Sir Tony Blair is trying to resurrect a political settlement that has failed - Matt Bromley

To me, Thatcher’s legacy was one of mass unemployment. But the effects extended beyond economics. Research since has found correlations between deindustrialisation and poorer physical and mental health, addiction, family instability, lower educational outcomes, and reduced social mobility.

By 1997, therefore, I was more than ready for Blair. And, at first, I wasn’t disappointed: New Labour oversaw one of the largest expansions of public spending and social reform in post-war Britain. While critics claimed Blair accepted too much of the Thatcher-era economic settlement, no one can deny that he reduced poverty, widened opportunity, and improved public services. Policies like child and pensioner tax credits, increases in child benefit, winter fuel payments, and targeted welfare support led to large reductions in child and pensioner poverty.

The creation of the National Minimum Wage Act in 1998 was one of New Labour’s most consequential reforms.

Under New Labour, NHS spending roughly doubled in real terms. Education was central to New Labour’s agenda. New Labour introduced several major constitutional reforms, too. And transformed legal rights for LGBT people.

I’m not blind to Blair’s flaws. Although New Labour reduced inequality and improved social justice, he did not fundamentally change the economic model Britain inherited from the Thatcher years. In truth, I think New Labour relied too heavily on financial services, tolerated widening wealth inequality, failed to reverse deindustrialisation, and embraced too many market mechanisms in public services. And then there was Iraq.

For these and other reasons, I’d lost faith in Blair by the time he left office in 2007, but I’ve never forgotten what he achieved and have retained a respect for him since. And so, I was disappointed with his recent intervention into the Labour Party leadership debate.

Blair’s latest intervention – a sprawling essay published by his Institute for Global Change – ultimately feels less like a roadmap for Britain’s future and more like an attempt to resurrect a political settlement whose failures are now impossible to ignore. At its heart is a familiar Blairite instinct: trust markets, get in bed with big business and the US (no matter how corrupt its administration), embrace technological disruption, and occupy the elusive ‘centre ground’. The difficulty is that the world which once sustained that formula no longer exists. To misquote Dorothy, we’re not in 1997 anymore.

Take artificial intelligence. Blair speaks about AI with the zeal of a Silicon Valley evangelist. Certainly, AI will transform the economy, public services, and education. But technology is not, in and of itself, an economic strategy. Starmer’s more cautious approach is probably the wiser one. Ministers are trying to balance innovation with regulation.

Equally puzzling is Blair’s apparent impatience with net zero targets – odd because Blair commissioned the Stern Review, which made the economic case for climate action nearly two decades ago.

What jars most, however, is Blair’s reluctance to acknowledge how profoundly Britain changed after he left office in 2007. Within months came the financial crisis – a catastrophe that exposed the fragility of the liberalised economic model embraced not only by Thatcher but largely accepted by New Labour too. That model promised dynamism and prosperity; instead, as I’ve already borne witness, Britain experienced deindustrialisation on a vast scale, widening regional divides and a labour market increasingly defined by insecurity and low pay. Here in Yorkshire, the consequences are still visible.

Blair dismisses Labour’s proposed employment reforms as a nostalgic return to the 1970s. But many workers would recognise them as something much simpler: an attempt to restore basic balance after years in which ‘flexibility’ too often meant casualisation, exploitation, and stagnating wages.

There’s also a deeper historical irony here. Deindustrialisation did not stop under New Labour.

But when Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008, the model collapsed with it, and we finally saw the man behind the curtain. What died in that moment was not simply a banking system but the wider assumption that lightly regulated global capitalism would steadily deliver prosperity for all. Wealth didn’t trickle down, it defied gravity.

Since then, Britain has drifted: weak growth, flat or falling living standards, and rising public anger – and with it a return to a dangerous kind of nationalism. Blair’s answer is essentially more of the same — move to the centre, align closely with business, cut welfare, and embrace disruption. Yet the political centre itself has shifted because voters have grown increasingly sceptical of an economic model that appears to reward wealth more than work.

Starmer undoubtedly has political weaknesses of his own. His inability to connect emotionally with voters remains a serious problem. But it is not serious politics to suggest that Labour’s answer lies in abandoning climate commitments, shredding workers’ rights, or pretending that the grievances driving public dissatisfaction are somehow imaginary. And it’s delusional to ignore the growing inequalities in our society.

Thanks for the memories, Mr Blair. Now take the balloon back to Kansas.

Matt Bromley is CEO of bee and chair of the Building Equity in Education campaign. Find out more at http://bee-online.uk