WeeklyWorker

04.06.2026
Stick with the good old US of A

There is an alternative

Tony Blair accuses Labour of ‘playing with fire’ with personality politics. Instead he offers a political line that effectively amounts to banking on deregulation, the wonders of AI and tailing whoever occupies the White House. Mike Macnair thinks this is a recipe for continued decline

Late last month Tony Blair published a substantial essay on why the Labour Party should return to Blairism. A great deal of it is worthless spin; but within the mass of spin there are some serious points - and some very noticeable silences. It is worth, then, discussing this piece of zombie Blairism. We cannot call it recently risen from the grave, because Blair’s American sponsors have kept him episodically employed as a Middle East ‘expert’ (meaning pro-US lobbyist) down to his current membership of Trump’s Board of Peace for Gaza;1 and the ongoing Mandelson scandal and before that Labour Together’s dodgy dealings were, in essence, about Blairism.

Blair offers a political line. He calls it “policy”, which he thinks is somehow more dignified than “politics” (how it differs he does not really attempt to explain. He argues: “Trying to force the prime minister out before we know what policy direction we’re bringing in is not a serious way of conducting ourselves.” This is remarkable, given that Blair himself was elected leader of the Labour Party in 1994 on competence (as a forensic rhetorician in parliament and as a ‘communicator’), not on any clear policy platform. And as prime minister his government was characterised by an unusually large number of proposals from the Law Commission carried into legislation - reflecting its lack of a substantive policy.

It is nonetheless true that the Starmer government is notable for its lack of a clear political direction, and the question of leadership is posed because selling Labour as an apolitical competent management - the Starmer/Labour Together policy - has produced the political impression of incompetence. And the rival contenders for the Labour leadership are offering policy directions - if fairly indeterminate (Streeting: a return to the EU and NHS ‘reform’,2 meaning further privatisation in the interests of Streeting’s US health industry funders; Burnham: a break with ‘Thatcherism’ in favour of stronger state intervention).3

Within the spin and the arguments, Blair’s political line can be quite briefly stated. In the first place, in relation to global politics, he argues for unambiguous acceptance of subordination to the USA and clinging tightly to the US administration, “even when it is difficult or unpopular”. Secondly, he argues for giving free rein to ‘big tech’. AI is, he argues, the new industrial revolution and those who do not get on the bandwagon will be left behind.

Early adopters

It is worth noting at an early stage that this was already Blair’s political line in the late 1990s - then in relation to the commercial and productivity/‘efficiency gains’ possibilities of the internet, fintech and the ‘dot-com’ boom. Britain, becoming one of the ‘early adopters’ of the tech, was to open the door to a new era of prosperity and ‘lean government’.

Following from this, while Blair thinks that Brexit was a mistake because of the loss of the ability as a member-state to block undesirable (from his point of view) regulation of big tech, he thinks that the UK should not rejoin - yet. Rather, radical deregulation of big tech, finance and so on will, he argues, strengthen the relative position of the UK (under the US, but better than continental Europe) to the point that the continental Europeans will be forced to accept an EU remodelled in British (actually, in US) interests as something more like a pure free-trade zone.

He summarises with a 10-point plan; again, heavily characterised by imprecision and spin; Philomena Cunk’s “Tony Blur”.4 Stripping the list down to its actual proposals, it is:

1. Business and entrepreneurs need to know government is on their side, removing obstacles to business growth [ie, drop net zero, reverse new employment rights, and the rises in the minimum wage and in employers’ NI contributions].

2. Transformative programme for planning reform and deregulation .... The government has taken significant steps, but well short of a truly radical reform.

3. Prioritise cheaper energy and electrification over net zero and use what is left of our North Sea oil and gas resources.

4. Partnership with the private and voluntary sectors for apprenticeships and training [and retraining] and not dilute the education reforms for schools started under New Labour and continued under the Conservatives [ie, education privatisation]. And keep our universities strong because they’re critical to the technology economy.

