Blair the “radical moderniser” defends a failing status quo on behalf of his elite bankrollers – Jon Trickett exclusive

“He wants to intensify the old economic model that has made working people poorer and less secure.”

By Jon Trickett MP

It’s an old story.  One we are familiar with. A charming but not especially bright man with a winning smile persuades others to help him achieve his ambitions. He joins the Labour Party, persuades a section of the northern working class in his chosen constituency to elect him as their MP and then, leaning on the communication skills of a close colleague (Petey), emerges as Leader betraying a close colleague along the way and then thanks to a collapse in support for the Conservatives he persuades working class voters to elect him into the highest office in the land. His next step is to do what too many ambitious social climbers do. He kicks away the ladder from the people who had helped him on his way and then builds a government which ultimately fails the very voters who elected him.

Tony Blair’s recent intervention claims to be an argument about Labour’s future. But it is really an argument about the past. He is contemptuous of past and present colleagues, including Starmer, has nothing to say to ordinary voters, and lays out a series of ideas which have no connection whatsoever to the central precept of Labour which is the pursuit of social justice. 

Underneath the rhetoric about AI disruption and a ‘new world order’ lies an all too familiar proposition. Blair believes that Britain’s problems can be solved by doubling down on the same economic model that created them in the first place.

For more than forty years, Westminster elites have governed on the assumption that markets know best, wealth will trickle down from the City of London to the rest of the country and British politics has no choice but to defer to the demands of global capital and American hegemony. 

The results of this failed experiment are visible for all to see. Stagnant wages. Broken public services. A housing crisis. Crumbling infrastructure. Extreme inequality. Former industrial communities that have lost their sense of purpose. And a political system that has lost all public trust.

This is the mess into which ‘neoliberal’ economics has gotten us. Tony Blair was one of its principal architects. He claimed to have found a ‘third way’ between Thatcherism and social-democracy, but privatisation, deregulation and market discipline remained at the core of Britain’s economy.

Downing Street and the Cabinet are full of Blair’s acolytes. But it is instructive to see which aspects of the Starmer government he has chosen to attack. He opposes stronger workers’ rights. He criticises lifting the minimum wage beyond inflation. He warns against taxing non-doms. He attacks the transition away from oil and gas. In other words, he objects to the few measures this government has introduced that begin to shift power away from corporations and towards working people. Despite what Blair’s ‘centrist’ cheerleaders in the legacy media would have us believe, polling shows these were some of Labour’s most popular policies at the 2024 election.

That is exactly why Blair has chosen to take aim at them. He is seeking to defend a legacy defined by his abandonment of these traditional labour values. 

I have been deeply critical of the Starmer government. I argued in Tribune that Labour needs new leadership and that Starmerism has collapsed because it attempted to govern without a transformative economic project. Managerial competence was confused for a political vision. Fiscal rules were treated as sacred while communities across Britain continued to decline. Stability was prioritised while the underlying structures of the economy remained untouched.

But Blair’s answer is even worse. He wants to intensify the old economic model that has made working people poorer and less secure.

Look carefully at his language. He argues for a pro-business, pro-technology, pro-America agenda in which the state’s primary role is to enable private investment, accelerate innovation and maintain Britain’s competitiveness in the global economy. These are exactly the same stated priorities pursued by every British Prime Minister since 1979. But underneath them lies a common assumption: that politics exists primarily to serve capital, empower corporations and maintain existing structures of wealth and power.

Blair now speaks of technology as though it is an irresistible force to which societies must adapt, in the same way he once spoke about globalisation. But this is the exact logic that produced the democratic crisis now unfolding across the West. People do not want politics reduced to economic management on behalf of multinational corporations. They want control over the economic forces that shape their own lives.

If Blair had a greater capacity for self-reflection he may have reckoned with how his own policies contributed to the nationalist identity backlash against globalisation that now sees the populist right on the verge of power. 

Questions of sovereignty matter here. Who owns the economy? Who exercises power? Who makes decisions about investment, energy, infrastructure and technology? At present, much of that power sits in the hands of unaccountable global corporations.

In media interviews Blair argues that we must avert our eyes from politics and politicians. Instead, he argues, we must focus on policies. But, it is impossible to separate Blair’s political arguments from the interests surrounding the Tony Blair Institute (TBI) itself. The TBI sits at the centre of a vast network of capital. They are bankrolled by an array of reactionary billionaires including the Trump supporting tech and media mogul, Larry Ellison, as well as foreign governments including the United States and Saudi Arabia. They are part of a wider ecosystem in which politics and corporate power increasingly merge together. Elite power now operates not only through political parties, but through think tanks, media companies, consultancies and international corporate relationships that put national governments in a stranglehold.

That is why Blair’s intervention feels so intellectually exhausted. He presents himself as a radical moderniser while defending a failing status quo on behalf of his elite bankrollers.

The task for Labour is not to reinforce a failed economic settlement,  but to construct a new one that makes life more affordable, delivers security and rebuilds Britain.

That means an interventionist state investing in productive industry and infrastructure, public ownership in strategic sectors like energy and water, rebuilding domestic manufacturing, stronger trade unions with sectoral collective bargaining, fair taxes on the wealthy and public control over finance. It means treating housing, transport and infrastructure as public goods rather than speculative assets. Above all, it means recognising that markets should serve the people and not the other way around.

It is notable too that Blair used-to-be an EU fan but now says this is not our future. Instead he wants us to learn from Trump and rebuild the alliance with Washington. But we know what this really means: opening up the NHS to American health providers and big Pharma; ordering more killing machines from defence companies; and opening up our public services to tech giants like Palantir.

Britain’s economic future cannot be organised around the interests of big corporations and a small professional political elite. If artificial intelligence is to reshape society, as Blair argues, then the question is: who will own these technologies and in whose interests will they operate? After all, it is our knowledge and data these companies are harvesting to construct their platforms.

That is the real political divide emerging now. Not between “modernisers” and “traditionalists”, or “Old Labour” and “New Labour”, but between those who believe that power should be located in the people’s hands rather than power being handed over to the oligarchy; that democracy should govern the economy and not that the economy should govern democracy.

You cannot remedy our broken economic and social fabric by feeding us the very measures which tore it apart. The country is crying out for something different: a new economic settlement, with democracy and social justice at its core.

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• Jon Trickett is the Member of Parliament for Hemsworth: you can follow him on Facebook, Twitter/X, Instagram and TikTok.
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