There is a Tony Blair problem. Not because the former Prime Minister still wields real power, but because too many in the political class continue to treat him as a sage rather than as the architect of a settlement that collapsed under its own contradictions. The Morning Star’s description of him as a “cadaverous incarnation of war and greed” is brutal, but it captures something essential: Blair represents a political worldview that refuses to die, even as the country it shaped is falling apart.
His latest intervention — a long essay prescribing the direction Labour should take — is being treated with the usual reverence in some quarters. Yet he has raised nothing new. What he has done is reheat the same doctrines that hollowed out Britain the first time around. And he has wrapped them in a phrase so contradictory in his mouth: the “radical centre.” For those of us who believe in a genuine radical centre and a real third way, Blair is the worst of enemies. Years ago I wrote a pamphlet titled The Third Way – An Answer to Blair. The criticisms I made of this flim‑flam man still stand.
Blair’s supposed radical centre promises radical change, but it is change that leaves everything the same or worse. It is a perfect encapsulation of Blairism: a politics that speaks the language of transformation while entrenching the status quo. Radical in rhetoric, conservative in effect. A politics of movement without direction, reform without redistribution, modernisation without meaning.
And when you examine the programme Blair now proposes, the hollowness becomes unmistakable.
Blair’s plan, as summarised in his own article, is astonishing in its brazenness. He urges Labour to move closer to Donald Trump, abandon net zero and restrictions on oil and gas, clamp down hard on migration and welfare, and roll back Labour’s new workers’ rights laws — all in the name of his so‑called “radical centre.”
This is not centrism. This is the Reform UK manifesto with better tailoring.
Blair’s comfort zone is where you can already find Nigel Farage and Kemi Badenoch. There is nothing in his programme with which they would disagree.
Even Keir Starmer — hardly a radical — has kept Blair at arm’s length. His allies have briefed that Labour “will not be dragged back into the politics of the 1990s,” and Starmer himself has stressed that the party “must govern for today’s Britain, not yesterday’s.” It is the politest possible way of saying: Tony, please stop trying to run the show from the sidelines.
Andy Burnham was blunter, criticising Blair’s “lack of interest in inequality.” That is not a footnote in the Blair legacy. It is the legacy.
Perhaps the most revealing part of Blair’s intervention is his praise for Trump, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, and Argentina’s Javier Milei — “all of the reactionary right.” Blair says you can like them or dislike them, but admires them for being “not constrained by conventional thinking.”
This is the point where Blair’s politics stops being merely misguided and becomes actively dangerous. To admire the reactionary right for their “unconventional thinking” is like admiring a demolition crew for their creativity with explosives.
Wes Streeting, usually sympathetic to Blairite framing, felt compelled to distance himself, saying Labour “must not take lessons from leaders whose values are incompatible with democratic norms.” When even the party’s right flank is edging away, you know the intervention has landed badly.
Blair’s vision for the future includes government “run by ministers not exclusively from the ranks of Parliament” if they have “experience and capability in change management.”
This is not democracy. It is governance by consultancy.
Blair has always preferred the boardroom to the picket line, but this is something new: a politics that no longer even pretends to trust the public. In the old New Labour days, he at least felt obliged to maintain the fiction that democracy was a conversation — a slightly stage‑managed one, granted, but still a dialogue of sorts. Now the mask has slipped. What he proposes is a system in which the public are not participants but obstacles, to be nudged, managed, or bypassed entirely.
This is Blairism stripped of its early‑2000s gloss. No Cool Britannia, no soft‑focus rhetoric about empowerment, no pretence that the working class might have something to teach the technocrats. What remains is the raw architecture of the project: a belief that politics is too important to be left to voters, and that the country should be run by a caste of “capable” administrators whose legitimacy derives not from election but from their proximity to capital.
When Blair calls for governments to be staffed by people “not exclusively from the ranks of Parliament” — provided they have “experience and capability in change management” — he is not making a technocratic tweak. He is proposing a quiet constitutional revolution. The demos becomes a nuisance. Accountability becomes optional. Expertise becomes whatever the corporate sector happens to be selling this quarter.
It is the worldview of someone who has spent too long in conference centres and private jets, listening to the applause of people who think democracy is a charming but outdated operating system. The public, in this schema, are not citizens with agency but variables in a spreadsheet — to be modelled, predicted, and controlled.
And this is why his “radical centre” is such a grotesque misnomer. There is nothing radical about a politics that treats the electorate as a risk factor. There is nothing centrist about a programme that hands more power to unelected managers while stripping it from workers, tenants, and communities. Blair’s centre is not a midpoint between left and right; it is the fortified compound where the powerful retreat when they fear the public might start asking questions.
This is not the politics of persuasion. It is the politics of insulation — a politics that has given up on winning people over and instead seeks to design institutions that can withstand them. A politics that sees popular pressure not as a democratic force but as a destabilising threat.
In the end, Blair’s new iteration of his old creed reveals the truth that was always lurking beneath the surface: he never believed the public were the engine of change. At best, they were spectators. At worst, they were liabilities. What he offers now is simply the logical conclusion of that worldview — a system in which the public are politely ushered out of the room so the grown‑ups can get on with the business of governing.
Blair’s economic vision is equally revealing. He declares: “The priority is growth… we are going to go all out for making business feel respected and supported.”
Translated: The priority is profit, and the public must get out of the way.
He opposes raising the minimum wage, taxing non‑dom millionaires, and strengthening workers’ rights. And he wants to raise VAT, which hits working people hardest, instead of employer National Insurance contributions. He is an enemy of working people and a friend to those who would exploit and impoverish them.
Blair’s intervention is not a roadmap for renewal. It is a manifesto for the past — a rotten past that Britain is still trying to recover from.
His radical centre, unlike ours, is not a bold new direction. It is the same narrow corridor that led us to inequality, privatisation, foreign misadventures, and the hollowing out of democratic life.
Britain does not need his version of a radical centre. It needs a real radical centre and a real third way. It needs a politics that confronts power rather than flattering it. A politics that trusts the public and gives them real power in the workplace and economy rather than managing them. A politics that understands that the future cannot be built with the tools that broke the present.
Blair remains a paid piper — and a pied piper — seeking to lead the public astray with weasel words on behalf of his corporate masters.
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