Tejas Sandhu/SOPA Images/Sipa USA via AP Images
Sir Tony Blair walks through Whitehall to attend the Remembrance Sunday service at the Cenotaph in London, November 12, 2023.
When Bill Clinton was the U.S. president and Tony Blair was the British prime minister, they were soulmates. They brought us neoliberalism. 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 in turn 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.
At home, Joe Biden has at last broken with Democratic neoliberalism. In Britain, the Conservative Party has lurched from blunder to blunder and from failed leader to failed leader, setting up a return to Labour.
The Labour Party, under Keir Starmer, is the odds-on favorite to win the next general election, which could be as early as May or as late as next January. But Starmer, rather than rebuilding a progressive party, has virtually outsourced his entire program to Tony Blair.
Based on its recent pronouncements, a Starmer government, if anything, would be worse than Blair’s.
Blair, now 70, as elder statesman and policy entrepreneur, is even more corporate than he was as prime minister. His modestly named Tony Blair Institute for Global Change was created in 2017. It consolidated Blair’s other for-profit and nonprofit enterprises into one, including the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, the Tony Blair Sports Foundation, the Tony Blair Governance Initiative, and his consulting firm Tony Blair Associates.
Blair’s institute takes money from the Saudis and from several large corporations. Its ideological stance is pro-business, pro–balanced budget, and aims to solve social and economic problems with technocratic solutions. The institute has a staff of over 800 and a budget of around $100 million. It’s common knowledge in British political circles that a Starmer government would be heavily staffed by Blair Institute people.
Earlier this month, the British government announced that Britain has been officially in a recession for the last two quarters. This would indicate the need for a large economic stimulus, of the kind that Biden used to keep the COVID downturn from turning into a recession and to rebuild crumbling U.S. infrastructure and create a greener economy.
Britain’s collapsing infrastructure makes ours look modern. As it happens, one of the core commitments of the Labour Party manifesto is the pledge to commit 28 billion pounds (about $35 billion) a year for four years to green infrastructure—not Biden-scale but not bad. But after the Treasury’s announcement of a recession and a wider projected budget deficit, Labour backtracked and cut its commitment to only 4.7 billion pounds a year, in order to stay within its fiscal targets.
This is of course backwards. A recession requires more countercyclical public investment, not less.
Britain faces dire economic and social challenges. The National Health Service and public education are grossly underfunded. Brexit destroyed Britain’s financial and industrial links with the EU. A Labour government has to repair relations with Europe, whether by rejoining or by working out a Norway-like arrangement that gives Britain the benefits of membership but without voting rights over EU policy.
Labour also needs to break the grip of organized business and finance on acceptable policy, and raise taxes on capital to finance its other needs. But Starmer is doing the opposite.
His shadow chancellor (finance minister), Rachel Reeves, recently gave a speech to Labour’s “Business Conference” in which she promised a friendly business climate and pledged, “I will not waiver from iron-clad fiscal rules … we will strengthen the Office for Budget Responsibility through a new fiscal lock.”
The NHS, as noted, is starved for funds. Blair’s institute recently released a report citing all the savings that could be realized by giving greater emphasis to prevention and wellness, an approach pioneered by the NHS—with nary a word about addressing the shortfall in basic NHS funding.
Neither a fiscal straitjacket nor Blair-style corporate technobabble will solve Britain’s deep problems nor make life better for ordinary Brits. When nominally left parties get captured by the corporate center-right and fail to solve problems, at best we get inconclusive oscillation between the major parties, and at worst working people give up on the system and support neofascists.
