Sir Tony Blair brings energy realism back to the centre ground
This week, Sir Tony Blair, the former prime minister, waded back into the national conversation on UK grand strategy and public policy. The former Labour Party leader did not hold back - with his intervention landing like an Exocet missile.
In a 5,700-word essay, Blair set out what has gone wrong in British politics in recent decades. He characterises the problem as an epistemic failure that has led to policy failure. He takes on those who claim that Britain’s problems flow from poor communication or leaders who lack charisma. At root, he argues, the country faces a deeper problem. Successive governments, and this one in particular, “don’t have a worked-out, coherent plan for the country in a fast-changing world and are in the wrong political position from which we can devise one and win a second term.”
He makes a passionate defence of centrist political leadership, which he describes as “the place where policy comes first and politics second. You work out the correct analysis, then the correct answer, and shape your political strategy around it.”
Blair’s argument starts from the claim that two epochal changes are reshaping the world. The first is the return of great power competition. The second is the AI revolution.
Britain, he says, is not remotely prepared for either.
On great power politics, he argues that Britain lacks the hard resources it needs, including economic and military capacity, and risks being pushed around by bigger powers such as America and China.
On AI, he compares the technology to the first Industrial Revolution of the 19th century. The risk, in his view, is that Britain misses the opportunity and becomes uncompetitive.
Blair supports his diagnosis with a range of arguments, including high taxes and unsustainable welfare spending. But it is domestic energy policy that sits at the heart of his critique of British grand strategy. He argues that UK policy has made economic activity far too expensive, weakened competitiveness and exposed the country to geopolitical risk.
His solution is to remove Net Zero, maximise domestic oil and gas production in areas such as the North Sea, and incentivise electrification so Britain can take advantage of AI. His energy argument rests on a series of detailed reports published by his institute over the past year, which have criticised the economics and system costs of renewables.
In a series of high-profile media interviews, Blair also criticised Ed Miliband personally, calling him a “quixotic fantasist” for pursuing a renewables-heavy energy policy. In an interview with The News Agents podcast, he mocked Miliband and said: “Xi Jinping is not sitting there in Beijing saying: ‘I wonder what that Ed Miliband thinks.’”
In the conclusion to his essay, Blair warns that if Britain fails to rise to the moment and honestly confront the root causes of its malaise, then “Britain will continue its long slide towards relegation from the Premier League of nations.”
On energy policy, Blair is not saying anything that other respected experts have not said over the past two decades. The Global Warming Policy Foundation, Net Zero Watch, Nigel Lawson, the GMB’s Gary Smith, Matt Ridley, Blue Labour’s Maurice Glasman and Oxford University’s Dieter Helm have all made similar common sense arguments. Only last week, Helm advanced many of the same points during a fascinating discussion with the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Energy realism has always been the truly centrist position.
Blair’s intervention directly challenges Labour’s main leadership figures, including Andy Burnham and Sir Keir Starmer, who is fighting to desperately defend his premiership. Yet both Burnham, who is standing in the Makerfield by-election, and Starmer fail to address the substance of Blair’s argument on energy.
In his 3,000-word riposte, Starmer essentially stonewalls Blair and doubles down on his energy policy. He repeats a series of tired tropes used by the renewable energy lobby in relation to “global oil and gas markets” and the futility of more drilling in the North Sea, although he does acknowledge that Britain is not a climate leader. Without providing evidence, the prime minister simply asserts that “investing in clean British energy strengthens our agency over those markets. It takes control of our bills on behalf of working people.”
Burnham takes a different route. In an op-ed for The Times he sidesteps the issue almost entirely. Blair treats energy policy as a supply-side question and as a precondition for national power and economic prosperity. However, Burnham folds energy into a place-based agenda about devolution, skills, public investment and regional reindustrialisation. His only specific reference to renewables is to the “clean energy cluster in Carrington”. His only other mention of energy comes when he argues that the government needs “strong public control and direction over both the investment strategy and the enablers of a more productive economy”. Such vague language implies that Burnham has not given the energy question the serious thought it requires and that, like Starmer, he is too afraid to stand up to Miliband and climate activists.
Taken together, these responses show that Sir Tony Blair and energy realists are winning the argument. In the millions of angry words written and spoken this week, Blair’s critics have still failed to identify the specific flaws in his reasoning. Most have resorted to a series of ad hominem attacks, referencing his alleged institute’s funders in the tech and hydrocarbon sectors.
To be clear, none of this means that Blair will win his war on Net Zero immediately. His views remain a minority position within the Labour Party and much of the media. Indeed, Alison Phillips, CEO of the newly-rebranded think tank, ThinkLabour (formerly Labour Together), bizarrely told BBC Newsnight that Blair’s views “[feel] so far to the right.” But that has no bearing on the truth or falsity of what he has said in his essay, or in the reports published by his institute over the past year.
But the most depressing aspect of this row is what it reveals about the future of UK energy policy. It is clear that the senior leadership within the Labour Party cannot be reasoned with on Net Zero. Businesses, trade unions, think tanks, opposition MPs, closet realists within the Labour Party and anyone else with an interest in bringing energy bills down need to recognise the implication. Net Zero, like socialism and communism in the 1970s and 1980s, will have to fail on its own terms. Some argue that it already is. Unfortunately, the burden of proof keeps rising each week and we are running out of time to keep the lights on.