Tony Blair is right: Labour is, “playing with fire over its future and the future of the country”. On that point I have no serious quarrel with the extended critique of the Labour Party in his essay of 26th May. His plea for long-term strategic thinking is a welcome corrective to the current myopia of Westminster politics. But the cure he prescribes is precisely the accelerant that will fan that fire into an inferno. This is written, not in the spirit of factional response, but because the millions of people whose lives are circumscribed by poverty, insecurity and the gathering storms of climate breakdown deserve rather better than to be offered a choice between two competing versions of managerial centrism.
Blair's essay is, in parts, genuinely insightful. His analysis of the twin epochal challenges — geopolitical realignment and the transformative power of artificial intelligence — is conducted with all his intellectual elan. He is right that Britain must navigate a world in which American hegemony is no longer assumed, in which India and China's rise reshapes global power dynamics, and in which the AI revolution will disrupt labour markets, public services and the very nature of governance in ways we can barely begin to comprehend. On these matters, his voice cuts through.
But the task of government has to be greater, and the questions it answers must be wider than simply “How do we grow GDP and cope with the rise of A.I. and the G2/3?” It must inspire a new generation with a vision of an economy where the gains from economic activity are shared fairly and sustainably. The task is to provide security and prosperity for the many and not just the few. It is to set out how we may bequeath to the next generation a richer set of options and opportunities than those we have today.
Having correctly identified geopolitics and technology, Blair fails to address the other key global challenges of inequality, and climate and ecological collapse. He retreats to the comfort zone of the 1990s. His prescription is economic growth of the old kind — GDP expansion, private sector animal spirits unleashed, benefits cut, Net Zero sacrificed on the altar of cheap energy, and a Labour Party that makes its peace with capital rather than challenging its terms. It is the politics of Davos dressed in the language of radicalism, and it will not do.
The current Prime Minister, says Blair, won the 2024 election not by inspiring the country, but by being 'an acceptable default option'. Perhaps it is no cause for wonder that a government built on not being ‘the other party’ cannot long endure?
Blair's vision of growth is, at its core, a vision of GDP expansion. But he predicates it on an AI revolution that he acknowledges will disempower millions of people depriving them of their jobs and livelihoods. Unbridled growth like this will simply concentrate greater wealth and power into the hands of the global oligarchs who own such technology. A more democratic vision of growth is required, something altogether different: the growth that the distinguished economist Partha Dasgupta calls inclusive wealth.
In 2021, the independent review of the Economics of Biodiversity commissioned by HM Treasury and led by Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta was published. It should have changed everything. It has not. The Dasgupta Review established with devastating clarity that the conventional measure of economic success, Gross Domestic Product, is not merely inadequate but actively misleading. GDP measures the flow of goods and services through an economy without accounting for the depletion of the natural assets that make all economic activity possible. It is, Dasgupta observed, as though a firm were measuring its income without accounting for the depreciation of its capital base. No prudent business would operate this way. Yet this is precisely how governments have chosen to measure the success of nations for the better part of a century.
The alternative framework Dasgupta proposes — inclusive wealth — accounts for all of the assets upon which human wellbeing depends: produced capital (roads, buildings, machinery), human capital (the knowledge, skills and health of the population), and natural capital (forests, fisheries, soils, clean air, stable climate, the biodiversity upon which all ecosystem services ultimately rest). When we measure inclusive wealth rather than GDP, the picture that emerges is one of civilisations in crisis. For decades, nations across the world — including the United Kingdom — have been drawing down their natural capital at a rate that is neither sustainable nor recoverable on any meaningful human timescale.
This is not a counsel of despair. It is a call to rational action. And it demands a fundamental reorientation of government purpose. The real question for a Labour government is not 'how do we grow GDP?' but 'how do we grow inclusive wealth?' How do we build an economy in which produced capital, human capital and natural capital all grow together, in which the gains from economic activity are shared justly, and in which we leave the next generation a richer inheritance in every meaningful sense of those words.
