Blairism, what is it today?

Now inspired by tech, Tony Blair is again set on disrupting some of our deepest political assumptions

Blairism is one of three economic outlooks identified by the academics David Klemperer and Colm Murphy that today dominate the Labour Party. It is also the tendency of several Cabinet ministers including two Secretaries of State, Wes Streeting and Peter Kyle – and of course of a towering Labour figure who is not in the Cabinet, the man himself. Its strength is such that one of the defining characteristics of Keir Starmer’s leadership is his commitment to accommodating rather than confronting it. Thus if we want to understand the new government, we need to understand Blairism and how it relates to the two other tendencies within the party mainstream, the neo-Bevinism of Starmer and Rachel Reeves and the neo-Croslandism of the rank and file. There are three ways to approach this task.

The first way is by examining Tony Blair’s time as leader of the Labour Party and Prime Minister. This is the way of the history books and anyone old enough to remember those years. Surely, we all have judged him. The problem with this approach is that it looks backwards. Today Blair is 70 years old, seven years younger than Donald Trump, looks younger and continues to live an active political life.

The second way is in the manner of Klemperer and Murphy, almost anthropologically, by trying to understand what unites a particular cluster of attitudes found today within the party. This is how the two academics come by the term neo-Blairism. The problem with this approach is that it neglects the extent to which Blair himself curates this cluster of attitudes (which is why I think the topic is Blairism rather than neo-Blairism).

The third way, which is my way here, is by looking at what he is doing and saying now. He reveals little with his own public utterances and so the focus has to be on the organisation that he commands, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. This is often described as a think tank, but is like no other simply by virtue of its size. While other think tanks generally employ 2-10 thinkers, the TBI counts 100 or more. It is funded in part by consulting contracts from overseas governments and in part by Larry Ellison, an American tycoon who made billions through the Oracle software firm.

The tech turn

A friend of mine who visited the London HQ in the spring was greeted with the words, “Welcome to the next Labour government!” It hasn’t worked out like that. Streeting has the Department of Health, Kyle has the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) – second tier posts. TBI staff have largely been passed over for special adviser jobs in Whitehall in favour of staff from the Institute for Public Policy Research and Labour Together, think tanks that theorise not Blairism but neo-Bevinism.

The TBI’s work on the UK is promoted under the heading of Future of Britain. The epic character of this branding is in line with the institute’s own epic brand name but unlike that found in other think tanks. Look at the IPPR website and you find a handful of teams that work on clearly delineated topics, such as the Migration Policy Unit. It is taken for granted that the government itself provides the overarching vision for the country and that the job of the think tank is to contribute ideas in particular niches. The work of the think tank is contained within that of the government. But with the TBI, the conceptual nesting is the other way round; what any particular government happens to be doing is contained within the remit of the TBI. Thus the TBI is unlike other think tanks also in terms of its aspirations. It does not limit itself to contributing to the government’s leadership of the nation; it offers an alternative leadership.

The reports and other documents presented on the TBI website under the Future of Britain programme number 71, all published since March 2023. They primarily focus on health and innovation, preparing the ground for Streeting and Kyle. At the top level, the programme explains itself by saying:

“Governing in the age of AI requires radical-yet-practical thinking and a reimagining of the state for the 21st century. Our Future of Britain initiative sets out a policy agenda for this new era of invention and innovation, with technology as the driving force.”

Given this, it’s easy to understand how Klemperer and Murphy have found techno-optimism among Blairites. Such an attitude is sharply at odds with the technophobia which is common on the left and one of the primary sources from which the Greens draw strength. It persists when we dig down into the individual reports, which range from The Watch Is Ticking: A Five Year Plan To Harness Wearable Health Tech to The UK’s Defence Strategy Needs A Reboot In The Age of AI.

The focus on tech is extreme to the point of zealotry. It is the lens through which all policy questions are viewed. This is all the more surprising since tech was never Blair’s thing during his 13 years as Prime Minister. Blair has effected a ‘tech turn’ and started to leave the history books behind.

The explanatory text also proclaims a reimagining of the state. As a form of epic and alternative leadership this is on brand, but turns the dial up to 11. The TBI is offering not just an alternative government but a transformation of the state itself. Indeed, the soaring transformativeness of the language reminds me of some of the rhetoric deployed the last time round. The question it raises I think is that of plausibility. Is it really possible to chart a road map for the future of the UK using a lens that is solely technological? What about, say, macroeconomics? By any conventional standard, it is an extraordinarily narrow basis, even narrower when one accounts for the fact that AI is again and again pushed to the front in those 71 documents.