5. ‘Reindustrialising’ the north of the country can be encouraged by government giving incentives and help, but most of all it will come through first-class infrastructure, education, freedom from bureaucracy and government working in partnership with the private sector and with the forward-facing part of the trade union movement. And with a broad definition of ‘industry’ if we want to create jobs, because much of future manufacturing will likely be done by robots, though there will be also major opportunities in areas requiring a high degree of traditional skills.

6. A plan for fundamental reform, over time, of welfare … The system at points incentivises people not to work. The triple lock is unaffordable long term … If the Conservative Party repeats its offer of working together on welfare, Labour should accept the offer.

7. The NHS needs not NHS reform, but whole-system healthcare reform. Moving from cure to prevention. Mixing private and public provision in a fundamental realignment of the two. Reorganising the delivery of healthcare: for example making weight-loss drugs and other preventative products widely available. Getting rid of all the old shibboleths, which have turned the NHS into a point of theological principle rather than a modern service, where the transformative power of technology alters its foundations.

8. Take effective - ie, ‘whatever it takes’ - action to solve the illegal immigration issue … We should deal by whatever means with small boats, but recognise the necessity of targeted immigration in certain sectors for economic growth and be unashamed to advocate it.

9. Most important of all, reorganising the whole of government around the harnessing of the 21st century technological revolution. All governments for the foreseeable future will govern in the age of AI.

10. Our aim, for the long term, should be a Reimagined State, in which taxes and spending can be lower, productivity higher and government seen as enabling, not directing.

Kemi Badenoch has argued that Blair’s proposals show that “the facts of life are Conservative. There is only one show in town for the political project you proposed.”5 This is, in substance, an accurate characterisation of Blair’s views: Tory.

Take, for example, the immigration issue. Blair proposes to crack down on “small boats” without addressing at all the “push factors” that lead people to take the desperate action of illegal migration (US-imposed and US-proxy supported wars, IMF restructuring programmes, and so on): tough on crime, soft on the causes of crime. But he proposes also to pursue the policy of Boris Johnson’s ‘Boriswave’ of radically increasing legal immigration on condition that the new migrants undercut wages.

The Tory policy of pushing down the wage share of output is also reflected in the proposals to reverse new employment rights and the rise in the minimum wage. So too welfare reform’, since welfare is, except insofar as it is a subsidy to landlords, a form of the wage share of output. That pensions are deferred wages was recognised by the European Court of Justice in 1990. Equally, a certain level of unemployment is necessary to capitalism in order to hold down wages; if the unemployed are starved to death immediately, labour markets will be too tight. So capitalism from its beginning has been accompanied by ‘poor law’ regimes: keeping the paupers alive is a necessary part of the wage share of output.

Tory then. But what are we to make of these Tory arguments? Are they at all plausible?

AI bandwagon

The core of the argument is that artificial intelligence will radically increase productivity - comparable to the effects of the ‘Industrial Revolution’ of the late 18th and 19th century: those who are on the bandwagon will prosper, those who are not will be left behind. The way to be on the bandwagon is to accept the demands of the big tech oligopolists and aspirant monopolists - for radical deregulation, and for massive increases in electricity and water supply for data centres.

I observe merely in passing that Britain did not ‘jump on’ the Industrial Revolution. It was both prepared by commercial and agricultural revolution, and fuelled by the proceeds of empire and success in the (sail-driven) shipping industry, backed by elaborate protectionist legislation. If AI does turn out to be the new industrial revolution, the breakthrough will be made in the US or China, which can enforce protectionist legislation. The UK only benefitted from free trade when it was the world-dominant power and the ‘bill on London’ the world’s reserve currency.

I made the point that ‘go with the tech’ was already Blair’s line in the late 1990s in relation to the dot-com boom and the supposed transformative possibilities of new tech. What in fact happened was the dot-com crash of 2000, leading to extensive money-printing. The money-printing for a time prolonged boom conditions, and also allowed Gordon Brown as chancellor to make limited concessions to the working class on wages and welfare under cover of stimulative spending.

Then came the crash of 2008. For a brief moment Brown as prime minister was the hero of the capitalist system - the saviour of the banks by bailing them out; but the Murdochs had all along wanted David Cameron to succeed Blair, and they - and the rest of the press following - turned on Brown with a succession of spun-up stories. Though there was a serious attempt to drive Labour into third place in 2010, it failed because urban working class voters reacted against it. The Conservative and Lib Dem coalition government nonetheless introduced austerity; which meant not only reductions in the wage share, but also further cuts in defence and infrastructure spending, police and the criminal justice system.