The answer to that question is neither the Blair prescription of unleashing private capital and abandoning environmental commitments, nor the timid incrementalism of a government afraid of its own shadow. It is a programme of purposeful, mission-driven state investment — investment that simultaneously addresses the existential challenge of climate change, rebuilds the resilience of our communities and infrastructure, restores our natural environment, and creates the decent, skilled, well-paid jobs that people in every part of this country have every right to expect.
One week before Blair’s essay, the Climate Change Committee published its Adaptation Report, 'A Well Adapted UK'. It should be read by every Member of Parliament. What it tells us is not a story for the future — it is a story about the present. The risks of heat, flood, drought and food insecurity are not projections for 2050. They are here now, in the lives of people across this country, and they are intensifying with every passing year.
The Report makes clear that the UK is not adequately prepared for the climate impacts already locked in by historical emissions, let alone the further warming that is coming regardless of what any government does in the next decade. Our homes are overheating. Our flood defences are inadequate. Our water infrastructure is fragile. Our food supply chains are vulnerable. Our natural environment — the very ecosystem services upon which all prosperity ultimately depends — is in accelerating decline.
Five months before that report, the National Security Committee published its own assessment of the risks of biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse. It spoke of “the irreversible loss of function beyond repair”. Ecological breakdown is no longer simply an environmental issue. It is a security one. And the National Security Committee documents the threats with surgical dispassion. It says, “Cascading risks of ecosystem degradation are likely to include geopolitical instability, economic insecurity, conflict, migration and increased inter-state competition for resources.” The collapse of pollinator populations threatens agricultural productivity. The degradation of soils threatens food security. The loss of coastal ecosystems removes the natural defences that protect millions of people from flooding. These are not marginal risks. They are, as the assessment correctly identifies, systemic threats to the essential functioning of our economy and our society.
And yet — Blair argues that Labour should reconsider its commitment to Net Zero. What irony! that the Prime Minister who presided over the Stern Review and put climate change at the heart of the Gleneagles G8 Summit in 2005, has been reduced to parroting that ‘clean energy must yield to cheap energy’, and says the acceleration of net-zero is a mistake. This represents a fundamental category error. Blair fails to measure the cost of transition –painful– against the cost of inaction – catastrophic! It ignores entirely the Dasgupta framework which tells us that the depletion of natural capital is not a free good, but the most expensive bill humanity has ever run up. And it ignores the extraordinary economic opportunity that the clean energy transition represents — an opportunity that other nations are seizing with far greater urgency than we are.
If the first duty of government is the protection of its citizens, then the central proposition is simple but radical: Security demands that resilience be the organising purpose of government. Not one policy area among many. Not a responsibility to be parcelled out to one of the least powerful departments in Whitehall and then abandoned. No! Resilience as the governing purpose of the state — the lens through which every spending decision, every regulatory choice, every trade negotiation, every infrastructure investment is evaluated. This is not idealism. It is pragmatism. It is the recognition that the alternative, business-as-usual model has no future.
The Institute for Government has, over many years, produced some of the most valuable and penetrating analysis of why the UK government so consistently fails to deliver the outcomes it promises. And a central theme of that analysis — running through reports on cross-departmental working, on the role of the Cabinet Office, on the management of major programmes — is the debilitating effect of departmental silos.
The problem is structural and familiar to anyone who has worked in or around Whitehall. Each department has its own targets, its own key performance indicators, its own spending round settlement and its own Secretary of State determined to defend their departmental patch. The result is that the targets of one department routinely undermine the targets of another. The Department for Transport builds roads that increase carbon emissions and undermine the targets of the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero. The Department for Work and Pensions pursues welfare cost reductions that increase demand on NHS services, undermining the Department of Health and Social Care's efficiency targets. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs pursues Nature Recovery targets while the Department for Housing, Community and Local Government approves planning applications that destroy the very habitats those targets depend upon.
The Cabinet Office has theoretically been responsible for resolving these conflicts. In practice, it has the authority of a referee who is also playing for one of the teams. It has neither the staff capacity, the spending power nor the political authority to impose solutions on departments led by senior Cabinet ministers with their own political agendas. The result is that cross-cutting challenges — and all of the most important challenges facing government are cross-cutting — are systematically under-managed.
