And that book was written by Larry Ellison.
Tony Blair’s 5,600 word essay, “The Labour Party Is Playing With Fire Over Its Future and the Future of the Country”, has made some big waves since its publication on Wednesday. Blair has wielded significant behind-the-scenes influence over the Keir Starmer government during the past two years, both through his modestly named foundation, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, or TBI, as well as key Blairite cabinet members.
With the release of this essay, however, Blair is once again in the front and centre of the political stage. Some deluded commentators are even calling for his return as prime minister…
Many have viewed the essay as an attack on both Starmer and the main challengers to Starmer’s throne, whom Blair rightly notes have “no coherent plan” for the country.
At the same time, however, Blair seems wilfully blind to the inescapable reality that Britain’s current malaise is the result of almost half a century of neoliberal economics, of which he played a vital part in cementing. He even admonishes those on the left for daring to think that “nothing good [came] out of the last ‘40 years’ of ‘neo-liberalism’”. An apt riposte:
In this humble blogger’s opinion, Blair’s latest intervention smacks of desperation. The Starmer project is coming apart at the seams at the worst possible moment for both Blair and his corporate sugar daddy, Larry Ellison.
The foundations of the so-called “AI revolution” are not quite firmly in place yet, while public opposition to AI is rising rapidly on both sides of the Atlantic. Meanwhile, Labour’s leadership woes appear to be going from bad to worse, with nearly half of the public now saying Keir Starmer should resign rather than contest a future Labour leadership election. His potential successors — Andy Burnham, Wes Streeting and Angela Rayner — inspire zero confidence.
Unsurprisingly, the legacy media has played down some of the conflicts of interests that lie behind Blair’s latest call-to-arms while somehow trying to present his essay as a rare intervention in British politics…
A more realistic take…
Blair’s essay is brimming with what Blair calls “radical centrist” proposals (economic deregulation, a crackdown on welfare spending, pension cutbacks, more NHS privatisation, more private-public partnerships…) that could have been written at just about any time by either of the two main parties over the past 30 years.
As Richard Murphy notes in his blog post on Wednesday, which we cross-posted here, Blair’s article is full-on TINA:
Blair’s core argument is straightforward. He says Britain is entering an era of immense disruption driven by artificial intelligence, geopolitical fragmentation, declining Western dominance, climate pressures, demographic change and a new global economic order. He argues that politics as we have known it is becoming obsolete, and claims Labour has no coherent response to this transformation.
So far, so good, then, even down to Labour having no answer to those things, because it very clearly has not. What Blair does not notice is that this is because neoliberal politics – of the sort he and Bill Clinton helped create – is not designed to have those answers. Its whole purpose is not to answer questions, but to suggest that these may be found in the market.
That said, Blair is right on two points: that it would be disastrous for the UK to re-join the EU from its current position of economic and political weakness. This is particularly true if it would mean having to give up Sterling and join the eurozone straight jacket, as one senior eurocrat has suggested.
Blair also makes three particularly controversial recommendations that I believe are worth highlighting:
- The UK should cosy up to Trump, on whose “Board of Peace” Blair currently sits. It is vital, Blair says, that the US can trust the UK as an ally regardless of who is in power. In an interview on the Newsagents podcast, he says: “It doesn’t matter if you agree with the [current occupant of the White House’s] policies or disagree with his policies, the American relationship matters. And as a prime minister, you’ve got to explain that to the people.”
- The UK should take a more active role in the US-Israeli war on Iran. No great surprise here, this being Tony “Butcher of Baghdad” Blair doing the talking. To my knowledge, there isn’t a US-led war Blair hasn’t supported since NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999. He is also one of the most fervent pro-Israel voices in British politics, which is some feat given the extent to which Israeli lobby groups have infected British political institutions, especially since joining forces with the Blairite wing of the Labour Party to bring down Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership.
- The UK should abandon its Net Zero commitments and embrace cheap energy, describing the Starmer government’s phasing out of oil and gas licences as key mistakes. This is not the first time Blair has pushed back against climate change policies. In April 2025, TBI launched a call to “reset action on climate change”. As always with Blair, money is the prime motivator. Cheap energy is a vital input for the data centres that will power the AI systems his foundation has been plugging for years. Besides the huge sums of money it has received from tech overlord Larry Ellison, the TBI is part-funded by oil companies and petrostates.
In all three of the aforementioned proposals, Blair is essentially talking his book, as he always does. And that book was written primarily by Larry Ellison.
Ellison is far and away TBI’s largest backer. Ellison invested $130 million in the foundation between 2021 and 2023, with a further $218 million pledged since. As Agenda Publica reports, Ellison’s donations have propelled TBI into a category all of its own among UK-based think tanks:
Ellison donations have seen it grow to close to 1,000 staff, working in at least 45 countries. It enjoys US levels of funding and influence, so while UK counterparts like Policy Exchange had income of £4.3 million in the last financial year, and the Institute of Public Policy Research registered £4.3 million in 2023, TBI’s turnover was $145.3 million…
Blair himself takes no salary from TBI but in recent years it 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.
