state.
‘This is a blatant and desperate attempt to revive the neoliberal centre by dressing it up as realism for the age of AI.’
Such a good analysis, would add Prof, and realism for age of genocide – hear him on R4 Toadie Programme
Tory Bliar makes my blood boil. He is immoral, he knows exactly what he is doing, and who he represents. Tory Blatant Liar, former leader of Liarbour.
He was on the Toady R4 this morning and dismissed AB’s criticism of neoliberalism, struggled to name his own ideology ‘neoliberalism or whatever Burnham called it’ (paraphrasing). Sorry, Bliar Even the IMF recognise neoliberalism, and it’s global reach.
Then Tory Bliar went on to tell us to embrace the Trump Gaza plan – its going to be Grrrrrreat for the Gazan people, he crooned.
The man behaves like a psychopath….and if it quacks like a duck….
Agreed
I was listening as I wrote
If “growth” means “growth in GDP”, I think growth is nearly over for the affluent West. It’s obvious that infinite growth is impossible on a finite planet. It’s likely that the S-shaped curve for growth in natural areas would apply to economic growth in the world, and in a country. And I’m trying to do sums on how GDP growth has been increased by social tendencies, like women working (paying for childcare, expenses of working), by planned obsolescence, by shifting risk from organisations to individuals. Some of these have benefits to the people involved; all have costs which aren’t included in GDP.
Much to agree with
Clive Lewis has a good piece in the Graun today offering some ideas on TIARA and a offering a firm rebuttal to Blairs neoliberal nonsense:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/may/27/andy-burnham-labour-establishment-fight-to-come
I think he has been reading stuff here
It seems to me that Tony Blair is trying to change the narrative that his reputation was ruined by the Iraq war by ruining it in several other ways as well.
New Labour telling New New Labour off?
One couldn’t make this nonsense up!
Clive Lewis ahs a better article in the Guardian today. He is in favour of the state’s power to invest.
quote Democracy must regain the power to invest. Public investment is still constrained less by national need than by what ministers think the bond market, the Bank of England and the Treasury will tolerate. A real shift would start from need, not nerves. Not nerves or fear.
The second fight is ownership. Public goods should be built and owned in the public interest
The third fight is constitutional. Proportional representation for Westminster, an elected second chamber and deeper devolution are not procedural tidying-up. They are conditions for progressive power in a fragmented country.
Sounds familiar -can’t think where I’ve heard it before !!
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/may/27/andy-burnham-labour-establishment-fight-to-come#comments
🙂
The smarmy, snake oil peddling, patronising Blair makes my skin crawl.
Surely the most appropriate response to this essay is to ask who paid for it to be written.
Tony Blair is a puppet of the billionaire tech entrepreneur Larry Ellison.
Larry Ellison’s funding of Tony Blair bridges domestic US conservatism with global business interests through a shared belief in technocratic governance. Ellison is a prominent Republican supporter and donor in the US, and his alliance with Blair focuses on advancing corporate deregulation, artificial intelligence, and centralized cloud computing worldwide.
Through the Larry Ellison Foundation, the billionaire has injected at least $348 million into the Tony Blair Institute (TBI), expanding its footprint to roughly 1,000 employees across 45 countries.
Blair acts as a high-profile door-opener to world leaders, embedding TBI policy advisers directly within foreign governments to shape their national digital strategies.
TBI actively lobbies governments to overhaul public infrastructure and centralise massive datasets, such as the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) data.
Once governments are convinced to digitize and centralize citizen data, Ellison’s tech giant, Oracle, is perfectly positioned to secure the lucrative cloud infrastructure contracts. Ultimately, this partnership functions as a sophisticated vehicle for corporate statecraft, allowing a right-wing billionaire to use a centrist former Prime Minister to expand his commercial technology empire.
And we’ve only got 40 years of failure of the exact policies he wants to enact to go on. 41 is the charm I guess?
He genuinely sounds like he just ought to join the Conservative Party. Why does he still consider himself Labour? Even Starmer and the Labour right, after doing all that he is advocating for, have realised it just doesn’t work anymore.
I don’t read trash by the likes of B.Liar, I leave that to my digital slave 🙂 which has kindly produced a nice demolition that goes, more or less in the same direction as Richard’s demolition & with a nod towards MMT. I have posted it on my LinkedIn page (I’m the Mike Parr in Brussels).
On a related note, I see Clive Lewis had an article on Burnt-ham and bond markets.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/may/27/andy-burnham-labour-establishment-fight-to-come
It did not really mention alternatives to gov bonds (= Gov to BoE – give us the money). Pity. &…I wonder who is funding Bunrt-ham? doubtless the usual suspects.
I have a feeling Clive has been here, quite often
Unable to read your LinkedIn post as I’m “not in your area”, Mike.
So many Mike Parrs on LinkedIn too!
I live in Scotland.
But if your critique of the Blair Institute paper is AI-generated, I guess I can do that for myself …
Tony Blair, funded by Larry Ellison, American Zionist billionaire.
“The Guardian reported in April 2025 that one of the institute’s largest donors is the charitable foundation of Larry Ellison, the founder of the computer technology company Oracle, which gave over £52 million in 2023 and has promised another £163 million.”
Look for Ellison’s name on the TBI website, and you will find nothing to acknowledge the association.
