The less we hear from Tony Blair, the better

Readers respond to coverage of an essay by the former Labour prime minister attacking the party’s current leadership and policies

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/may/29/the-less-we-hear-from-tony-blair-the-better



Wouldn’t it be great if Tony Blair kept his mouth shut about the Labour party (Tony Blair tells Starmer and rivals: abandon net zero and move closer to Trump, 26 May)? Since he entered his messianic phase, his utterances have undermined the leadership while attempting to push the party ever further to the right. He’s entitled to his views, but if he is still a party member, his are no more valid than anyone else’s.

Does he think that the millions he has earned by leveraging his former office will protect his grandchildren from horrendous climate change if we abandon net zero ambitions? Having led us into one illegal war through becoming too close to a US president, does he think that going into another illegal Middle East war alongside the deranged inhabitant of the White House is really a good idea? Does he think that criticising the Employment Rights Act while decrying the change to non-dom status is a vote-winning strategy? Yesterday’s man with yesterday’s answers would do better to get back to what he does best, increasing his multimillion-pound fortune as a shill for autocrats, dictators and the sovereign wealth funds of unsavoury Middle Eastern regimes.

Fred Pickering
Chapel-en-le-Frith, Derbyshire

Whenever Tony Blair speaks out on where the Labour party has got it wrong, one can invariably guarantee that the solution lies in more neoliberalism spearheaded by the kind of mega-corporations that support the Tony Blair Institute. The institute is funded by private billionaires, notably Larry Ellison of Oracle, who has given it more than £250m over the past five years. It has also received at least £9m from the Saudi Arabian government to assist with its Vision 2030 programme, which is aimed at diversifying its economy away from oil and updating its social institutions.

It is hardly surprising, then, that Blair wants Keir Starmer and any successor to follow economic policies that maximise profits for his sponsors, reduce public expenditure by cutting welfare spending, remove restrictions on oil and gas exploration, and get closer to Donald Trump. It is now more apparent than ever that Blair belongs very firmly to the right of the political spectrum, where the creation of wealth is prioritised in favour of an elite of which he is a part, with any attempt at a fairer society to be postponed until an indeterminate future date when we might be able to afford it.

Bill Jackson
Nottingham

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Tony Blair is strong on diagnosis, deluded on prescription: Britain’s ills can’t be fixed by him

The former PM’s essay rightly calls for a coherent economic plan, but then sets too much store by AI – and a worldview stuck in the past

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/may/27/tony-blair-strong-diagnosis-deluded-prescription-britain-artificial-intelligence



Tony Blair is right. Labour has made some big and avoidable mistakes since it came to power nearly two years ago. Keir Starmer had a strategy for winning the election but lacked a coherent plan for what his government would do next. Fair cop. Blair is also correct when he says that unless Britain tackles some long-term structural issues, it is in danger of being relegated from the “premier league of nations”. Achieving higher levels of sustainable growth is one challenge. Welfare reform is another. And as the former prime minister notes, reversing Brexit is not a solution to those problems.

But, all that said, Blair’s 5,700-word essay published by his Institute for Global Change is a flawed analysis of what the country needs. It is one part nostalgia for a golden Blairite era that never was, one part belief that AI is the answer and one part failure to accept that the current crop of Labour politicians might be on to something. AI is a case in point. The UK government is trying to steer a middle way – a very Blairite concept – in its approach. It wants to encourage AI startups while providing the proper regulatory safeguards to protect the public. It doesn’t want regulation to stifle innovation, as it does in the EU, but nor does it want a free-for-all. This seems a sensible approach. Blair, from what he says, seems to have drunk far too much of the Silicon Valley Kool-Aid.

He has also been too quick to jump on the anti-net zero bandwagon, a curious stance for a politician whose government commissioned the groundbreaking Stern review into the economics of climate change two decades ago. The choking off of crude oil shipments through the strait of Hormuz is one reason why Ed Miliband is right to be going big on renewable energy. The UK’s record-breaking temperatures this week are another. But it is Blair’s failure to accept that the world has changed since he left Downing Street in 2007 that really jars. That change was swift and brutal. Within a month of him stepping down as prime minister, the cracks started to appear in the global financial system that led a year later to the near-collapse of banks around the world.

This was a complete system failure of the free-market liberal model championed by Margaret Thatcher. Attempts to resuscitate that model have been in vain for one simple reason: the model was a complete dud. It didn’t make the economy grow faster, it didn’t lead to higher levels of investment, it didn’t allow wealth to trickle down from rich to poor. Instead, it led to deindustrialisation on an epic scale and – by reducing the power of trade unions – created a labour market in which employers were able to call all the shots. Labour’s changes to employment rights will shift the pendulum modestly back in favour of workers. Blair sees this as an attempt to turn the clock back to the 1970s, rather than an acknowledgment that the result of Thatcher’s flexible labour market has been casualisation and exploitation. It has also led to weaker productivity since employers have used cheap labour as an alternative to investing in new equipment.

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