A government focussed around resilience would create a new Department for Sustainable Development — a super-department with genuine authority over the cross-cutting mission of embedding resilience into every aspect of national life — would address this structural failure. But the Department for Sustainable Development would not be simply another large department with its own siloed team. Its distinctive contribution would be the creation of generic teams: multidisciplinary groups drawn from specialists across relevant departments, assembled around specific challenges and problems, and held accountable for achieving solutions rather than managing processes.
A heat resilience team, drawing on planners from MHCLG, public health experts from DHSC, climate scientists from DSIT, energy efficiency specialists from DESNZ and ecologists from DEFRA, working under a unified leadership and accountability framework to deliver the programme of housing retrofit and urban greening that the Adaptation Report tells us is urgently necessary. A food security team, drawing together agricultural economists, ecologists, trade specialists, public health nutritionists and community development practitioners to develop and implement a national food strategy with teeth. A water security team — charged not with managing the regulatory relationship with private water companies but with planning the transition to a publicly owned, resilient, ecologically responsible water system.
The principle underlying this reform is simple: government should be organised around the problems it needs to solve, not around the administrative convenience of departments that have accumulated their powers and territories over decades of bureaucratic accretion. Such a radical proposition will face fierce resistance from within the Whitehall machine, but it is the only serious response to the systemic failures that have left successive governments unable to deliver on their most important commitments.
A change in the machinery of government is not a substitute for a change in outcomes. It is the necessary means to achieving that radical change in outcomes. So it is important to be specific about what such change means in practice? It means a programme retrofitting millions of British homes to withstand the summers we know are coming, and the floods and storms of the winters we know will continue to cause misery and death. It means creating hundreds of thousands of skilled jobs in the process through a programme of sustainable drainage and flood management — working with, rather than against natural systems, restoring upland peat bogs and floodplains, creating wetlands that absorb rainfall and protect downstream communities. It means investing in green infrastructure that serves multiple purposes simultaneously.
It means a serious programme of food security — supporting farmers to transition to regenerative agricultural practices that restore soil health, reduce chemical inputs, enhance biodiversity and produce food that is nutritious and affordable domestically whilst commanding a high export value because of its quality assurance. It means investing in the water infrastructure that decades of privatisation and the extraction of shareholder value have allowed to decay — and it means doing so under public ownership, as we shall discuss further below.
It means investing in early warning systems, in community resilience planning, in the health services that will be required to respond to the flooding-related trauma, heat-related illness, and air pollution-related respiratory disease that are already presenting themselves in our hospitals and GP surgeries. These are not future threats but present harms, falling disproportionately on the poorest and most vulnerable members of our society.
If the task is to build security and prosperity for the many, then building resilience must be done in a way that generates good, secure, well-paid employment in every region of the country. The reports on ‘A Green and Fair Future’ and ‘Greener Workplaces’ commissioned by the TUC and the trades union movement clearly indicate the importance of a just transition for those whose jobs are at risk. They also demonstrate conclusively that the green economy is a labour-intensive economy. Heat pump installation, building retrofit, offshore wind manufacturing, solar panel deployment, ecological restoration, sustainable agriculture — these are jobs that cannot be offshored, jobs that require skills that can be developed in communities that have been hollowed out by deindustrialisation, and jobs that carry dignity and purpose as well as a decent wage.
Guy Shrubsole's meticulous research in 'Who Owns England?' and the older but equally revelatory work of Kevin Cahill in 'Who Owns Britain?' tell a story that should scandalise any serious progressive. England remains one of the most unequal countries in the developed world in terms of land ownership. Roughly half of England is owned by less than one percent of its population. Many of the great estates date from the Norman Conquest, and were further enlarged during the 19th Century enclosures. A thousand years later they continue to dominate the countryside. London's residential land is owned by a remarkably small number of institutions and individuals. And the planning system, far from democratising access to land, has historically served primarily to protect the interests of existing landowners.
