A new spectre is haunting British politics in the ghoulish form of Tony Blair. Speaking in the voice of the undead, Blair was on the BBC on Wednesday petulantly promoting his 5,700 word essay about the Labour leadership and how to get this country out the hole that it is undoubtedly in.
Eagerly encouraged by Nick Robinson who has managed to turn the Today programme into a platform for his own political prejudices, he outlined a policy programme that would have made Donald Trump proud.
Forget politics and old-fashioned left and right, let AI rip, cut back on disability benefits, the pension triple lock, the minimum wage, abandon net zero, double down on defence and security and yes, get closer to Donald Trump.
It is quite extraordinary that this relic is allowed out in public, let alone invited onto the BBC studios to expound his views. Outside of the Westminster bubble, Blair is widely regarded as a war criminal. Even the Chilcot Inquiry found that he misled the public to take us into the catastrophic Iraq War.
Between the Iraq disaster and Chilcot, Blair spent years as the west’s Middle East envoy, when he tightened his links with Israel, pressured the region’s governments to come to terms with the Israeli state and generally helped create the conditions for Israel’s rampage of the last two and a half years.
The year after he was excoriated by the Chilcot judgement he set up the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, since bankrolled to the tune of £250 million by Larry Ellison of Oracle amongst others.
As he bragged to Robinson, this bizarre parastate of an organisation now employs 1,000 people in as many as forty countries. It promotes climate scepticism, and peddles AI and data farming tech to some of the most authoritarian governments in the world from Saudi Arabia to Rwanda on behalf of some by of the world’s richest men. But as he says:
“If we don’t work in any country where there are problems of human rights, you’re going to be working with a small list of countries.”
A close friend of Donald Trump’s brother-in-law, Jared Kushner, Blair was according to the Financial Times, one of the architects of post war plans for a ‘Trump Riviera’ in the Gaza Strip, including an ‘Elon Musk Manufacturing Zone’. The plan involved paying Gazans to leave the area for good.
This colonial, business obsessed ‘centrism’ is on the essential policy points really little different from the right-wing populism Blair laughably claimed to be challenging. No wonder he said on air that he doesn’t really care what political party is in power if it pursues his goals.
Andy Burnham and others have dismissed Tony Blair and his latest intervention as out of touch and irrelevant. The skeletal figure of Tony Blair does feel like a spectral apparition from another era.
He remains, however, shockingly influential. Starmer regularly turned to Blair as an unofficial source of advice and the fact is his policy prescriptions remain all too present. Strip away the rhetoric and you will find all the main parties are signed up to his ‘pro-growth’, welfare-shrinking pro–US and Israel approach to politics. His obsession with security and rearmament is shared by all the potential candidates for the Labour leadership and none of them show any signs of standing up to either Trump or Netanyahu.
Tony Blair took Britain into a catastrophic war that still reverberates. He turned the Labour Party into a champion of armed, free market globalisation. If we want to stop him haunting us, we will need to break sharply with his world view.