Trying to make sense of this, Hetan Shah has suggested that the role of AI in the government’s plans is primarily to symbolise other, substantive work being undertaken to fix, for example, the NHS. “If it takes the hype of AI to give political cover to this kind of important investment in basic IT and data systems, then so be it,” he wrote. This has something to it but begs the question of why political cover is needed for practical solutions to widely-acknowledged problems.

One answer is that old technology is the dull furniture of history while new technology is glamorous. To wield it, even symbolically, is to grasp the future. Thus it is a source of political momentum, optimism, even hope. That’s reminiscent of the Blair of old. And if you’re used to the Westminster dogfight as essentially a mixture of ideology, economics and personality, the tech turn is liable to disorient and disarm in much the same way as the Third Way disoriented and disarmed those who were used to thinking about politics as a contest between left and right.

A New National Purpose?

A fuller answer can be found by turning to document number 72, oddly absent from the web pages of the Future of Britain programme but published before all the others and the thing that provides the conceptual basis for the entire programme: A New National Purpose: Innovation Can Power the Future of Britain. When it was published in February 2023, it was largely overlooked. It is, for example, missing from the FT’s archive. For myself, I have been writing about policy on science and technology in the UK for decades and at this point my eyes glaze over at soaring rhetoric; at the time, it never crossed my mind that this was it for Blair, that there would be nothing else, that everything would run through tech. This centrality has only become manifest with the passage of time, as he has shown through the work of the TBI that he really meant what he said and, as we shall see, as the proposals have started to turn into reality and other politicians and institutions have begun to get on board.

A New National Purpose does not offer a concise summary of its core principles and defies any such summary. Shortly after publishing it, the TBI said the essence of the document was that:

“…the UK needs to move fast or risk falling further behind the tech giants set to dominate the decades ahead: the US and China. On a domestic level, the translation is simple: make technology our new national purpose, or become poorer. The report set out a plan of action that was commensurate with the task ahead of us. It made the case for science and tech to become the central driving force of government, using tools such as sovereign general-purpose AI systems, increases to R&D investment and major reforms to planning, procurement and research to accelerate the speed at which this happens.”

We see from this that A New National Purpose dials the epic up to 12. Technology will not merely transform the state, it will, like a religion, imbue its activity with meaning. However, this summary also ignores many highly consequential aspects of the document. Here are two examples. First, it argues that the transformative power of technology now requires “a fundamental reordering of … the way the state itself functions”. The goal is a smaller but more effective state that leans more heavily on the private sector. Second, it argues for a “central strategic and delivery unit, optimised for science and technology, to act as a centre of political and state power. It should be independent from vested interests and status-quo forces, and able to devise, drive and unblock a reform agenda.”

Strip away the language of technology and what we have here is a commitment to a small state and to centralising power on the Prime Minister. These are important and very familiar positions which, without the disorienting and disarming invocation of technology, would more readily provoke opposition.

The report also has the equally disorienting and disarming category-melting quality found in the Third Way. For example, on the one hand, it could be seen as statist in its positioning of government as a solution, in creating state-sponsored AI systems, increasing state spending on R&D and exploiting state procurement. On the other hand, when you read it, it does not step across the small-state line drawn by Margaret Thatcher when she ruled out state investment in near-market research more than 40 years ago.

Thatcherism 3.0

The epic and disorienting and disarming aspects of A New National Purpose are in the realm of rhetoric, but there is also a side to it that is factional. Blair shared the authorship with William Hague. That is, what we can now accept as his central overarching approach to the problem of governing the UK has been developed in collaboration with the Conservative leader he defeated at the 2001 general election. Equally, David Cameron’s Foreign Secretary has penned an overarching approach to the problem of governing the UK with the former Labour prime minister.

Put aside party affiliations and the two have a lot in common. New Labour can be seen as a continuation of Thatcherism but with more social liberalism, more environmentalism, better public services and Gordon Brown’s redistribution by stealth. Cameron’s team kept the core Thatcherism, the social liberalism and the environmentalism but made public services worse and ditched the redistribution. Now we see a public coming together of Blairite and Haguite factions across party lines on the central political question of how to govern the country.

The common ideological core to the two factions shows that, in other circumstances, there is enough common ground for Blair and Hague to be in the same party. Could that in fact happen now? Are we going to look back in a few years and regard A New National Purpose as the first sign of a new party? For Blair, the attraction would lie in finally throwing off the shackles of what he called old Labour. For Hague, well, look at this image.

This is a screengrab from a debate in the House of Lords on the Climate Agenda set up by Net Zero skeptic Peter Lilley and timed at almost exactly 1pm on 24 October. In the foreground is fellow skeptic David Frost. In the background is Cameron’s science minister, and Hague ally, David Willetts. Because he supports concrete measures to get the UK to Net Zero, Frost has just accused Willetts of being a socialist.

