A once-radical Labour moderniser, Tony Blair, now sounds more like a Silicon Valley consultant for Trump-friendly billionaires than a champion of the working people who built the Labour party
Tony Blair still carries himself as though he alone understands Labour’s soul.
Every few years, Blair reappears to warn the party it is drifting too far left, becoming too suspicious of business or losing touch with “modern Britain”. Yet his latest 5,700-word essay feels different. It reads less like advice from a former Labour leader and more like a declaration that many of the party’s founding instincts are now, in Blair’s eyes, problems to be dismantled.
Again and again throughout the piece, he frames core Labour values almost as weaknesses. Workers’ rights become a drag on growth. Welfare is discussed primarily as a financial burden. Environmental ambition is treated as an obstacle to competitiveness. Public services are reduced to systems needing “transformation” through private-sector logic and technological disruption.
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There is remarkably little in the essay about inequality, insecure work, struggling families, the cost of living or the concentration of wealth and power.
Instead, the language is dominated by “competitiveness”, “AI revolution”, “markets”, “deregulation” and “growth”. It reads less like Labour politics and more like a management consultancy pitch drafted somewhere between Davos and a billionaire tech summit for the benefit of some Silicon Valley bros.
Blair argues Labour should rethink workers’ protections, move harder on welfare cuts, scale back elements of net zero and embrace far deeper private-sector involvement in healthcare. The message is unmistakable: Labour’s role, in his view, is to reassure wealth and power first and trust that ordinary people eventually benefit.
Most revealing of all is the political company Blair now keeps.
He openly praises the “effectiveness” of Donald Trump and warns Britain against becoming too “wary” of his America. This is the same US leader whose politics have revolved around division, attacks on democratic institutions and open contempt for labour protections, environmental rules and political opponents.
Yet Blair increasingly sounds fascinated by Trump-style disruption politics – the idea that smashing through institutions and bulldozing convention somehow proves strength.
That becomes even more troubling when viewed alongside Blair’s modern network. His institute has received support linked to Larry Ellison, the billionaire Oracle founder and one of Trump’s most powerful backers. Blair also sits on Trump’s so-called Board of Peace, a grandiose and deeply questionable project wrapped in the language of diplomacy while orbiting around some of the most powerful billionaire and political interests on the planet.
For many Labour supporters, that should ring alarm bells. Because Blair increasingly sounds less like a former Labour prime minister and more like a roaming ambassador for billionaire technocracy – a politics where democracy, public services and working-class concerns are secondary to “innovation”, disruption and elite global networking.
Of course, Labour must embrace technology, growth and modernisation. But Labour was not founded simply to make markets more efficient or reassure billionaires that Britain is open for investment. It exists to redistribute power, wealth and opportunity towards ordinary people.
That is the central flaw in Blair’s argument. He talks constantly about efficiency and delivery but barely about solidarity, community or economic justice. He sees Labour’s values not as strengths to build upon but constraints to escape.
Britain has already spent decades living through politics shaped around deregulation, globalisation and elite corporate thinking. Much of today’s anger and distrust grew directly from that settlement.
Labour wins when it speaks unapologetically for working people. The more it sounds like a consultancy presentation delivered to tech billionaires and Trump’s golf club mates, the more it risks losing the very soul Blair claims to understand.