Tony Blair once claimed to stand for equality, public services and social justice. So what happened?

In this video, I look at Blair's extraordinary new essay on AI, politics and the future of government, and argue that it reveals something much deeper than a fascination with technology. What it really reveals is the complete triumph of neoliberal thinking over the values Blair once claimed to support.

Blair now argues that governments must adapt themselves to AI, shrink the state, cut support for people with disabilities, prioritise defence spending, and surrender ever more power to markets and corporate interests. He presents this as inevitable. I argue that it is dangerous.

This is not really a debate about artificial intelligence. It is a debate about democracy, inequality, power, human worth, and whether politics should serve people or markets.

In this video, I explore why Blair's argument reflects neoliberal ideology at its purest, why oligarch money and AI corporations now appear to shape political thinking, and why disability and social security have become central battlegrounds in modern politics. I also look at the extraordinary contradiction between Blair's conversion to Catholicism and Pope Leo XIV's direct warning about the dangers posed by AI and concentrated technological power.

At the heart of this discussion is a much bigger question. Should politics exist to serve markets and production, or should it exist to serve people, communities, democracy and the planet? Blair increasingly appears to believe the first. I believe the future depends upon resisting that idea.

This is not just a critique of Tony Blair. It is a critique of the political system that produced him and of the future now being proposed in the name of “modernisation”. If you think politics should still be about people, democracy and well-being, this discussion matters.

This is the audio version:

The Debate Ammunition for this video is available here.

This is the transcript:

Tony Blair has been corrupted. Now, let's be clear. I'm not saying he's corrupt. That is not my allegation at all. I am saying he has been corrupted. There is a difference, and this video is about that difference. Corruption here means the loss of whatever principles he once held. His essay on the future of politics and the use of AI, published in the last week, is the clearest evidence that this has happened. It's time to talk about what has happened to him and what might happen to us as a consequence if the world follows in his path.

Once upon a time, Blair must have believed in the Labour Party. After all, he became its leader; its most successful ever leader in electoral terms. He was Prime Minister of this country for more than 10 years, and he came into Labour alongside Peter Mandelson during the era of Neil Kinnock in the 1980s.

He must, at one time, have thought equality and social justice were what Labour stood for.

He must have believed in trade unions, decent public services, and standing up for the powerless, or why else did he want to be a Labour MP at that period, when these were essential qualities that those people were meant to hold?

But that version of Tony Blair has gone; completely and utterly gone. What has replaced it is something very different. And saying this, the essay that he has published feels unmistakably like Blair himself. He wrote it. It has his familiar style. It's breathless. It has slightly verb-free sentences, which were always a characteristic of his speeches. We had to endure those for years. And this then is his product, and not that of his Global Institute, although I suspect that they had an input. And that institute now spans over 40 countries, as I understand it, with over 1000 employees, and its funding depends heavily on Larry Ellison, the boss of AI company, Oracle.

But it is Blair, and unmistakably Blair, who is arguing for what he calls ‘radical centre politics'. But when you read it, this is not about centrist politics. This is a recipe from the far right. It is purely and unapologetically neoliberal, and frankly, it even questions democracy by implying there is only one choice to be made, and that is the one that Tony Blair is promoting.

His argument is we are living through a new industrial revolution driven by AI. But then he would say that, given who funds him. And he says, we cannot fight this. We must embrace and adapt to it. In other words, we must surrender to it. That is his suggestion.

And in saying so, Blair makes clear that he thinks governments must surrender, perhaps most of all to this AI revolution. Blair says governments must take what AI can offer and use it.

The question is, use it to do what? And on this, he is unambiguous. He says that we are overtaxed, and we spend too much, and we do not spend enough time thinking about how we can expand the economy and create economic freedom. The result is that he is promoting an agenda which is purely neoliberal to its core. Smaller government, smaller taxation, no doubt on the wealthy, and an expansion, via growth that will burn the planet, about which he seems to be indifferent, and the point is obvious. What he is about is promoting this neoliberal agenda, and he's very unclear on specifics, with a few notable exceptions.

Tony Blair is very certain that we spend too much money on people with disabilities. He doesn't say why he knows that is the case. He just says, we can't afford people with disabilities, and we can't afford the increase in the number of people who have those disabilities. He says that is an unaffordable cost when it now imposes a strain, according to him, upon the UK budget, which is bigger than defence spending. Apparently, buying bombs is more important than helping people who aren't able to work. And that tells you everything you might need to know about in whose interests this essay was written.

Blair argues that because the number of disabled claimants is growing, the payments they receive must be cut.

He never asks why those numbers are growing.

He never asks what the consequence of forcing people with disabilities back into work might be.

He just says, people must be forced back into the workforce, whatever the cost to them.

He doesn't ask whether the economic system creates jobs for those people when we know that AI is going to eliminate many of the jobs that people might be able to undertake.

He does not ask why people who are not neurotypical cannot fit into the workplace anymore because it demands neurotypicality as a price of undertaking work.