Frost’s attack is part of the standard playbook of far-right entryism into the old parties of the right. Denounce anyone who won’t get on board. Willetts’ reaction is visceral. If you didn’t know the political context you’d swear he was in physical pain. The key point is clearer now than it was almost two years ago when A New National Purpose was published: for people like Hague, Willetts, Cameron and Osborne, life in the Conservative Party is becoming increasingly uncomfortable. Eventualities that were only possibilities when the report was published have come to pass: the Conservatives have been trounced at the general election; Reform has strengthened its electoral position at enormous cost to the Conservatives; there is a clamour within the party for some kind of reconciliation with Reform; the leadership of the party has passed to the far right for whom such a reconciliation is more plausible. Under the new ascendancy, some political principles on which Blair and Hague agree are problematic. These include social liberalism, concern for global warming that requires more than lip service, a pro-European position in the Brexit referendum, a small state, and placing a high value on truth and rationality. At worst, the cycles of purging, which took the wets like David Gauke during the Brexit agony, may be coming again, and this time for the likes of Hague.

Consider the following scenario. Labour continues to languish in the polls. A new Conservative leader strikes a deal with Nigel Farage that merges the Conservatives with Reform. Those, such as Hague and Willetts, who won’t get on board begin to be purged. The merged party, standing on a Trump-lite platform, takes a majority-winning lead in the polls. In these circumstances, the creation of the new party could be presented as something that was above mere politics and in the service of the country.

At this point, some kind of unifying message would have to be provided that i) was acceptable to both Blairite and Haguite wings; and ii) offered some kind of optimistic, forward momentum. The epic, disarming tech language found in A New National Purpose and the carefully curated topics found in the Future of Britain programme could do the trick.

So, yes, I think it is possible that A New National Purpose will underpin the building of a new party for Blair and Hague. This is the core of the factional purpose the document serves. However, the new party is more important as potential than plan. It gives both Blairites and Haguites leverage in internal negotiations within their parties and deters purges of them. It links their fates and it’s easy to see how a rupture in one party could now lead to a rupture in the other. To an extent, the two can be thought of as a single unit. The podcast hosted by Osborne and Ed Balls, Gordon Brown’s right-hand man, and launched in September 2023 normalises the unity. DSIT gives it bureaucratic form.

While Blair’s tech turn serves a deeper political purpose, it cannot be written off as a superficial attempt to detoxify a tarnished brand. Rather, it transforms the project. The rhetorical bargain that has been struck can’t be jettisoned without cost. The TBI is now full of people who think about tech in policy. Tech such as AI is pushed to the front in the search for solutions to problems. Blairites have occupied departments that are umbilically connected to science and scientists, the Department of Health, which leans heavily on medical research and the pharmaceutical industry, and DSIT itself. From his vantage point in DSIT, Kyle has been given a cross-departmental remit, to push technology, that otherwise is exclusive to Numbers 10 and 11.

Industrial strategy

The conceptual framework created by the tech turn is powerfully consequential, as we can see by looking at industrial strategy. As the term is understood in countries as diverse as the US, Germany and South Korea, neither A New National Purpose nor any of the later documents from the TBI endorse the idea of industrial strategy. Rather, the tech turn involves focussing both attention and government money not on industry but on basic research in universities. This is a continuation of an approach stretching back to Thatcher and the antithesis of the neo-Bevinite approach encoded in the original, £28 billion a year, plans for Net Zero. Thus the celebration of science in the tech turn is used to deny government investment in technology, and while Klemperer and Murphy find that both Blairites and neo-Bevinites articulate support for an “active industrial strategy”, what the two concretely intend is very different.

“Techno-optimism”, the attitudinal term used by Klemperer and Murphy, can’t capture all of this. For the TBI, tech is always the lens through which issues are considered and at stake is not merely a selection of policy questions but the country’s destiny. Taking account of these aspects, a more accurate term would be techno-totalism. However, this doesn’t capture the particular political purpose for which tech is being harnessed, the transformation that the tech turn effects on that purpose, or the extent to which Blairism as a project can now only be understood as a component of Blair-Haguism. The simplest term I can think of that gestures at all of this is Thatcherism 3.0. To be exact, if we call the common ideological core to New Labour and the Cameron project Thatcherism Mark II, then Thatcherism 3.0 is Thatcherism Mark II transformed by the tech turn and a unity across party lines that has moved on from ideological commonality to a shared conceptual platform and practical coordination.