This is not merely a question of historical injustice, though it is that. It is a question of present-day economic dysfunction. The hoarding of land — whether by aristocratic estates that keep it in permanent underdevelopment, or by developers who sit on planning permissions awaiting the optimal moment to cash in — distorts the entire economy. It drives up housing costs. It prevents communities from taking ownership of the land they need for affordable homes, community facilities and green spaces. It concentrates wealth in the hands of the already wealthy at the expense of everyone else.
Community right to buy, at a price that reflects use value rather than speculative value. Transparency requirements that make it impossible to hide land ownership behind offshore trusts and shell companies. A land value tax that shifts the burden of taxation from productive economic activity onto the unearned windfall of land appreciation. Reform of compulsory purchase powers to enable local authorities and community land trusts to assemble sites for affordable development without being held to ransom by speculative landowners.
The politics of place recognises that devolution is not merely a structural arrangement but a democratic principle, that communities have the right to shape the economic and social destiny of the places in which they live. This provides the political framework within which land reform and prosperity can be delivered. The Metro Mayor model demonstrates that when power and resources are genuinely devolved, when communities are trusted to make decisions about their own futures, the results can be transformative. Extended to the question of land, this means ensuring that communities have the first right to purchase land that comes onto the market in their area, the right to challenge absentee ownership that is damaging the local economy, and the resources to develop community land trusts that can deliver affordable housing in perpetuity.
A Land Value Tax that captures the socially created value of land appreciation for the common good — advocated by economists across the political spectrum, from Adam Smith to Joseph Stiglitz — would represent the single most powerful intervention available to reduce wealth inequality, fund public services and incentivise the productive use of land. It is an idea where GDP and inclusive growth can work together and whose time has come. The work of Thomas Piketty has demonstrated with empirical rigour that wealth inequality — driven primarily by the compounding returns on capital, including land — is not an accident of markets but the predictable consequence of a system that taxes income while leaving capital largely untouched. A government serious about addressing the structural causes of inequality and delivering prosperity cannot avoid the question of land.
The story of Thames Water is the horrific story of an entire ideology in miniature. A utility essential to human life and ecological health was placed in private hands, loaded with debt, and its infrastructure starved of investment. While its private equity shareholders extracted billions in dividends, our rivers and coastal waters were poisoned by sewage that was discharged with impunity by executives rewarded handsomely for the privilege of presiding over this degradation. It is a story of market failure so comprehensive that it defies rational defence — and yet, the ghost of the ideology that created it continues to haunt Blair’s thinking. Private profit is made at the expense of the public good.
Private water companies have consistently prioritised shareholder returns over infrastructure investment, with the result that England's water infrastructure is degrading, even as demand increases and climate change puts growing pressure on supply. Sewage discharges into our rivers and coastal waters have caused the destruction of aquatic ecosystems, the closure of beaches, and the contamination of waters used for both recreation and food production.
The People's Commission on Water has made the case for public ownership with a thoroughness and clarity that renders the counter-arguments threadbare. Public ownership of water utilities does not mean a return to the nationalised industries of the 1970s — large, centralised, producer-captured bureaucracies immune to accountability. It means a new model of public ownership: regionally structured, democratically accountable, with strong environmental governance, transparent financial management and a mandate to invest for the long term rather than extract for the short. This is achievable. The financial mechanisms exist, and it is above all popular with the public where polling shows majority support for water renationalisation across the political spectrum.
The renationalisation of the rail network, already partially under way through the creation of Great British Railways, should be completed without equivocation. The privatised rail franchise system has delivered, over three decades, a combination of high fares, poor reliability, inadequate investment and massive subsidy dependence that represents one of the great policy failures of the post-Thatcher era. A publicly owned, integrated rail network — accountable to passengers, to the communities it serves, and to the taxpayers who fund it — is not a socialist fantasy. It is the model that operates successfully in Germany, France, Japan and across most of the developed world.
