The world is shifting on its axis. Artificial intelligence will transform the economy and potentially life as we know it. Its use on the battlefields of Ukraine has reshaped warfare and it is supercharging scientific discovery with more than 170 AI-discovered drugs in clinical trials. The fight for tech supremacy has upended geopolitics, culminating in a battle for power between China and the United States that has torn through the post-war rules-based order. Everything is changing and we are in the eye of the storm, living it, absorbing it, struggling to comprehend it as it plays out in real time on our screens.
This should be the time for a politics that is ruthless in its quest to understand a changing world. For a politics that does not shy away from honesty with the public about the trade-offs change forces upon us, thrown up by our wrecked public finances, our necessary relationships with the superpowers remaking our world or the adoption of technology itself. And for a politics that prizes the right answer, however difficult, above everything else, and ties those answers into an agenda for the country that gives it a stake in the future. A plan people can see themselves in.
This should be the time for New Labour.
The country needs it. The party won’t have it. Labour cannot decide what to do with the tradition that won it three elections. Sure, it hires New Labour people and borrows New Labour positions but every few years since 2010 it has convulsed over whether to throw it out altogether. The party’s other traditions – Blue, Soft and Old – have found it easier to define themselves against New Labour than to say what they are for, as they run the same warm bath of nostalgia that powers conservative forces at home and abroad. Their instinct is to deny that New Labour is a tradition at all, pushing it to the margins as an aberration, a moment in time that ignorantly embraced globalisation and abandoned the working classes it was elected to represent.
This is just plain wrong, and it is wrong about Labour’s own history. New Labour is not a set of manifestos gathering dust but the newest chapter of the party’s oldest argument. Labour has always had a revisionist tradition. Whether it was Gaitskell trying to rewrite Clause IV 35 years before it was rewritten or Crosland arguing that socialism was about equality, not who owned the means of production, the tradition holds the party’s ends as fixed and its means as open to argument. New Labour was it winning, three times. Its critics may wish it had resisted globalisation, but anyone with the faintest interest in history, economics or the human condition knows that stopping it was never possible. Instead, globalisation was harnessed. It brought the minimum wage, growth across the nation and opportunity in every postcode. Millions were lifted out of poverty. The New Labour tradition put parents and kids before schools, the patient before the NHS. It put people first and defined itself against the future, harnessing change and bending its arc to progressive ends.
Why New Labour sits on the margins today has more to do with the internal politics of the Labour Party than with any appraisal of what wins elections and sustains governments. But those of us who believe in it bear some responsibility too. After 2010, it was carried by personalities more than by a school of thought, and a tradition carried by personalities rises and falls with them. The ideas kept coming, not least from its original architects, but what stopped was the thing that made them New Labour: an approach to politics that builds ideas into an agenda and argues for it. That is the job now.
If globalisation was “the thing” in the ’90s, then technology is “the thing” today. An agenda that harnesses it can be summed up in four words.
Technology for the many.
A murmur of groans will meet this. Some will say, Of course someone from the Tony Blair Institute is banging on about technology. But this misses an important point. Technology is reshaping our world. Ignore it at your peril. Resist it at your futility. And to the cries of “technocrat” that will greet this piece: this is not divorced from values. Far from it. New Labour does not differ from other Labour traditions in its values – opportunity, fairness, social justice – but it does differ in how those values are deployed. Where others use them as a lens through which to assess change and reject it, clinging to a status quo that is being rejected by voters themselves, New Labour uses them to shape change and decide who the harnessing is for.
The prime minister is right to commit to a ten-year plan. It is what the country wants more than any short-term, tactical fix. But it cannot be another political device, waved at the country like plans that have gone before it. It must not hold back in its diagnosis. We have a state with no more money to spend, an economy that will be hurt by tax rises and a wasted decade that has consumed six prime ministers as they’ve failed to arrest Britain’s decline. Those are not problems the past can solve. They are solved by facing the future, by the New Labour way.
The plan should be built around harnessing technology, and giving Britain the power to do so: cheap energy, sound public finances, powerful military, strong borders and strong alliances with America and Europe.
It should mark the end of taxing and spending our way to better public services. Reforming (or better yet, transforming) them should be prioritised and the approach to this must speak to the age we are in. People hand over their private data to private enterprise for cutting-edge services. Health, education and welfare should not be any different, and yet we’re more likely to sink progress with a debate about privacy. Digital ID should return not as “show us your papers” but rather to enable people to collect their data in one place and choose who to give it to. What “choice and competition” were to the government of 1997, “data-driven, personalised, preventative and always on” should be to the government of today.
