Blair is closer than ever to regaining political power, albeit through a proxy Labour government led by Keir Starmer. The beauty (for Blair) is that he will be able to continue expanding his global political consulting empire at the same time.
One of the great contradictions of British political life over the past 15 years is Sir Tony Blair. The three-term prime minister is broadly reviled by the British public, even among many Labour Party voters, yet he continues to be feted and fawned over by the British establishment and media. Even after the “crushing verdict” (in The Guardian‘s words) of the Chilcott Inquiry — that the Blair government’s case for the Iraq war was “deficient” — was finally made public in 2016, Blair remained a go-to person for the British and international media on all manner of topics, particularly the COVID-19 pandemic.
It is a very different story for the British public. In a recent YouGov opinion poll, only 22% of respondents said Blair had had a positive effect on the Labour Party, with 38% saying his impact was broadly negative. Even among Labour Party voters, only 26% labelled his impact as positive compared to 38% who saw it as negative. According to another YouGov survey, this time from 2022, a mere 14% approved of his knighthood and only 3% strongly so, while 63% disapproved, 41% strongly so. Over a million people signed a petition demanding the knighthood be revoked.
In other words, the last thing most people in the UK want to see is Blair making a political comeback. Yet the former PM is closer than ever to regaining political power, albeit through a proxy Labour Party government led by the current party leader, Keir Starmer, who is hotly tipped to win the next general election, which must take place by January 28, 2025. Starmer is favourite to win not because of a groundswell of support for his vision or candidacy — the UK public view the party under Starmer even less favourably than under Ed Miliband — but because support for the governing (if you can call it that) Conservative Party is in freefall:
Remarkable data, the UK public actually view the Labour Party under Keir Starmer’s as far less capable than it was under the tepid Ed Miliband, and yet the useless plank Starmer is destined to become PM entirely thanks to the Tory’s self-destruction. pic.twitter.com/pERhtWG53y
— Matt Thomas (@Trickyjabs) April 22, 2024
Blair will probably have no official role in the resulting Starmer government, but he will wield plenty of power from behind the scenes. The beauty of such an arrangement (for Blair) is that he will have zero public accountability or responsibility while at the same time being able to continue serving his corporate clients and expanding his global political consulting empire.
Many of the key positions in a Starmer government will be filled by members of the Blairite wing of the Labour Party, which has spent the past four years purging the party of its genuine left-wing politicians and members, including former party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, and the veteran British filmmaker Ken Loach. As the veteran US journalist Robert Kuttner writes, Starmer “has virtually outsourced his entire program to Tony Blair” and his modestly named non-profit foundation, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (often shortened to TBI).
TBI was spawned in 2017 by rolling together all of Blair’s for-profit and non-profit ventures, including the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, the Tony Blair Sports Foundation, the Tony Blair Governance Initiative, and his consulting firm Tony Blair Associates, into one vehicle. Some of those ventures had begun to attract a little too much attention for their opaque tax structures, fragrant conflicts of interest and dodgy client lists, including the despotic governments of Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan – all, of course, rich in mineral deposits. TBI continues to take money from the Saudis as well as large corporations and philanthropic foundations.
As Sam Leith writes in The Spectator, the Institute is symptomatic of the post-democratic world we live in today:
It seems to me that what’s interesting about the Tony Blair Institute is that it’s a newish kind of thing, maybe even a post-democratic kind of thing. It looks like a thought-through response to the recognition that international policy, in many of the respects that matter, has been substantially privatised.
It has been a commonplace since Blair was prime minister that the largest corporations now have more power than most nation-states. Their influence on tax and regulatory regimes, directly and indirectly, is considerable, and with it, their influence on the direction of national and international policy. Google and Amazon do more to determine the shape of the world and the lives of its citizens than all but a few elected politicians.