This year marks the 70th anniversary of the Clean Air Act of 1956 — one of the great achievements of post-war British governance, born out of the catastrophic London smog of 1952 that killed an estimated twelve thousand people in 5 days. It is a fitting moment to acknowledge that we face another clean air emergency, no less serious for being less dramatically visible than that choking yellow fog.
How is it that the 200 plus deaths from knife crime are regularly debated in parliament, and action is demanded. The 1,600 fatal accidents on our roads each year are regularly debated in parliament, and action is demanded. Yet the Royal College of Physicians and the British Medical Association tell us that there are between 30,000 and 40,000 excess deaths from air pollution each year, and there is silence?
The links between air pollution and cardiovascular disease, asthma in children, dementia in the elderly, and premature death from respiratory disease have been documented with a rigour that admits no equivocation. It disproportionately affects those who live in poverty and are less likely to have the resources to insulate themselves from its worst effects. The World Health Organisation's air quality guidelines establish limit values for particulate matter and nitrogen dioxide that are exceeded across large swathes of the United Kingdom on a regular basis.
A new Clean Air Act — fit for the 21st century — should establish legally binding air quality limit values aligned with WHO guidelines, backed by a comprehensive programme of low emission zones, support for households to switch from polluting heating systems, investment in active travel infrastructure that reduces car dependency, and the manufacturing transition to electric vehicles that will clean up our roads. It should also establish clear responsibilities for monitoring, reporting and enforcement.
This is not, as some would characterise it, an attack on the motorist or the homeowner. It is an investment in the health of our people. The economic case alone is overwhelming: the Royal College of Physicians estimated NHS costs associated with air pollution-related illness run to more than £27 billion pounds per year. But the moral case is simpler and more compelling. Clean air is not a luxury. It is a right. And a government that takes that right seriously will be rewarded, in time, by a healthier, more productive and longer-lived population.
Blair is right that artificial intelligence represents a transformative opportunity for public services, including the National Health Service. Diagnostic AI that can identify cancers at earlier stages, predictive algorithms that can identify patients at risk of deterioration before they deteriorate, tools that can support GPs in managing the extraordinary complexity of multi-morbidity in an ageing population — these are real and significant opportunities that should be pursued with energy and ambition.
But Blair skirts around the wider ethical and security considerations that AI raises. Whilst France is moving to a sovereign open-source tool for its civil service, and the German government is developing a public sector alternative to Silicon Valley software, the UK has been outsourcing data from the Met Police, the MOD and the Financial Conduct Authority, to Palantir. In an official report, the Swiss army blocked Palantir’s involvement citing the “possibility that sensitive data could be accessed by the US government and intelligence services”. In the UK, the British Medical Association has called upon doctors to limit their engagement with the Federated Data Platform because of its links with Palantir who have been criticised by Amnesty International, and the UN for their alleged facilitation of ‘unlawful use of force’.
There is a profound difference between harnessing AI for the public good within a publicly owned and accountable NHS and outsourcing that opportunity to private technology companies in ways that privatise the gains while socialising the risks. The NHS holds one of the most valuable datasets in the world — decades of clinical records, genetic information, treatment outcomes and population health data that, used appropriately, could power the next generation of medical research and drive genuinely transformative improvements in care. That data was gathered in trust. It belongs to the public. Its value should flow to the public.
This means investing in NHS data infrastructure under public ownership, developing AI capabilities in partnership with universities and public research institutions, and establishing a clear legal and ethical framework that ensures patient data is used for public benefit rather than private profit. It means rejecting the model — already being explored in some quarters — of offering NHS data to commercial companies in exchange for access to AI tools that those companies will then sell back to the NHS at profit. That is not a bargain – It is a mugging.
It also means investing in the workforce capacity to make the most of AI tools — training clinicians to use them effectively, supporting the administrative staff whose roles will be transformed, and ensuring that the productivity gains from AI are reinvested in improving care rather than extracted as efficiency savings that simply displace clinical risk onto patients. The NHS is not broken because it is publicly owned. It is under strain because it has been politically destabilised by repeated reorganisations and asked to absorb the social consequences of a decade and a half of austerity. AI cannot fix those problems. Only investment and stability can.
