In case you were concerned that everyone is using AI to write their statements and policies, rest assured that some of the most influential people in public life are still trying to think for themselves.

Witness Tony Blair’s latest state-of-the-nation essay, written for his very own Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. With its platitudinous style, ahistorical vacuity and cringing metaphors — can Britain return to the “Premier League” of nations? — you can even hear that imploring, earnest voice as he insists that, hand on his heart, invading Iraq was the right thing to do. It is a distinctive style that AI can’t replicate because no generative AI lived through the glory days of the End of History. Communism was defeated and policy was easy: import cheap labour to keep inflation low, and export industry to help the Chinese Communist Party become rich and powerful, so we could all enjoy office jobs sending very important emails to each other.

The fact that Blair — despite all the clichés and Oxford tutorial-style blagging — can still shape public debate through the assertion of political vision, as well as his personal influence, indicates how parlous British politics has become. It’s impossible to imagine any other party leader convincingly sketching out a global overview that combines the implications of geopolitical, technological and economic change in a fashion akin to Blair, while also drawing up broad policy orientations to meet those challenges. There are even signs of intellectual life and adaptation. It is striking to see Blair’s soft scepticism towards rejoining the European Union, Net Zero clean energy commitments, and even Nato — all organisations and policies that would have been impeccably Blairite during his time in power.

While we may quibble about some of Blair’s diagnoses and solutions, the real issue is that the problems we confront are themselves the legacy of Blairism. We have a hollowed-out regulatory state, a devolved Union with multiple and conflicting layers of political authority, a military designed for interventions to defend foreigners’ human rights rather than British national interests, and an economy built on extensive growth through importing labour rather than improving productivity. In large part, the solutions on offer in Blair’s new essay remain the same as Blairism 1.0: public-private partnerships, technocratic modernisation and efficiency, fealty to the US, and broader alignment with Brussels.

Unlike winning elections in the Nineties, no nation can triangulate its way out of the wreckage of globalisation. Blair’s vision for a new political centrism hopes to recreate what he accomplished when he first ascended to the Labour leadership, steering between a faded Tory Party and the radical Left. What he has now overlooked is that there is no “radical centre” in a failing state. Political options and ideological traditions are only meaningful and available when there is a state and a nation in which to contain and channel them. For that, you need state capacity and a centralised state with political authority, the two things that Blairism did so much to undermine.

At its peak, Blairism envisaged a world without sovereignty, in which all countries were merely administrative zones of a single integrated global order, and politics itself was blended away into regulation, ethics and law. For centrism to flourish, the British people need a state that can do things, and that requires precisely what Blair derides and dismisses in his latest statement: a democracy defined by meaningful political representation and popular input.

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Philip Cunliffe is Associate Professor of International Relations at the Department of Risk and Disaster Reduction, University College London. He is the author of seven books, including, most recently: The National Interest: Politics after Globalization.

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