A recent feature article in the London Times, titled “Tony Blair: Politics Is for the Weird and the Wealthy”, provides a glimpse of just how much influence Blair and TBI are likely to wield during a Starmer government:
Starmer, who shared a stage with Blair at the TBI’s Future of Britain conference last summer, has populated his team with Blairites — including the former Blair special adviser Matthew Doyle, now Starmer’s director of communications; the former Blair strategist and speechwriter Peter Hyman, who is a senior adviser; and another former Blair special adviser, Peter Kyle, now the shadow science secretary. In particular Kyle and Wes Streeting, the glossy shadow health secretary, are said to act as Blair’s emissaries around the shadow cabinet table.
Marianna McFadden, previously “head of insight” at the TBI, is deputy to Starmer’s campaign director, Morgan McSweeney. Working with them is Marianna’s husband, Pat McFadden, a Blair government veteran who is Labour’s election campaign chief. He says: “One of the good things Keir has done is to tell the Labour Party and the country that he’s really proud of what Labour’s done in government. We went through a period of time after 2010 when we weren’t telling the Labour Party and the country that, and that’s a welcome change.”
McFadden describes the TBI as a “useful resource for different members of the shadow cabinet”. “Curiosity is an essential function of leadership, and people who want to occupy positions of government responsibility have a duty to be curious about technological change,” he says. “In an era of tight money, where so much of the debate is around fiscal events and headroom, you need a broader debate. I’m not saying that public services don’t need investment — of course they do — but there is also going to be interest in how services can be reformed and whether technology can help you get greater productivity.”
Blair’s Digital Nirvana
For Blair and his namesake non-profit, technology is invariably the solution to most of the world’s problems. There is an almost evangelical zeal to Blair’s faith in digital technologies, including biometrics. As the Times article notes, Blair’s prescriptions are, unsurprisingly, technocratic. They include promoting the full gamut of “digital public infrastructure”, or DPI, currently being rolled out in countries across the Global South, often with World Bank loans and financing from billionaire philanthro-capitalists like Bill Gates and Pierre Omidyar.
Since leaving politics in 2007, Blair’s global influence has, if anything, grown, thanks largely to the expanding influence of TBI. As the FT reported last June, TBI has in effect become a global consultancy to the UK government, giving advice on a whole host of issues. It has over $100 million in s also currently active in 40 other countries, including the United States. Most, however, are in the global south/majority, where TBI advises governments on DPI such as digital vaccine certificates, digital identity and central bank digital currency.
In January 2021, Blair made one of the most Orwellian statements of the COVID-19 pandemic. “In the end,” he said in an interview with ITV News, “vaccination is going to be your route to liberty.” At one point he called unvaccinated people “idiots” and repeatedly urged the UK government to introduce vaccine passes. What he didn’t say was that his foundation, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, or TBI, had received millions of dollars in donations from pro-vaccine organisations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
A year later, he joined forces with his erstwhile rival William Hague to call for the introduction of a digital identity system as part of a “fundamental reshaping of the state around technology”. As prime minister, Blair tried but failed to introduce an identity card system in the UK. Now, his foundation is promoting digital identity programs around the world, including to many authoritarian regimes. A report by the NYU School of Law’s Center for Human Rights and Global Justice (CHRGJ) warns that the emerging digital ID infrastructure has already “been linked to severe and large-scale human rights violations in a range of countries around the world, affecting social, civil, and political rights.”
This does not appear to even register as an issue for Blair. As always, he has an unbending faith in his own judgement of what is needed for the world to become a better place. Whether it is the need for “humanitarian” military intervention in the 1990s and 2000s or to digitalise everything, including government, health, banking and payment services, Blair and his associates know best.
In a speech at the World Economic Forum’s 2020 cyber attack simulation event, “Cyber Polygon”, he told the event’s participants that Digital Identity would form an “inevitable” part of the digital ecosystem being constructed around us, and so government should work with technology companies to regulate their use — as the EU has just done. It is the perfect manifestation of the 21st century Public Private Partnership — a digital panopticon designed and built by global tech companies, paid for with taxpayer funds, so that the government, security agencies and their corporate partners can more easily track, trace and control the populace.