Inequality is not an unfortunate side effect of an otherwise well-functioning economy. It is a structural feature of an economy organised around the extraction of value from labour and the natural environment, for the benefit of those who own capital. Addressing it requires not merely redistribution through the tax and benefits system — necessary though that is — but a transformation of the power relationships within the economy: between employers and workers, between landlords and tenants, between corporations and communities, between private capital and the public interest.
The intellectual case for a fundamental shift in fiscal policy — away from the taxation of earned income and productive economic activity, and towards the taxation of accumulated wealth and unearned capital gains — has never been stronger. The work of Thomas Piketty has established, on the basis of data spanning two centuries and dozens of countries, that capitalism's tendency is towards growing wealth concentration unless actively counteracted by redistributive taxation. When the return on capital consistently exceeds the rate of economic growth, wealth naturally concentrates in fewer and fewer hands. Britain in 2026 exemplifies this dynamic with startling clarity.
Esther Duflo's work on poverty, inequality and the effectiveness of redistribution programmes provides the empirical foundation for the design of specific interventions. Her research, conducted with Abhijit Banerjee and recognised with the Nobel Prize in Economics, demonstrates that well-designed redistribution is not merely a matter of moral justice but of economic efficiency — that tackling poverty and reducing inequality generates economic activity, improves health outcomes, reduces crime and enhances the productive capacity of the economy as a whole. The false trade-off between equality and growth — beloved of those who benefit from inequality and find academic rationalisation for that benefit — is not supported by the evidence.
Joseph Stiglitz has gone further, arguing that the dominance of financial capitalism over productive capitalism — the hollowing out of the real economy in favour of financial engineering, the extraction of rents rather than the creation of value — is a structural cause of both economic stagnation and rising inequality. His prescriptions include stronger antitrust enforcement, reform of corporate governance to give workers and communities a voice alongside shareholders, and a tax system that penalises rent-seeking while rewarding genuine productive investment.
At a time when everyone is demanding a more efficient use of public money, what some still refuse to accept is that a fairer programme of wealth taxation is also a more efficient one. Eliminating the preferential treatment of capital-derived income relative to earned income would mean a suite of reforms from a financial transactions tax on the secondary trading of financial instruments, to policies around capital gains tax, inheritance tax, and trusts that enable wealth to be passed on, while contributing little to the common good.
On monetary policy, the active resale of gilts acquired during the crisis period of Quantitative Easing has imposed substantial costs on the public finances. As the Bank of England's own research has documented, and as Christopher Mahon and others have argued in the pages of the Financial Times, QT has contributed to elevated gilt yields at precisely the moment when government needs to borrow for the long-term investment programmes that our economic situation demands. The current statutory independence of the Bank of England in the management of its balance sheet — including the active selling of gilts into the market — should be revisited. The power of the Bank to conduct active gilt sales should be curtailed, with the Bank instead permitted only to allow gilts to mature rather than actively selling them, thereby reducing the upward pressure on borrowing costs without compromising the Bank's operational independence in the setting of interest rates.
The deindustrialisation of Britain was not a natural economic phenomenon. It was a political choice — a choice made in the 1980s to allow market forces to determine the destiny of communities that had sustained manufacturing employment for generations, and to assume that the service sector would fill the void. The void has not been filled. The towns and cities of the Midlands, the North, Wales and Scotland that lost their manufacturing base did not find prosperity in financial services or the knowledge economy. They found unemployment, poverty, ill health and the corrosive social despair that eventually expressed itself in the Brexit vote.
The CBI's research on what business requires from government by way of incentivising private capital into new manufacturing areas is instructive. It tells us that businesses need certainty — long-term policy frameworks that allow them to invest with confidence, rather than the short-term political cycles that have characterised British industrial policy for decades. They need skills — a workforce equipped with the technical capabilities that advanced manufacturing requires and demands. They need infrastructure — energy, transport, digital connectivity, and research facilities. And they need, in some sectors, patient public capital to de-risk investments that private finance will not undertake on its own.