New tech did not radically increase productivity, as the spinmeisters of the dot-com boom claimed it would.6 Instead, what we got was a series of failed large-scale government purchases of information technology.7 One of the more spectacular results was the Horizon/sub-post office scandal, which is still running on, as the Post Office drags its heels on compensating victims. The Land Registration Act 2002 was marketed as permitting cheap and speedy electronic conveyancing - still not there 24 years later. And so on. One of the more striking ‘productivity gains’ was the introduction of self-service tills in supermarkets; but this is actually not a gain in total social productivity at all, but merely outsourcing from paid labour onto the unpaid labour of customers. The same is partly true of staff and branch cuts in banks: reduction in the service provided, more than the same service provided more cheaply.

It theoretically ought to be the case that the new tech of the 1990s-2000s should have produced productivity gains. Part of the problem, fairly clearly, is that the tech providers are actually selling mainly consumer product, and their business model is adapted to this. Extremely high capital intensity in the production of the hardware (desktops, laptops, tablets, phones) together with sunk infrastructure costs, means that profitability is dependent on “planned obsolescence” far more radical than was the case with cars, etc, when the term was coined. This planned obsolescence is provided for by constant ‘upgrades’ of the software to use more memory - bloatware - enforcing new hardware purchases.

As a consumer market model this works well enough. As applied to government and service industries, it has the effect that most potential productivity gains are actually consumed by retraining and re-equipment costs. In addition, in the hope of ‘getting ahead of the curve’, software that has not been adequately tested is put in circulation - leading in public purchases to very large-scale failures.

What about AI? There is a fair probability that it has been seriously over-hyped, like the dot-coms in their time, and a crash is coming in the short term.8 At the moment, AI looks like more bloatware to enforce more hardware purchases - in which case, as with the last tech bubble, productivity gains will actually be quite limited. AI hallucinations remain a serious unsolved problem.

Suppose, on the other hand, that the AI tech has not been seriously over-hyped and that what is in reach in the 21st century is technology that can do any job that a human can, as opposed to what we have had so far, which is the automation of specific skilled jobs. For a range of examples: the Ukraine war front lines already involve heavy levels of drones fighting drones. Japan has been experimenting with robots to do elderly care work.9 In China, surveillance devices are marketed to overworked women as substitute mothering.10 Humanoid robots are on the market (how successfully I do not know) for domestic service;11 similar devices could probably be trained for plumbing and some forms of building work. Sex robots using AI ‘large language models’ are already on the market.12

In February this year Citrini Research caused a brief market panic by suggesting that effective artificial general intelligence would lead to a downward spiral in which massive layoffs of humans caused by the substitution of AI devices would destroy demand and lead to a generalised collapse of the economy. Michael Roberts has argued, as Marx and Engels did, that new technology, while displacing old jobs, would create new ones.13 But this does not meet the point that I made above, that if AI has not been seriously over-hyped, what is at issue is not the automation of specific skilled jobs, but the possible replacement of any human capability. In this case the ‘AI doom loop’ would result.

There is, therefore, no reason to suppose that AI is the ‘new industrial revolution’ and if the UK gets on the bandwagon by giving big tech whatever it wants, the UK will prosper, while continental Europe declines. Rather, the more probable outcome is money wasted on a repeat of the failures of IT purchases in the last 30 years, and another financial crash that demands more bailouts, followed by more austerity … On the other hand, if we do get artificial general intelligence, it means the end of capitalism by way of the ‘AI doom loop’.14

US and EU

Blair’s argument on world politics, the EU and the US contains important truths, but also fundamentally misleading silences and spin.