July 2020: Speaking as part of the WEF’s annual ‘Cyber Polygon’ event, former UK PM Tony Blair—who was instrumental in opening the UK’s floodgates to mass, uncontrolled immigration—touts the need for digital ID in determining “who has the right to be in your country”.… pic.twitter.com/Ru4uMYake8
— Wide Awake Media (@wideawake_media) March 26, 2024
“A Fraud on the People”
The Hague-Blair duo has also called for the UK’s struggling National Health Service (NHS) to sell off its patients’ health data “to fund cutting-edge treatments” and raise much-needed money for the crumbling healthcare system. One of the main reasons why the NHS is so short of cash is the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) that Blair’s predecessor, John Major, created in 1992 but which Blair’s government massively expanded. As The Independent reported in 2018, PFI ended up burdening the State with more than £300bn in debt — for infrastructure projects with a face value of £54.7bn.
PFI, and its latest incarnation, PF2, allowed bankers and financial consultants to gorge on massively inflated interest rates and fees for run-of-the-mill infrastructure projects, while saddling taxpayers with debts they will struggle to repay. For over two decades. It was effectively “a fraud on the people”, as one of the biggest beneficiaries of PFI all but admitted a few years ago:
Sir Howard Davies, chairman of the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), recently made an astonishing admission on BBC1’s Question Time when he stated that private finance initiatives (PFI) had been a “fraud on the people”. Beyond seemingly populist rhetoric, the real story of PFI reveals that RBS alongside other global banks, notably HSBC, were instrumental in what Sir Howard has effectively labelled a great heist.
Blair is also far from a neutral voice on the issue of selling NHS health data. TBI’s principal donor is Larry Ellison, the world’s fourth-richest man and owner of the Silicon Valley giant Oracle which aspires to become the world’s most important online medical data company using its cloud technology. In 2022, Oracle bought the US electronic health records giant Cerner last year for $28 billion. The company’s ultimate goal is to build a united national health database amalgamating thousands of separate hospital databases.
Blair’s financial ties with Ellison clearly represent at least a potential conflict of interest and one that should be at least disclosed in any interview, article or report discussing Blair’s calls for NHS patient data to be sold to third party companies — which could, of course, include Oracle. It also goes without saying that issues around digital technology (digital vaccine certificates digital ID, CBDCs, biometric identifiers, digital censorship, digital health data…) will feature heavily in a Starmer / Blair 2.0 government.
Kowtowing to the City, Again
Let’s also not forget the crucial role Blair played in cementing Thatcher’s economic legacy during his ten years in power. Thatcher even cited Blair as her greatest accomplishment while Blair for his part openly admitted in 2013, in the wake of Thatcher’s death, that his job as PM had been to “build on some of the things [Thatcher] had done rather than reverse them”. As Kuttner notes, it was Tony Blair and his US soul mate, Bill Clinton, who consolidated neoliberal economics as the only option:
Both Clinton’s New Democrats and Blair’s New Labour turned away from progressivism and working families in favor of globalist corporate financial elites. Neoliberal deregulation of finance (NC: particularly the emerging derivatives markets) produced the economic collapse in 2008.
The failure of the center-left party to maximize the moment, contain capital, and rebuild a pro-worker economy led to the defection of working-class voters and ultimately to Trump in the U.S. and Brexit in the U.K.
It is hard to forget just how obsequious Blair’s New Labour was to the City of London. In a speech at the Mansion House in 2007, Blair’s long-time frenemy and then-Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, congratulated himself for “resisting pressure” to toughen up regulation of the City’s activities. As Andrew Rawnsley reported in The Guardian, Brown declared that:
Everyone needed to follow the City’s ‘great example’, emulate this ‘high value-added, talent-driven industry’. ‘Britain needs more of the vigour, ingenuity and aspiration that you already demonstrate.’ Thanks to their ‘remarkable achievements’, we had the huge privilege to live in ‘an era that history will record as the beginning of a new Golden Age’.
