Sometimes it feels like Tony Blair works on a timer. On Mondays, he intervenes in UK politics to say that mandatory digital ID will solve some major crisis or other. On Wednesdays, he steps up to say that the UK needs to embrace AI more than it has done, and work with big US tech companies and figures – some of whom, like Oracle executive chair Larry Ellison, happen to fund his think-tank – to make that happen.
So, on Thursday, when Blair wrote the foreword to a report suggesting that the UK should rejoin the EU, it just felt like it must be that day in the diary. It used to be a rare and major event when a former prime minister made a public political statement, but that ceased to be the case long ago.
Part of the reason is that we just have so many living former prime ministers now – no fewer than nine of them, since Sir Keir Starmer stepped down in summer. But also, several of them simply never shut up. Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak both have weekly newspaper columns. Liz Truss has a YouTube show and podcast.
And Blair has a global think-tank with a multimillion-dollar budget, a staff of around 800 and a seemingly relentless need to involve himself in politics almost 20 years after the end of his premiership (often to the chagrin of his successors).
On the substance, it is difficult to argue with Blair on this particular issue. It is 10 years since the UK voted to leave the European Union, and six years since we actually left, and the supposed benefits of Brexit have not materialised – there is no explosion in trade with the rest of the world, no huge boost to the UK’s sluggish growth and no appreciable golden era of freedom and liberty.
Instead, there is lots of admin, bureaucracy and endless headaches. Leaving the EU does not change the fact that every country close to the UK is either an EU member or is part of its single market. To trade with them, or deal with them as neighbours, means constantly negotiating with them – just now, from the outside.
Andy Burnham, like Starmer before him, has landed himself in the awkward position of promising a “reset” with the EU – presumably with benefits to the UK – while also trying to change none of his red lines on rejoining the customs union or the single market. This is effectively like promising to drive forwards, while also promising never to remove the handbrake.
So, on that level, Tony Blair is right when he says that Burnham should abandon his red lines if he wants to build closer relations with the EU, just as he’s right when he says that economically, rejoining the EU within a decade would be the best outcome. But in classic Blair-ish fashion, he felt obliged to add a twist: the UK should seek to rejoin the EU, he says, but only if the EU reforms itself, in largely unspecified ways.
Blair’s report makes it clear that the EU should be better for business, more “competitive”, and – inevitably – friendlier to AI. But it is not especially clear why the EU should restructure itself to suit UK re-entry on his terms. Generally, when you’re applying for membership of a club, you don’t try to change its rules until you’re in. Blair’s approach is presumptuous, to say the least.
Beyond that, Blair seems chronically unaware that he is an increasingly bad messenger for the causes he wishes to promote. Millennials are increasingly the core Labour voters, and many millennials’ first political memory is of Blair’s 2003 invasion of Iraq.
He is not a figure many of that generation want to hear more from. Blair is seen as a technocratic, a relic of another era. That unpopular image is only enhanced by Blair’s constant desire to cosy up with oligarchs and billionaires, at a time when anti-elite sentiment is running high. Blair’s most useful intervention on most causes he supports would be to stay out of them.
All of that may go some way towards explaining why Burnham’s No 10 operation seems unbothered by Blair’s intervention. The Prime Minister himself has, so far, felt no need to respond to it, and with Parliament not sitting this week, the No 10 spokesman hasn’t had to react to it either.
Tony Blair might have given Andy Burnham his first ministerial jobs – as a junior minister first in the Home Office, then the Department of Health – but Burnham clearly doesn’t feel obliged to pay his former patron all that much attention.
Blair will doubtless continue to intervene relentlessly in UK and global politics. Perhaps, as he is on EU membership, he will sometimes be correct, just as a stopped clock is right twice per day.
But he should manage his expectations: just because he says something doesn’t mean anyone in power is going to listen.
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