To start with, the UK is dependent on the USA. This has been true since the geostrategic position of the UK was destroyed in 1940 and the UK agreed to hand over world hegemony to the US. The UK made two attempts to squirm out from below - in 1944 with Keynes’s ‘Bancor’ proposal, and in 1956 with the Suez invasion; both failed, and the USA after Suez demanded that Britain join the then European Economic Community (now EU); Charles de Gaulle blocked this until mass opposition in May 1968 brought him down as French president the following year.15 The relation of the UK to the USA is most analogous to that of Portugal to the UK from the 1660s through to the ‘Carnation revolution’ of 1974-76: an empire, but one dependent on a larger empire.

This truth makes Blair’s arguments more realistic than Burnham’s. Burnham imagines that it is possible to return to a ‘pre-Thatcherite’ policy, in which the UK government promotes industry, as opposed to finance. But this is a delusion. The Thatcher policy was one promoted by the USA, when in the 1970s it broke with Bretton Woods, began to promote financialisation, and shifted political and financial support from the social-democrat and Christian-democrat centre parties to neoliberals. Thatcher was handsomely paid off after stepping down as prime minister in 1990, with a £3.2 million advance on her memoirs and a ‘consultancy’ for Philip Morris tobacco, etc, so that she was worth £9.5 million two years after her resignation. Blair was even more handsomely paid off after his stepping down in 2007.16

The effect of their policies - continued since their leaving office - has been continued de-industrialisation and the sale to US-owned ‘private equity’ asset-strippers of much of the businesses operating in the UK, as Angus Hanton shows in his 2024 book, Vassal state.17 Any project of rebuilding British industry, let alone breaking with Thatcherism, would involve open opposition to the USA and ways of dealing with a sanctions regime as tough as those imposed on Iran or Venezuela.

Turning to the EU, Blair excludes without argument the possibility of a European unification that could pursue a policy independent of the USA. What he advocates, as I said above, is for Britain to stay out until the supposed benefits of deregulation force the Europeans to accept a changed “structured formal relationship” with a potentially “multi-speed” Europe: that is, a free-trade zone with a race to the bottom on labour rights and regulation.

He claims that Europe’s interests are in subordination to the USA. This is, first, because “America allied itself to Europe in the 20th century to fight two world wars alongside us, and that alliance continued after the second world war in opposition to communism” - a remarkable description for US interventions on one side of European wars.

It is, secondly, because, “Though American security strategy is couched in very ‘America First’ terms, it identifies the principal threats - in the Arctic from Russia; longer term, globally, from China; and in the Middle East from Iran - no differently from how Europe sees the world.”

Really? The sharp debate over the invasion of Iraq in 2002-03 is one example of the fact that US and European interests may be opposed, especially in the Middle East. Since then, the US has secured increased control of European politics through the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance ‘definition’ of anti-Semitism as opposition to the US’s settler-colony in the Middle East, Israel, and its expansionist character. If there is an Arctic threat from Russia, it is to the US and Canada; the actual (unrealistic) agitation about Russian aggression in Europe is not about the Arctic, but about the Baltic and eastern Europe.

Blair’s silence about the EU as a potential unified state and hence world power is not senseless. In essence, the choice of the Germans in the euro zone debt crisis in the wake of the 2008 crash, to prefer hard money and national control of taxation over ‘European solidarity’, destroyed the potential political authority of the EU as an institution that could be a proto-state power. Meanwhile, the confederal structure of the EU constitution holds the EU in political subordination to the USA - just as, before 1860, ‘states’ rights’ functioned to hold the USA in political subordination to Britain and the lack of German unification held Germany in political subordination to Britain.

The other side of this coin, however, is that the USA is no longer willing to make serious concessions to Europe as subordinate allies. The 1985 Plaza Accord ‘deleted the Japanese economy’. The US operations against Iraq were directly against French and German commercial interests. The US-sponsored Maidan coup embroiled Europe in war with Russia (and the US or its proxies blew up the Nord Stream gas pipeline to emphasise the point), directly inflicting damage on the German economy. And so on.