Clicked too soon – meant to add this:
“In 2017, Ellison donated $16.6 million (equivalent to $21,800,000 in 2025) to the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces (FIDF), saying, “Since Israel’s founding, we have called on the brave men and women of the IDF to defend our home”. This was the largest donation in the organization’s history”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Ellison#Political_involvement
A question in earnest…
When Tony Blair says he thinks Labour “moving to the Left” would be a mistake, what do we suppose he actually means by that? What does Tony mean when he says “Left”? I wonder if it’s just an economic “Left”, i.e. more public ownership, not being in thrall to the band markets, etc etc…
It could be a more general “Left” which, let’s be honest, has become a shorthand for “Progressive”. Is Tony actually advocating steering clear of humanitarian consideration as a policy? I mean, I wouldn’t be surprised… but if a former leader of The LABOUR PARTY can come out with stuff like that, then I feel the man behind the curtain has emerged and is just sticking his fingers up at everyone. the truly depressing part is that, with the current feel of the UK voting public, I fear Tony Blair might be right about that 🙁
Blair offers a faster Neoliberalism. As if the failings aren’t enough. He believes the failures are because we are gong too slow. He is a neoliberal accelerationist. Some of what Blair says echoes the tech-radical Nick Land. Nick Land believes such ideas lead to social collapse and therefore should be welcomed. He wants social collapse am ruin. Blair believes that they are progress and well make Britain stronger. One has to be wrong and that is Blair. Far from being ideas of the 21st century, these ideas need to be shoved back into the bins of 1990s.
[…] By Richard Murphy, Emeritus Professor of Accounting Practice at Sheffield University Management School and a director of Tax Research LLP. Originally published at Funding the Future […]
I’m currently hosting a really bright 15 year old friend’s daughter. She’s very interested in politics, takes after her mother!- we have long conversations and I’m seeing things from her perspective. It’s refreshing. Today she said, after reading Blair’s article, When we went into the Iraq war, where did all the money for weapons, arms, occupation, etc, come from? Was it from taxes? I directed her to Wikipedia. She said she still could not understand why money is “on tap” for wars, but not for “real life”- her words. So I’m introducing her to your site, because I can’t tell her why, either. I can’t tell her why a man like Blair, who is very wealthy and could just live a peaceful, wonderful life, keeps on and on relentlessly trying to control geopolitics, except that it may silence the guilty part of his mind that knows exactly what he did. She said that he sounds mad and dangerous. A bit later, she’s asked why we let mad people into politics in the first place. Short of basic psychological screening, again, I have no answer. I haven’t spent much extended time around teenagers and they are fantastically direct and to the point. I can barely keep up with her unfiltered honesty! Time out for a much needed ice cream break!
Does she want to do a podcast?
It would be fascinating to have guest of her age.
Good to see this whole article reposted on nakedcapitalism.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2026/05/blair-invokes-ai-to-revive-tina-denying-tiara.html
Thank you. I had not noticed that re-post.
Blair was responsible for ‘New Labour’ and the betrayal of the traditional Labour roots. Now he calls for effectively austerity, rejecting pro-EU pathways, and smaller state politics. Reform would be proud to claim him as one of their own. They certainly have similarities in how much they are representatives/puppets of wealthy/business paymasters.
Much to agree with
I would have thought Blairs infantile “essay” will have done Burnham a huge favour. He has writ large the demarcation lines of the struggle in the upcoming byelection (in LINO terms). Note Sunak who followed Blair on the Today program completely agreed with all that Blair expounded, enough said. Why would anybody believe a discredited, pathetic, US owned, Trumpet like Blair. Clearly mixing with and taking the money from the unelected powerful has given him an unjustified feeling of self importance. He will always remain a class traitor and an untruthful war criminal – nothing will ever change that. How does he sleep at nights with the deaths of hundreds of thousands on his conscience – he is obviously devoid of one as his “essay” proves. What a TOAD (Tony Only Approves of Dictators).
That’s a fantastic idea, thanks, Richard! I will ask her. Talking at length to a 15 year old is an eye opener and I totally agree that we should be hearing their voices- their future is deeply uncertain and I’m beginning to think that given the climate emergency, AI, constant wars, inflation, the reality that few of them will ever own a roof over their head, etc, the dignity of teenagers is extraordinary. But most are not like my young friend- they feel totally disengaged from politics, which seems to also be a fast growing crisis for engagement with democracy. But I have felt some new hope in the last few days listening and talking, just when I had reached a point of near hopelessness. They need hope! And a voice. I’m going to see what I can do about that. Youth, eh? They can’t half shake you up. Onwards.
I love your enthusiasm
I love reading this. A perception of the world as it is, not skewed by bias or investment – a refreshing clarity for the good things.
And now we have snippets of Milburns report leaking which again is coming down on the side of neo-liberalism -c uts, the current institutions are good enough. Damn right they aren’t – but not from your perspective pal.
Agreed, and very frustrating when a review by a Blairite neoliberal former failed Health Secretary makes headline news and generates interviews on TV news, without any critical questions or comments from the MSM journalists or an alternative heterodox economist (ideally Richard).
Very good. It made me think about a definition of the term neoliberalism.
Libertarianism (US-style) holds that individuals should be free to pursue their own preferences, constrained only by the equal freedom of others. Libertarian economists claim this as a scientific position, not a political one — ‘I study preferences, I don’t impose them.’ Neoliberalism turns this apoliticism into a weapon delegitimizing democratic politics as coercion, while remaining entirely political in its own right.
Tony Blair is best ignored, and if you can’t ignore him, then defy him, resist him. He is not to be trusted.
[…] Blair's recent writing reveals a similar tendency. His concern is not really with artificial intelligence. His concern is […]