As in the US, once the bubble burst and the financial edifice came tumbling down, there was no great reckoning, or indeed any reckoning of any kind. There was a shift in the language, however. What Brown had hailed as “a golden age” he now suddenly deplored as an “age of irresponsibility.”
By then, of course, Blair had already left politics and had walked straight into a plush senior advisory role with the US’ biggest lender, JP Morgan Chase — a position he holds to this day. In 2022, the former prime minister was named by a JPM whistleblower as one of a number of parties to have received improperly processed “emergency payments” from the bank.
A Starmer government, if anything, could be even worse than Blair’s. In the comments thread to a recent post of mine, Colonel Smithers, a regular NC commentator who is UK power politics adjacent, suggested that the next Labour government will be even more in thrall to the City of London than Blair or Brown’s:
From late November, I have become involved with the trade body representing foreign banks operating in the City, including their engagement with Labour. What you report is the tip of the iceberg.
Labour’s leader and its Treasury team told us that “the City is a force for good” and “Labour has the City’s back” and “every day, every month and every year of a Labour government, it will maintain its credibility with the markets and enhance relations with investors”… This includes a balanced budget, if not a budget surplus, and funding solely from tax.
Labour would like the City to fund its programme, partner at all levels of government and second staff to all levels of government, including economic development, education and land use planning. It sees no role for unions and civil society. Labour’s definition of “an active state” is where the government “is stable and ensures all the levers pull in the same direction”.
Labour is not interested in “opposition for opposition’s sake” and “has moved on from student t shirt politics”.
Blair’s team, which has many young former civil servants, and Mandelson are working on Labour’s “bomb proof” manifesto. They have banksters from Barclays, HSBC, Citi, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan and staff from private equity on secondment.
Later this month, we have a session with the Labour health and development leads, Wes Streeting and Lisa Nandy. Labour is keen to mobilise City investment and expertise to reform healthcare and overseas development.
Streeting is a protege… and has the Blair and Mandelson machine in his corner for the succession to Starmer, which many Blairites hope will be sooner rather than later.
The party’s kowtowing to the City was recently on full display when it decided to abandon a popular policy commitment to curb excessive banker bonuses. The general secretary of the Labour-affiliated Fire Brigades Union (FBU) Matt Wrack summed up the general public’s response in a comment on X (formerly Twitter), describing the U-turn as “an utterly daft approach” to public policy:
“Tackling abuse by wealthy bankers would be a popular move and a vote winner. The desperation from Starmer’s team to win approval from the people who run the finance industry is appalling.”
“Resetting” UK’s Relationship with EU
A Blair/Starmer government will probably be even more subservient to US corporate, financial and geopolitical interests than the current Sunak government, if such a thing is possible. As Declassified UK reported last year, Starmer served on the Trilateral Commission “alongside two former heads of the CIA without telling Jeremy Corbyn—who would have blocked it.” The group was founded in 1973 by billionaire banker David Rockefeller as a networking platform for elites from the US, Europe and Japan, and is closely tied to US and UK intelligence.
Here is Noam Chomsky giving a little historical background on the organisation:
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Lest we forget, Starmer played a leading role in the persecution prosecution of Julian Assange. As Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) from 2008-13, Starmer oversaw Julian Assange’s proposed extradition to Sweden to face questioning over sexual assault allegations. During that period he visited Washington four times while the CPS under his stewardship was marred by procedural irregularities surrounding Assange’s case, including the destruction of key emails relating to the case and documents pertaining to Starmer’s trips to Washington.
While Starmer is likely to place the UK even deeper under the US’ thumb, Blair is determined to “reset” the UK’s relationship with the EU. From the Times interview:
There is also Britain’s relationship with Europe. “It would be wise to reset it,” Blair says. “There are too many things that affect us that are going on in Europe. That doesn’t mean to say [Starmer] will start trying to frame this as rejoining [the EU] or even the single market. In any event, we’ve got a trade negotiation coming up in 2025. But at the moment we’re outside the big political union on our own continent and we’ve got a disrupted trading relationship with our biggest trading partner, so you’ve got to fix this stuff.