If US operations overseas were delivering an improved security environment for capitalist development, making theoretically possible ‘trickle-down’, this might give some sort of justification for Blair’s policy of radical subordination of Europe (like Britain) to US capital. But, first, what I have already said about Britain means that what we should expect from this policy is what we have got in Britain: declining wage share, declining infrastructure, increasing foreign ownership, structural job losses, producing increased welfare dependency …

Second, since the middle 1970s it has been increasingly apparent that the USA in relative decline as an industrial producer cannot manage a protectionist empire that provides stable conditions for capitalist investment - unlike the European empires of the later 19th and early 20th century. Instead, in a series of cases US and US-proxy interventions have delivered merely destruction. We do not yet know the outcome of Ukraine; but we do know the outcome of the Lebanese civil war and US intervention in it in the 1970s-80s, of US-backed operations against the post-colonial regimes in Mozambique and Angola in the 1970s, of the long history of US interventions in Afghanistan, beginning in the late 1970s … and, more recently, of Iraq, of Libya, of Syria …

In short, at the moment Europe is paralysed and the individual states cling to the USA as a security blanket. But the USA increasingly demands more tribute from its vassal states (as Blair recognises), increasingly uses it to protect US businesses and undermine allied competitors, and is increasingly unable to deliver actual security. Hence, Europe objectively needs a political equivalent of Lincoln or Bismarck to overthrow its constitution and thereby to set it free from US domination. Clinging to ‘the American alliance’, meaning vassalage to the USA, as Blair urges, is merely a road to more rapid decline.

The best option would be for the European working class to play this Lincoln in the shape of European unification; but the workers’ movement remains paralysed by delusions in ‘socialism in one country’, ‘national roads to socialism’ and people’s fronts. EU ‘Returnism’ as promoted by Streeting or by the Atlanticists for Workers’ Loyalism (Alliance for Workers’ Liberty), without a struggle to overthrow the EU constitution, is just a pseudo-left version of Blair’s argument.

Underlying

Why do Blair’s arguments fail? And why did Thatcherism not deliver prosperity for the UK … and so on? Why, for that reason - and underlying these problems - is the USA not able to act as a ‘world cop’, securing the conditions for profitable investment? Why does Blair not mention the 2008 financial crisis, or the massive interventions of governments in the Covid pandemic?

The underlying issue is that marginal-utility general equilibrium economics is false in the same way that flat-earthism is false: that is, it identifies a superficial appearance (prices vary according to supply and demand; the world looks and feels flat) and insists that there cannot be anything more complex behind the superficial appearance.

So far as the utility for marginalism is treated as purely subjective and as identifiable only by supply and demand, the result is that the theory is unfalsifiable, and it leads to early Chicago economist Frank Knight’s suggestion that armed robbery is utility-maximising.18 This version is merely ‘Everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds’ providentialism, lightly secularised. As soon as this approach is rejected, it become clear that the equilibrium claim is false: wages must over time deliver 2,500 calories and other basic needs, so that wages cannot fall to the ‘market-clearing’ level or the level given by the ‘marginal product of labour’.

The consequence is that substantial downward pressure on the wage share of output will not overcome problems that are created by the over-valuation of capital assets and excessive levels of accumulated debt built up in order to acquire over-valued capital assets.

Hence, the scheme initiated by the end of Bretton Woods and financialisation from the mid-1970s was a Ponzi scheme on the largest possible global scale. The idea that borrowing in order to build and financialisation would generate virtuous-circle growth, substituting for taxation and a degree of state planning, was just false.

World capitalism objectively needs the US empire in this century to meet the fate of the British in 1914-50 - in particular, it needs debt defaults on the scale of those in 1914-19 and 1945-50, in order to create the conditions for stable profitable growth.

Britain has been trading at a loss, as far as balance of trade and of payments is concerned, since the mid-1980s. It has partly made up for this gap by attracting hot money to a deregulated City - the ‘London laundromat’. It has also done so by selling off UK capital assets, like an individual who is in the course of going bust and sells their furniture to keep paying the bills. Pretty much all that remains to be sold is the hospitals and the universities …

This brings us back to Blair’s 10 points. They imagine that deregulation and pushing down the wage share would allow the UK to (relatively) recover - at least enough to force the Europeans to agree to a regime of race-to-the-bottom deregulation. The problem is that everyone else will also be pushing down the wage share and deregulating. There may be a temporary recovery in profitability at the expense of the working class (and of French, German, etc, capitals …). But, as soon as the others catch up, the underlying overvaluation of assets and debt burdens resulting from these will reassert the relative weakness of the UK economy.