One former staff member said the effect of this cash injection was to make the culture “toxic as fuck”, while others described a form of AI boosterism that silenced nuance and pushed the boundaries of lobbying for Oracle. Some TBI staff — including a number who left because of it — say the cash injection has produced a toxic culture at the institute that is rife with nepotism , dominated by AI optimism that silences nuance and pushes the boundaries of lobbying for Oracle.
All three of the aforementioned proposals, if acted upon, would either benefit Ellison directly, by lifting energy restrictions and regulatory obstacles for the development of AI, or indirectly — by fortifying the UK government’s relations with the Trump administration, of whom Ellison is both a prominent backer and major beneficiary, and its unquestioning support of the State of Israel, to which Ellison, a fervent Zionist, is a big donor.
As we reported in our article, Larry Ellison’s Dark Vision for “OUR” Future, Ellison has a religious-like belief in AI, describing it as “maybe” the most important discovery in the entire history of humankind — more important, seemingly, than fire, the wheel, language, steam, electricity and the atom. He is also aggressively pushing for governments to embrace AI-enabled control and surveillance technologies, with a significant onus on biometric identifiers:
The world’s fourth richest man, Larry Ellison, has a vision for the future, and it is one that most of us would never vote for if given the chance (which, of course, we won’t be). It essentially involves harvesting and storing all of a nation’s data, including all of its citizens’ most personal data, in one place, and then letting AI programs scour all over it. That data, he says, should include economic data, electronic healthcare records, including our genomic data, spatial information, agricultural data and info about infrastructure.
“I have to tell [the] AI model as much about my country as I can,” Ellison said in a recent onstage discussion with his old friend Tony Blair at the World Governments Summit. “We need to unify all the national data, put it into a database where it’s easily consumable by the AI model, and then ask whatever question you like. That’s the missing link”…
Today, Ellison is determined to turn his dystopian vision of the future into reality through his deep connections with two markedly different governments: Donald Trump’s second administration in the US and Kier Starmer’s Labour government in the UK…
Now, Ellison wants to take AI-enabled digital surveillance and control systems to a new level by totally centralising them, despite the obvious security implications. He also envisions a world without passwords and personal identification numbers (PINs) in which access to IT systems and tech platforms will be based purely on our biometric identifiers. As he says in the clip below of his recent chat with Blair, “this is the last year you will ever log onto an Oracle system with a password… biometric logins are the future.”
Ellison also talks about the need for national governments to have their own “sovereign” data centres to power their AI systems, which will no doubt provide Oracle, the world’s largest database management company, with lots of new income streams.
In an Oracle financial analysts meeting in September, Ellison told investors that AI will usher in a new era of surveillance that he said, gleefully. will ensure “citizens will be on their best behaviour.” It is as if Ellison read Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World and came away with a new business model.
In September last year, the New Statesman published a report flagging growing concerns among TBI staff about Ellison’s malign influence over TBI, as his cash injections have produced “a culture that is dominated by a form of AI boosterism, and which, as they see it, amounts to lobbying for Oracle”:
The TBI, however, was welcomed by Keir Starmer’s Downing Street operation, which includes many figures with close connections to the former prime minister. Peter Kyle, an adviser in Blair’s second term, was appointed technology secretary and called on governments to show “a sense of humility” towards Big Tech companies. In an August 2024 paper on “preparing the NHS for the AI era”, TBI found “good reasons” for building new digital health records with an existing system run by Oracle.
In January 2025, Starmer’s government announced the creation of dedicated AI Growth Zones to enable the “rapid” build-out of data centres. As David Powell reported last year, the AI Growth Zones represent a fundamental shift in how the UK approaches industrial development, bypassing normal environmental assessments and community consultation processes:
This mirrors the Freeport model – special economic zones where normal rules don’t apply. While the government hasn’t explicitly confirmed tax holidays for AI Growth Zones (our FOI requests are pending), the pattern is clear: deregulation, fast-track planning, and corporate subsidies disguised as economic development.
The regulatory divergence from Europe is stark. While the EU has enacted comprehensive AI governance through the AI Act, the US and UK have pursued what JD Vance called a “hands-off approach.” This creates regulatory arbitrage – allowing practices in Britain and America that the EU has deemed too risky.
The regulatory divergence from Europe is stark. While the EU has enacted comprehensive AI governance through the AI Act, the US and UK have pursued what JD Vance called a “hands-off approach.” This creates regulatory arbitrage — allowing practices in Britain and America that the EU has deemed too risky.
Blair’s essay ends with a ten-point plan for political reform, the first of which provides a textbook example of this way of thinking:
1. The private sector will go through a process of adaptation to this new AI world and, therefore, business and entrepreneurs need to know government is on their side, removing obstacles to business growth – not creating them as they go through this massive process of adjustment. So, all those measures I described above which hold business back should be corrected or mitigated.
Yet those obstacles are exactly what are needed to protect local residents and communities from the dark externalities of AI. While companies like BlackRock profit from managing British pension funds and investing them in data infrastructure, residents near those facilities face a litany of health, environmental and financial impacts that mirror experiences in the US…
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Nick Corbishley 