The trades union reports on jobs, growth and a just transition add a crucial dimension: the social architecture of manufacturing investment. Sectoral collective bargaining that establishes fair wage standards across new industries, rather than allowing a race to the bottom in labour costs. Apprenticeship programmes that give young people in de-industrialised communities access to genuinely skilled, well-paid employment. Community benefit agreements to ensure that, when new industrial facilities are built in a community, the people of that community share meaningfully in the economic gains. Jobs are the most fundamental means of creating the security and prosperity that people need.
The industrial sectors of the future are, in large part, the sectors that the green transition requires: offshore wind turbine manufacturing, battery technology, heat pump production, sustainable building materials, precision fermentation for food production, and the whole ecosystem of technologies required for the management of a clean, secure energy system. These are sectors in which Britain has genuine comparative advantages — in engineering capability, in scientific research, in offshore energy infrastructure — and in which state investment, guided by a serious industrial strategy, can attract and anchor private capital in ways that create lasting, well-paid employment. A National Industrial Strategy, developed in genuine partnership with trades unions and employers, underpinned by a National Investment Bank with a mandate to deploy patient capital in strategic sectors, and linked explicitly to the skills infrastructure through a reformed and properly resourced Further Education sector, is not socialism. It is what every successful manufacturing economy in the world does.
Blair is right that Labour cannot win by simply being the anti-Conservative/Reform option. He is right that the party needs a project, a tribe and a governing purpose. He is right that the storms of social media will be weathered only by those who have a sufficiently robust ideological vision to be, in the best sense, oblivious to them.
But this brings us to one final irony at the heart of Blair's argument — an irony so large that one is astonished it appears to escape him. He analyses, with evident admiration, the political success of Donald Trump, Giorgia Meloni and Javier Milei. He observes, quite correctly, that their power derives from the fact that they have, what he calls 'an attitude, a tribe and a project.' They are, he notes, unbound by conventional thinking, oblivious to the storms of social media precisely because they have built a base of ‘true believers’ who will weather those storms with them. They succeed because they project ideological clarity and a governing purpose, however repugnant that purpose may be.
But he cannot bring himself to acknowledge that one Labour leader of recent times who did build such a tribe, who did project an ideological vision robust enough to be oblivious to the social media storms and the relentless hostility of the mainstream press, and who did inspire genuine fervour in millions of people. Blair dismisses him, with patrician contempt, as an 'intellectual wasteland.' He dismisses, in other words, the very phenomenon his own analysis tells him Labour desperately needs.
The world has changed dramatically since 2017. But the tribe Labour needs to build is not Blair’s tribe of his so-called ‘radical centre’ — the contented professional class, the financially comfortable, the people who have done well enough from the existing settlement to prefer its reform to its transformation. That tribe is not radical, and it already has political representation in abundance. The tribe Labour needs to build is the coalition that 2017 briefly glimpsed: the young people inspired by the possibility of genuine change, the workers in insecure employment who need the protection of labour law and collective bargaining, the communities whose children are breathing polluted air, whose homes flood with increasing regularity, whose futures are being mortgaged by a consumption-driven growth model that is destroying the natural capital upon which all human wellbeing ultimately depends. That is a majority coalition.
It is the coalition we need to bring back hope and prosperity, united not by nostalgia for a social-democratic past or by enthusiasm for a technocratic future, but by the recognition that the world of inclusive wealth, resilient communities, manufacturing renaissance, and democratic accountability, is a better world than the one we currently inhabit. And that building it is the work not of a parliamentary session but of a generation.
The fire Blair warns of is real. But the answer to fire is not to retreat to the safety of the known — because the known is what is burning. The answer is to build something new: a politics equal to the scale of the crisis we face, rooted in the communities that have most to lose and most to gain, and sustained by the moral clarity that comes from knowing that the work we are doing matters not just for this Parliament, or this generation, but for every generation that comes after us.
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Barry Gardiner is the Labour MP for Brent West.
All blog posts represent the views of the author alone and not necessarily those of Mainstream.
