The Arsonist Returns With Advice on the Fire

Tony Blair says Labour is playing with fire over the future of the country. He should know. He poured the petrol.

The former prime minister’s 5,000-word intervention for his own institute is dressed as elder-statesman counsel. Read it again. It is a prospectus. The diagnosis is that Britain is weaker, poorer and less respected than it was a generation ago. The cure, in every particular, is the politics that made it so.

The man indicting his own legacy

Blair laments that Britain has lost diplomatic standing, that the US alliance is weaker, that the development apparatus has been disbanded. The Iraq war was his. The reordering of British foreign policy as a junior auxiliary to Washington was his. The hollowing out of the Foreign Office in favour of a No. 10 freelancing around the world to sell wars was his. The Chilcot Inquiry’s findings on the manipulation of intelligence and the absence of post-invasion planning are a matter of public record. Britain’s loss of standing did not begin in 2024. It began in March 2003, in a Commons vote whipped through on a dossier that did not survive contact with the facts.

He writes that “power is derived from the strength of a country’s economy and the strength of its military capacity.” His government’s wars cost £8.4 billion in net additional military spending in Iraq between 2003 and 2009, per Ministry of Defence figures reported to the House of Commons Library, and considerably more once veterans’ care, reconstruction and the longer tail of operations are counted. The economic strength he now invokes was lent to those wars at gunpoint, and the bill landed on the NHS waiting list and the local authority that closed the library.

The “Radical Centre” is the politics that produced the crisis

Strip the AI futurism out of Blair’s prescription and what remains is a manifesto from 1997 retyped. Deregulate planning. Reform welfare downwards. Bring the private sector deeper into the NHS, in his words “public-private integration.” Rebuild the Atlantic alliance through more defence spending. Treat net-zero as a brake rather than an industrial strategy. Recruit a “specialised workforce” from outside Parliament to run the state.

This is Third Way social democracy with a chatbot bolted on. It is the politics that delivered PFI hospitals saddling the NHS in England with around £80 billion in lifetime repayments on £13 billion of capital, per the National Audit Office and IPPR analysis of the 118 NHS PFI schemes. It is the politics that left British industry hollowed and the City swollen, that ushered in the financial crisis his successors managed and his party paid for. The country Blair describes, drifting and demoralised and weaker than its peers, is the country his model built. He is asking Labour to double the dose that produced the symptom.

The think tank funding the prescription

The Tony Blair Institute is not a neutral observer of public affairs. The Larry Ellison Foundation, the personal vehicle of the Oracle co-founder, has donated or pledged at least £257 million to TBI since 2021, per investigations by Lighthouse Reports and the Guardian. Oracle itself, the company Ellison built, has earned £1.1 billion in UK public sector revenue since the start of 2022. The institute also runs a multi-million-pound advisory partnership with the Saudi government, signed in 2017 to support the Mohammed bin Salman modernisation programme and confirmed by TBI to have continued after the murder of Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. When TBI’s founder calls for the NHS to integrate with the private sector and for the British state to be rebuilt around AI procurement, the reader is entitled to ask whose order book is being written.

This is not a smear. It is the structure of the document. The argument and the donor base are in the same shape.

The counter-argument, taken seriously

There is a serious case that Labour does need a clearer project, that Starmer’s government has been timid where the moment demands ambition, and that the rise of Reform and the collapse of the Tories has opened a space that will not stay open forever. Blair is not wrong about the diagnostic facts: the welfare bill is unsustainable on current trajectories, productivity is poor, the geopolitical order is shifting. A reader can grant all of that and still notice that the prescription does not follow from the diagnosis. The case for ambition is not the case for Blairism. The case that the centre needs a project is not the case that Tony Blair’s project is the project. The country has tried it. The country lived through the result.

What is actually being sold

Blair’s piece will be received, in the broadsheets that built him and the columnists who never quite got over him, as a grown-up corrective to a flailing government. It is not. It is a pitch. A pitch for a return of the network that ran Britain from 1997 to 2010, dressed in the language of the next thing (AI, the Radical Centre, the Reimagined State) so that the voter who remembers the last thing does not look too closely.

Labour is playing with fire. Blair is correct about that. He is wrong about who is holding the match.