No long-term benefit to the UK. But a benefit to someone - that is, to US capital, and at the expense of everyone else in the world.

Back to the working class and Europe. By some way the most probable outcome of the 21st century is generalised nuclear exchange, as the increasingly destructive aggression of the USA pushes some nuclear-armed state too far. Next most probable is that no-one is prepared to push the button, and the USA succeeds in ‘Somalifying’ the whole of the rest of the world; probably also accompanied by accelerating global warming leading to human extinction.

International - and in particular continental-scale - political action of the working class offers a potential alternative. Tony Blair’s delusions of a return to 1997-2007 provide no alternative whatsoever.

  1. Of this ‘Board of Peace’, the speech Roman historian Tacitus put in the mouth of the Caledonian fighter, Calgacus, in 83/84 AD, has never been more appropriate: “To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false justifications, they call public order; and where they make a depopulation, they call it peace” (Agricola, chapter 30).↩︎

  2. Eg, www.lbc.co.uk/article/streeting-government-abandon-nhs-reforms-5HjdZwq_2 (May 31).↩︎

  3. ‘The simple truth on the doorsteps that Tony Blair has ignored’ The Times May 29.↩︎

  4. www.youtube.com/shorts/xszI0dkd_wA.↩︎

  5. www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cglpj6eenl1o (May 29).↩︎

  6. ‘Productivity paradox’ (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox) is a useful summary of the literature. The UK government’s 2025 ‘AI-assisted’ review - www.gov.uk/government/publications/ai-assisted-vs-human-only-evidence-review/the-impact-of-technology-diffusions-on-growth-and-productivity-findings-from-an-ai-assisted-rapid-evidence-review - appears to have the vices of over-selective reviews discussed by Gideon M-K ‘Health Nerd’ on his substack in relation to a recent NHS ‘review of evidence’ into hormone provision for trans teens (gidmk.substack.com/p/hormone-therapy-for-trans-teens).↩︎

  7. www.nao.org.uk/insights/governments-approach-to-technology-suppliers-addressing-the-challenges (January 16 2025).↩︎

  8. Eg, www.levyinstitute.org/blog/minskys-vision-and-the-coming-ai-induced-crash (May 14). On the other hand, see also thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2026/06/02/global-profits-an-upward-turn (we await comrade Roberts’ next post, in which he will return to the issue of the US economy as a “bet on AI”.↩︎

  9. www.technologyreview.com/2023/01/09/1065135/japan-automating-eldercare-robots; www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9wdzyyglq5o (October 28 2025).↩︎

  10. R Murphy and G Wu, ‘Why do rural migrant mothers in urban China digitally monitor their children?’ Gender & Society Vol 39 (2025), pp91-119.↩︎

  11. Eg, www.unix-group.ai/martian/1822.html.↩︎

  12. J Cassar, ‘Face to face with sex robots and the cultures surrounding them’ Sexuality & Culture (2026): link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12119-025-10525-y.↩︎

  13. thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2026/02/26/citrini-and-the-ai-doom-scenario.↩︎

  14. There is a mildly interesting anti-labour speculation on this from a Russian émigré, V Charushin at moderndiplomacy.eu/2026/04/13/the-human-loophole-ai-and-the-end-of-labour-economy.↩︎

  15. N Moss 19 weeks: America, Britain and the fateful summer of 1940 London 2004; B Steil The battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White and the making of a new world order Princeton NJ 2014; DB Kunz The economic diplomacy of the Suez crisis Chapel Hill NC 1991; en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accession_of_the_United_Kingdom_to_the_European_Communities.↩︎

  16. www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/apr/09/margaret-thatcher-estate-family-secret; www.businessinsider.com/tony-blair-money-millions-2011-09.↩︎

  17. See also my review of the book: ‘Vanishing capitalists?’ Weekly Worker April 10 2025 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1533/vanishing-capitalists).↩︎

  18. See also M Piccione and A Rubinstein, ‘Equilibrium in the jungle’ The Economic Journal Vol 117 (2007), pp883-96.↩︎