The goal of Thatcherism 3.0, one might say, is to remain permanently in office even if it is from time to time obliged to vacate Number 10. The tell-tale phrase is “cross-party consensus”. A New National Purpose tells us this is central to the new purpose which “… must rise above political differences to achieve a new cross-party consensus that can survive any change of government.” Out in the real world, Willetts has succeeded in selling the idea to the country’s most powerful science institution, the Royal Society. And Danny Dorling has highlighted an exchange from one of the first podcast episodes in which Osborne notes with satisfaction that Labour is “sticking with the two-child limit on welfare, which I introduced”, to which Balls replies:

“Well, that takes you to an interesting thing in British politics which is that in the end, however contested things are, the only things that last are the things that become consensual. So, the Conservatives opposed the minimum wage in 1997, you [Osborne] ended up boasting about raising it. The Conservatives opposed Central Bank independence in 97/98, you ended up being a champion of it. The trade union reforms of the 1980s, which many Labour people hated at the time – clearly Tony Blair and Gordon Brown carried on with them. So, things which are contested can become consensual and when people agree, that is often how our county moves forward.”

But there is no consensus on any of these things that encompasses both parties. The support for science provided by the likes of Willetts and Greg Clarke when the Conservatives were in office was unpicked by the likes of Sajid Javid and Kwasi Kwarteng. The two child limit is bitterly opposed by the majority of Labour MPs. There is only a consensus on these issues between the parts of the parties that comprise the two wings of Thatcherism 3.0.

This is not to say that the smaller consensus is inconsequential. One effect of it is to reduce differences between parties that would otherwise be spitting blood at each other, not only rhetorically but in terms of substantive policy.

The three tendencies identified by Klemperer and Murphy among the Labour Party at large can also be identified in the Cabinet. In government however, neo-Croslandism, the redistributive comfort zone of party members, is confronted with the need to make difficult choices and is obliged to make one of its own: between the neo-Bevinites or the far less accommodating Blairites. For this reason, once one focuses on factions in the Cabinet, it feels less like a three-way split and more like a two-way one. Starmer and Reeves and their neo-Bevinite allies are the core of the government and the Whitehall machine itself oils the wheels of their faction. The Blairites are the junior partner and by contrast have to be more deliberate and self-reliant in their organisation.

Look at the Cabinet posts occupied by Blairites. Darren Jones is Reeves’ number two in the Treasury, a position from which he sees into every department via its spending plans. Pat McFadden, who worked for Blair at Number 10, is a minister without portfolio, free to roam Whitehall and focus on internal party matters. He attends “the Quad”, a central forum whose other members are Starmer, Reeves and the deputy leader, Angela Rayner. Kyle’s remit allows him to push at the policy of all departments. Add to this a sprinkling of Blairites elsewhere through Westminster and Whitehall and it becomes clear that it is extraordinarily difficult for Starmer to move in any significant way without Blair knowing in advance. The Blairites have secured an arrangement that ensures there will be no echoes of the days Blair was left in the dark about the Budget that Brown was planning.

The question is how all this plays out in practice. It is possible that the commitment, in Starmerism, of the neo-Bevanites to finding an accommodation with Blairites is not merely a question of principles but one of concretely managing a coalition of organised factions day by day, a conclusion that will make anyone familiar with the angst of the Blair-Brown years queasy with recognition. If you feel the government is moving slowly and that its underlying principles are opaque, that Starmer is more manager than leader, here’s a possible explanation: nothing happens except by negotiation between the coalition partners. This would explain the famously centralised, many-handed and byzantine process Labour has for issuing press releases, and why they are so dull.

A comparison then can be drawn with Rishi Sunak’s time as Prime Minister. He himself seems to me to fall squarely within the ideological parameters of Thatcherism 3.0 and he put into practice some of the playbook found in A New National Purpose: he set up DSIT, talked about tech a lot and attempted to seize for the UK global leadership of regulation in AI. However, you could never really make out what he stood for, and most obviously this stemmed from the fact that his government was an uneasy coalition of two factions. Starmer is in a stronger, more stable position than Sunak was but – whatever the substantive success or failure of his programme – endless internal and opaque negotiation means he still risks a disappointing narrative emptiness.

To sum up, Blairism today is the Blairism of old but transformed ideologically through the tech turn and organisationally through its participation with like-minded Conservatives in the project of Thatcherism 3.0. It is the junior partner to Starmer’s neo-Bevinism in the governing Labour coalition but always positions itself as an alternative government. Its rhetorical tropes are the epic and the mind-bending, the better to disorient and disarm potential opponents. It is a major force in British politics and, one soaring claim it never makes for itself, capable in the right circumstances of blowing up the two party system that has shaped the UK for the past 100 years or so.