Tony Blair Has Forgotten Blairism

Tony Blair remains the most consequential politician in modern Britain. Nearly three decades after his first election victory, he can still dominate a political conversation in a way no other former prime minister can. Actually, in a way even the incumbent prime minister can. Which is why his latest intervention matters. Not because he is wrong about everything. Quite the opposite. But the problem, if we are to take it seriously as a political project, is that it does not try to be. And that is because Blair no longer sounds like Blair — or at least the Blair who built the most successful project in the history of the British left.

Though his essay is hardly the breaking of a vow of silence some have described, it is his most significant intervention since Labour's return to office. As he rightly says, Britain faces the absurd prospect of elevating its seventh prime minister in ten years. As easily the most politically successful living prime minister, with a keen strategic sense, Blair enjoys a unique authority. On many matters — the unaffordability of an ever-rising benefits bill, Britain's diminished standing, the need to harness parts of the AI revolution — he is worth listening to. Moreover, in a party which has largely chosen not to think aloud, argue with itself, or argue with anyone else for six years, it is telling that his words have charged and electrified. It is not just the man saying them. It is the fact that someone of authority inside Labour is saying anything at all.

It is a shame, then, that this moment has largely been wasted. Blair's argument will not land, for several reasons. And despite his insistence that policy matters more than politics, there are problems with both.

The first is political framing. Blair's argument is that the what matters more than the how: policy more than politics. The irony is that it is not only the substance of his argument that has angered Labour MPs, but the way it has been made. There was a way to advance much of the same programme within a recognisably Labour moral and political framework. Blair chose not do so.

Contrary to much of the mythology, the idea that he was always an alien to the Labour tribe, this is exactly what Blair did throughout the early and middle years of his leadership. Consider the revised Clause IV, which he briefly cites at the start of the essay: "a community in which power, wealth and opportunity are in the hands of the many not the few." Or his 2001 conference speech: "The governing idea of modern social democracy is community. Founded on the principles of social justice ... The test of any decent society is not the contentment of the wealthy and strong, but the commitment to the poor and weak." Blair housed his programme within a moral framework — Christian socialism, progressive liberalism, Labour revisionism. In this essay, by contrast, he rarely roots any argument in values at all, beyond a grim, disempowering technological determinism.

The result is a politics without a moral vocabulary- and politics without a moral vocabulary rarely wins consent for change, which means the essay isn’t of much value at all. It offers Labour no route to assembling a coalition because it barely addresses the question of political consent. No-one beyond the Westminster-Davos circuit wakes up worrying that Britain risks being "relegated from the Premier League of Nations."

In other words, the tragedy, for those of us who still believe there is intellectual life — indeed necessity — in the Third Way, is that Blair seems to have forgotten what made it so compelling. Its power lay in marrying market dynamism to social justice. There remains profound political force in that argument. It could both resonate beyond Westminster and push Labour out of its comfort zone. But it cannot do either if it the argument is not made.

Instead of making a moral and political case on loosening labour laws (protecting the rights of those aspiring to get into the workforce), or North Sea oil exploration (stronger pound, more tax revenue for green transition/public services), reforming welfare (the moral value of individual liberation from the state) the only reason posited for doing these things is that business wants them. The result is to sound like a more fogeyish Rishi Sunak or a more charming Kemi Badenoch.

And worse, he is making the same mistakes which undid his extraordinary political achievement and settlement. Consider this passage on AI:

“The technology revolution led by developments in artificial intelligence, which will change everything. I mean everything. There is no point in debating whether this technological revolution is a good or bad thing. Just know it is a ‘thing’. In fact, it is ‘the thing’.”

Here Blair invites Labour to repeat some of his worst political misjudgments, the moment he and the British public started to part ways. Recall his famous line on globalisation in 2005:

"I hear people say we have to stop and debate globalisation. You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer.”

The sentiment is identical. Change is inexorable, unstoppable and beyond democratic contestation. But Blair was wrong about globalisation. The last two decades have shown that states can shape it, channel it and sometimes stop it altogether. More importantly, it was precisely the centre-left's insistence that these forces were inevitable — its apparent helplessness in the face of their consequences — that fuelled the populist backlash which destroyed the New Labour settlement.

If politicians repeat that mistake with the coming tech transformations, appear to give in to a technological nihilism, without offering a sense of control and mitigation, you bet we’ll see the same, but from a starting place where politics is already more extreme. Young Blair didn't just say globalisation existed. He promised people agency within it. The late and current Blair often sounds as though the role of politics is simply to explain why resistance is futile. It is a council of despair.

This is not a cry for luddism. The irony is that harnessed correctly, the technological revolution could unlock the growth that could resurrect the Third Way as a viable political creed. To do so Blair is right, that a serious programme of reform is necessary. The Third Way remains the most significant contribution to social democratic philosophy in Britain of the last half century, and none of the milquetoast offerings we’ve had since have come close. However fashionable it is to decry it on the left, Blairism needs advocates within the Labour Party, now more than ever. The problem is, on the basis of what we’ve seen, Blair himself may no longer be the man to deliver it.

In other words, Blairism once promised that politics could shape the future. Blair now often speaks as though politics exists merely to accommodate it. That is not the Third Way. It is a retreat from it.