And he does not ask why people worn out by stress are unable to work. He doesn't seem to have any understanding that the inability to make ends meet created by the neoliberal system that has extracted every ounce of value from people in this country has created the people who are now not able to work. He doesn't get it, and that is the problem.

He thinks everything and everyone must be harnessed to the process of production. That is all that matters to him, and this is what neoliberalism always does. It has only one goal. That goal is increasing the wealth of the wealthy. People are not, in his opinion, agents in their own right, and that is the neoliberal view; they are cogs in the machine.

And at the same time, Blair hints about something else as well. He claims that data can solve the problems of healthcare, including presumably those of people with disabilities. This is an extraordinarily reductionist view of what it means to be human. Blair's model of health treats the human body as a mechanism to be repaired. If you have the right data, he says, you can fix the fault in the body and return the unit, that is the human being to you and me, to production. But human life is not like that, not even remotely. Human life is shaped by poverty, insecurity, inequality, and despair for far too many people in this country, but none of that appears in his analysis because none of it fits in his model.

Blair is also clear that we must spend more money on defence. The thing that he is worried might have less spent on it than spending on disability.

He's equally clear that we should be partnering with the United States, and that is unsurprising. Blair sits on Donald Trump's ‘Board of Peace', and that is the Orwellian-named creation of Trump, which came straight from the pages of 1984. This has nothing to do with peace, of course, it appears to have everything to do with war, and for Blair and that board, defence expenditure is not about security. It is about weaponry that can be used to impose a particular view on the rest of the world. That is why people like Blair are now amongst the greatest threats to human well-being.

But nowhere in this essay does Blair show concern about well-being or inequality. Those words do not appear in the essay. I've checked. But he does show concern for the wealthy and their tax bills. He condemns Andy Burnham and his proposals for an additional capital gains tax charge, which Andy Burnham rightly says will reduce inequality in this country.

But Blair quietly avoids looking at any of the outcomes of the processes he advocates. Instead, he claims Labour has no plan, and on that, at least he is right. We've got to give him some marks. He isn't a total failure. He has some ability as a politician, although it's residual these days.

But he forgets the fact that neoliberal politicians, and all Labour politicians appear to be neoliberal politicians these days, never needed a plan. They always outsourced everything to the market. That's what Blair did, and that's precisely what Keir Starmer is doing, and that is what Blair says they should be doing time and again. And then he criticises them for not having a plan. The fact is, what he's criticising them for is not spelling out clearly enough that what he's going to do is outsource everything to the market, wherever he can. And there is, as a result, no recognition in this document that this will inevitably increase inequality and that there is a plan needed to deal with that. That is again, not on Blair's agenda.

All of this suggests that Tony Blair is a dinosaur. Tony Blairosaurus, if you like. He belongs to another age. He should be extinct. These attitudes should be consigned to the past, but that's not the case.

And let's look at Tony Blair, the man. We know that he has displayed his insecurity for decades. Nothing seems to have dimmed it. His parents sent him off to boarding school, and my guess is that the wound of rejection that happened then has never healed. He has spent his life seeking the approval of others. He's always craved it. It's been glaringly obvious. He's worn that need on his shoulder throughout his career, and now he thinks the world's oligarchs are providing him with that love he's always desired.

They aren't. He's just another useful tool to them. He's deluded about them, as he is about everything else, but he thinks their money and their regard can protect him from the insecurity he fears. That's what he's admitting in this essay, although he doesn't say so, of course; I can read between the lines. And yet the money he now clearly possesses has not brought him what he was looking for. He remains as bewildered as ever.

And there is a curious contradiction at the heart of all of this. Pope Leo XIV published his encyclical on AI this week. We've made a video about that. There will be a link down below, and it says almost the exact opposite of what Tony Blair is now arguing. But Blair famously converted to Catholicism after leaving office. He appears not to have read or understood his own Pope. Perhaps he should, but the fact that he hasn't tells us something about the depth of his commitment to anything beyond himself. He has none. Tony Blair has been corrupted, and his corrupted thinking is dangerous. That is my point.

It threatens the people of this country. It might threaten people around the world because he's involved in an international agenda these days, and most especially Blair's thinking threatens the most vulnerable people in the world, whilst also threatening democracy, which he clearly sees as a means to an end and not an end in itself, and he wants the singular goal of the superiority of AI to trump democracy. That then threatens the Labour Party he once led. And the corruption that AI money and oligarch approval delivers is real in that case, and it is powerful.

In that case, we do have to fight him, however much the odds appear against us, and we have to fight him with ideas. The idea of a politics for people that cares, coupled to an economics of hope, and a commitment to our planet, which Blair clearly wants to let burn, such as his indifference, because he calls for an end to zero policies. We can beat people like Blair and those who fund him, but we can only do that by exercising our convictions, the thing they lack, and that is the weapon they cannot take away from us.

That's what I think. I think we have a chance in this fight. Do you? There's a poll down below. Please leave us your comments. Please like this video if that's what you do. Please do share it. And if you're so inclined as to buy us a coffee, we'll be very grateful.

Poll

 Loading ...

PDF of article