oh ffs.......... Tony Blair 'fired up' to shape Labour future by Andy Burnham's attack

[Celerity]

The former prime minister’s allies say the Greater Manchester mayor’s claim that ‘40 years of neoliberalism’ has harmed the country is wrong

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/tony-blair-essay-net-zero-labour-news-szpjndqwr



Sir Tony Blair is poised to escalate his interventions in Labour’s leadership race after allies said criticism from Andy Burnham had “put a fire in his belly” and hardened his resolve to shape the party’s future.

Blair’s allies said Burnham’s claim that “40 years of neoliberalism” had damaged Britain was an attack on the former prime minister’s legacy and an inaccurate representation of the country’s economic woes. There is now a growing row between the two men, after Burnham told The Observer on Wednesday that Blair did not understand the dire economic reality for working-class Britons.

Burnham was responding to a 5,600-word essay from Blair that criticised Sir Keir Starmer’s government for not having a “coherent” plan for the country, and accused the Labour Party of “playing with fire” by contemplating a more left-wing agenda under a new prime minister.

Burnham said: “He doesn’t mention inequality once. If you don’t get how that’s driving politics now, if you are not rooting your analysis in the fact that people are unable to live and that things that were taken for granted are no longer affordable, then you are not understanding what’s going on.” The mayor of Greater Manchester is standing in next month’s Makerfield by-election as part of a plan to replace Starmer in No 10.

snip

[muriel_volestrangler]

1. it wasn't just Burnham who rejected Blair's attempt at intervention - so did Streeting

Writing in The Guardian, Streeting said the "striking weakness" in Sir Tony's intervention was that the "defining issue of our age is barely confronted at all".

He said: "Inequality - the economic, social and democratic fracture running through modern Britain - is treated as peripheral rather than fundamental.

"But inequality, rather than being incidental to the crises reshaping western democracies, is actually their cause."

Streeting said "resentment grows" when people believe the rules "no longer reward effort fairly" and the centre-left "cannot answer populism merely with managerial competence or technological optimism".

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckgp4llnn12o

PM says predecessor misunderstands government’s successes and ‘very different’ situation compared with 1997

If you are to the right of all of the potential leadership candidates, you are irrelevant to the party. Even Blunkett thinks Blair's wrong:

‘Stuck in his glory days’: Blunkett and others cast doubt on Blair’s advice to Labour party

As a manifesto for winning over the Labour party membership, or indeed for coming out victorious in the Makerfield byelection, where Burnham is largely battling Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, Blunkett suggested he was unconvinced. But more than that, he said, there was a hole in the political analysis. The “only impact I can think of”, said Blunkett of the intervention by Labour’s most successful election-winning leader, would be to provoke a counter-argument.

“We are on the edge of major technological revolution and the last two big ones, which was the 19th century and the 1980s, saw the most enormous number of victims,” said Blunkett. “The lesson from the 80s, where I was leader of Sheffield at the time, where we lost 50,000 jobs in three years, was that a social democratic government would not block modernisation and change but would be on the side of those navigating their way through it. Make it a positive rather than a negative in their lives.

“What was missing from Tony’s essay and his interview was a recognition that government aren’t just there to facilitate the Industrial Revolution, they’re to facilitate people being able to live through it with a degree of dignity and to come out the other end seeing it as a positive gain rather than [being] victims.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/may/27/blunkett-cast-doubt-on-blair-essay-labour

And if you're advising getting closer to Trump, you're evil.

Tony Blair tells Starmer and rivals: abandon net zero and move closer to Trump
Blair, Catholic convert, needs to pay attention to the Pope, who gave him a handy encyclical on AI just this week.

[malaise]

2. Eff BLIAR

He destroyed Labour.

[muriel_volestrangler]

3. Jonathan Freedland makes similar points to us, and links to a report on Blair and Oracle being closely tied

Which brings us to the second epochal change identified by Blair: technology, and specifically AI. “Twenty years ago it was globalisation, now it’s AI,” laments one former close colleague, noting Blair’s tendency to warn of immutable forces that cannot be challenged but which, like the weather, must simply be accepted.

Except in this case it’s hard to read Blair’s prognostications as the fruit only of dispassionate analysis. On this subject, he is not neutral. The Tony Blair Institute, or TBI, took $130m between 2021 and 2023, with pledges of a further $218m to follow, from Larry Ellison, whose Oracle company is hugely invested in AI infrastructure. According to one detailed account based on extensive testimony from current and former TBI staff, the TBI and Oracle have become “inseparable”, with the former acting as a “sales engine” for the latter. In this telling, Blair’s “trademark evangelism is now focused on AI, its power to transform government … and why everyone should listen to Larry Ellison”.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/may/29/tony-blair-says-he-is-all-about-the-future-but-his-vision-is-woefully-stuck-in-the-past

That report:

Blair and the Billionaire

Insiders reveal how Larry Ellison’s money turned Blair’s institute into a tech sales and lobbying operation for Oracle

The ex-premier’s trademark evangelism is now focused on AI, its power to transform government –with his Institute now going as far as to try to build its own AI tools to sell to Gulf states– and why everyone should listen to Larry Ellison, the founder of technology firm Oracle.

While the institute relies on Blair’s political brand, its money comes, in large part, from Ellison, who has had a remarkable 2025. He was briefly the richest man in the world in September, as Oracle’s stake in AI infrastructure drove its share price into orbit. In the 1990s Ellison was known as “the man who would be Gates” as he battled the Microsoft founder, Bill Gates, for pre-eminence. This year, the 81 year old has been feted by US President Donald Trump as the “CEO of everything” and an essay in the New York Times called him the billionaire “who will soon own the news” as his family’s media interests in Paramount-Sky Dance seem set to expand to include Warner Bros. Discovery.

Ellison invested $130 million in the TBI between 2021 and 2023, with a further $218 million pledged since then. The scale of funding took the TBI from a headcount of 200 to approaching 1,000. Blair himself takes no salary from TBI but over this time the institute has been able to recruit from bluechip firms like McKinsey and Silicon Valley giants Meta. In 2018 before the Oracle founder’s funding surge, TBI’s best-paid director earned $400,000. In 2023, the last year where accounts are available, the top earner took home $1.26 million.

Blair and Ellison have a relationship that goes back to the former’s time in office. In 2003 Ellison and Blair, then in his pomp, had a photo opportunity at Downing Street to mark a gift of supplies to 40 specialist schools. In tech circles this is known as “land and expand”. Oracle has since been contracted hundreds of times by the British government and earned £1.1 billion in public sector revenue since the start of 2022, according to data collected by procurement analysts Tussell.

https://www.lighthousereports.com/investigation/blair-and-the-billionaire/