Blair has always viewed the 2016 Brexit vote with unbridled contempt, even going so far as to describe it as a “coup” in the immediate aftermath of the vote. As the former bank regulator and white-collar crime lawyer Bill Black related in a piece cross-posted by Naked Capitalism, Blair’s real beef is with “populism”:
He is enraged that the UK voters “demonized” “the experts” who warned that BREXIT would cause an economic catastrophe. He is appalled that “the left” in the UK is appalled by the conduct of the City’s bankers that became wealthy by gutting and filleting their customers to the tune of 50 billion pounds on payment protection insurance (PPI), ran the two largest cartels in world history, made hundreds of billions of pounds in “liar’s” loans, laundered money for drug cartels, kleptocrats, and terrorists, and nations trying to develop nuclear weapons, and helped elites worldwide evade paying their taxes.
The bankers’ frauds made them spectacularly wealthy and drove the financial crisis. Blair’s destruction of effective financial regulation and supervision made all of this possible. As in the United States, the elite bankers were able to become ultra-wealthy by leading these frauds and scams with complete impunity from prosecution. But Blair is appalled that “the left” wants to restore the rule of law to the City of London’s elite bankers. Blair is outraged that after the sordid record of the bankers’ crimes, abuses, and staggering incompetence the public refused to defer to those bankers as “the experts” on BREXIT.
Blair has stuck firm to his position on Brexit. Here he is presenting a fairly compelling case for why it is in the UK’s long-term geopolitical interest to stay in the EU — compelling, that is, in the year 2019 when the EU still looked like a reasonably strong, cohesive unit with a functioning industrial economy that hadn’t been decimated by a dozen rounds of backfiring sanctions on its main energy supplier:
Listen to Blair’s reflections on Brexit in 2019! Right on! pic.twitter.com/fRgFSbk7hG
— Cary Cooper (@ProfCaryCooper) May 1, 2024
As Blair prepares for his return to frontline politics in the UK, albeit through proxies in Kier Starmer’s cabinet, questions are being asked, particularly in the right-wing press, about just how far a Starmer government is prepared to go to reverse Brexit.
Like Blair, Starmer is a staunch remainer. Days after the referendum, he described the result as “catastrophic for the UK, for our communities and for the next generation.” Jeremy Corbyn went on to commit a rookie error by appointing Starmer as shadow Brexit secretary from 2016-19 — a rookie error. As Declassified UK notes, “in this role he was integral to the push for a second referendum on exiting the European Union, a position that many fault for Labour’s catastrophic performance in the 2019 election.”
France and Germany are now championing an “associate membership” proposal that would involve Britain observing EU law and accepting a form of free movement in return for access to the single market. French Premier Emmanuel Macron is apparently very keen on the idea. According to an EU source cited by the euro-sceptic tabloid, the Daily Mail, “the deal had been drawn up with Labour in mind and was ‘carefully balanced politically to be a potential place for Britain without the need to ever rejoin the EU or to hold a referendum’”.
It is an offer that hopefully even Starmer and Blair will refuse, given that it will essentially mean that the UK continues to be subject to EU laws while having no means of influencing them. The Labour Party has so far rejected the proposal, saying it is not interested in reopening the old wounds, and only hopes to “improve” the Brexit deal negotiated by the Boris Johnson government. But even that will come at a price.
In an interview with Bloomberg in November, Blair talked about “carving out blocks of cooperation” with the EU. “For Britain to be absent from Europe is a real problem for us,” he said. “However, having left it, getting back in is a real tricky, tricky negotiation.” If anyone is willing and able to pull it off, regardless of the dire consequences it could have for the already anemic levels of political trust and support in the UK, it is Tony Blair.