This means a national prevention service. Measuring health through waiting lists is outdated. We should be measuring progress in healthy years added to lives. Innovations in therapeutics and diagnostics are accelerating at lightning pace, GLP-1s can make a dent in the national obesity epidemic and the shingles vaccine has been linked to a fifth lower risk of dementia. It cannot be that the rich pay privately for these while the rest of the country waits for an outdated system to give them what those with money already have.
The social-care system causes misery for millions of families, and it belongs at the centre of government’s thinking. The debate has been stuck on how to fund an ever-growing system for the best part of two decades. There is no magic formula waiting to be discovered, but technology does give us an additional entry point to solving this crisis. Start with somebody at 60 and ask how they spend more of the next 30 years healthy and independent, and social care becomes health policy. Dementia is one of the biggest drivers of demand for residential care, costing the UK £42 billion a year, rising to £90 billion by 2040 – and just 1.4 per cent is spent on its diagnosis and treatment. The plan should be about the drivers of dependency as much as the financing of it.
Then there’s the NEETs crisis. The government is right to treat it as a priority and to think in decades rather than budget cycles. But the instinct so far sits on one side of the equation: skills, support, readiness. A young person can be ready for an opportunity, but somebody has to create it. On this, Britain has a supply problem, and this will only be fixed by creating the conditions in the private sector to make it cheaper and more attractive to hire a young person. When the real statutory cost of employing an 18-year-old is around 40 per cent higher in 2025 than it was in 2015, we have a problem – and policies that sound progressive one at a time can work against each other when assembled.
Britain must also deal with one of the biggest drivers of economic malaise: poor mental health. Comparable countries are facing increased diagnoses, but Britain is an outlier in how many people move onto benefits because of them. We count the cost in economic inactivity across all age groups and strained funding for what should be key priorities in the age we’re in, including defence and security, but the biggest cost is borne by young people themselves. Lives should be purposeful, and where someone can contribute to society, they should. Fuelling the opposite, even indirectly, is a blight on our politics. For a condition that does not limit work, the progressive answer is treatment and support that keeps them in work, not a cash transfer that keeps them out. We cannot wait for this, and an emergency handbrake on new claims for non-work-limiting conditions should be year one of the plan.
Devolution has become a powerful organising idea and, for much of the party, the correction of a New Labour sin. Except New Labour built the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Assembly and the Mayor of London, and asked the North East if it wanted an assembly too (and the North East said no). Today’s thirst for devolution is really a symptom of decline itself, felt most sharply on the high street and in the breezeblock job centres, especially outside London. It is that decline a New Labour agenda exists to correct.
Devolve where it’s right, not by default. People care more about what decision is taken than where it is taken. And while devolution is far from a guarantor of growth, the fiscal case for it is unanswerable. Since the poll tax, central government has collected 92 per cent of all revenue, against an OECD average of 53 per cent. Give places the means to compete for investment and a real stake in the growth they generate. Let Clean Power 2030 give way to Cheaper Power 2030, with zonal pricing in place of a national investment climate built for windfarm investors, so that the places that make the power can host the data centres and modern factories that need it.
Then keep at the centre what only the centre can do, and in the age of AI that is more than it was. Britain is almost 70 million people on less than half the land of France. One health system. One grid. You can cross it in a day (even on our trains). A country like that can build a national AI stack that ten mayoralties never could, and when fraud and cyber-crime now account for almost half of all crime, it needs fewer, more specialised police forces. It would be perverse to fragment the advantage geography gave us.
None of this works in isolation. And core to the country’s future is its relationship with Europe. But not this Europe, and not this Britain. In a world shaped by power and technology, Europe has too little of either. Two years on from the seminal Draghi report on European competitiveness that laid out the path to correct that, fewer than one in six of its recommendations has been fully implemented. Britain, meanwhile, has to rejoin from a position of strength, not as a supplicant. So we should commit now to rejoining a reformed EU and accept there is an entry fee to shaping it, paid in the political capital generated by ending Britain’s red lines including the blanket opposition to free movement.
Those of us who believe in New Labour as a political tradition will see the significance of a ten-year plan. It is our politics, after all. And as in 1997, 2001 and 2005, there is a willing audience. There’s a public out there whose reservoirs of optimism are depleted but not gone, who believe that Britain can get back on its feet, and that there is as much opportunity as challenge in the world. They voted for a New Labour agenda before, and they would vote for it again.