Friends like these ...
Tony Blair is no friend to Scotland ... and we better understand what his "advising" Scottish Labour on healthcare policy actually means for our nation.
Scottish Labour’s recent Holyrood by-election win should not blind anyone to the obvious truth: theirs is a party in trouble. Not existential peril—nothing like 2015, when our only mistake was not finishing them off altogether—but the kind of trouble that eventually becomes existential.
Even without the dreadful polling you’d know they were panicking, because yesterday it leaked that they’re drafting in Tony Blair and his “non-profit” to advise them. And what area of expertise do they want to share?
Their insights on the future of the NHS. Which is a bit like using Harold Shipman’s diary as a blueprint for patient care.
You know the whole affair is soaked in dishonesty the moment anyone calls the Tony Blair Institute a non-profit. To see how absurd that label is you only need to know two things:
First, how much money Blair has already funnelled into his own pockets;
Second, how obsessed he has always been with the lifestyles of the ultra-rich—and joining their ranks the second he left No. 10.
But TBI isn’t just a vehicle for personal enrichment.
It’s one of the leading neocon outfits on the planet. Blair is heavily invested in AI, which is why putting him in front of any UK Government “AI task-force” is a grotesque conflict of interest at best, and at worst a licence to loot at his leisure.
His links to private-health giants are even better known. Blair has been pushing Starmer’s front-bench towards outsourcing and “partnerships” for years. For TBI, AI isn’t a tool to improve care; it’s a scalpel to slash staff numbers and let private providers sink their claws into the system.
Scottish Labour alone would never have tried this—they can’t be that stupid. Blair’s name is toxic in Scotland. Anyone who’s kept half an eye on politics here knows exactly what he’s selling and exactly who’ll pay the bill.
Inviting him north is an admission that Scottish Labour will happily let London set Scotland’s healthcare policy—and that policy is privatisation, plain and simple. Oh it will have another name on it, but that’s what it’ll be.
Even “free at the point of use” is going to be a selective practice before long, and once you start eating away at the principle it’s not a slippery slope but a plunge into a US style system where anything goes.
Yes, we know that a few Scottish Labour grandees have always flirted with private-sector cash. But I still believe most of the rank-and-file imagine themselves to be centre-left. They must be cringing, horrified, at the sight of the vampiric Blair swooping back into the fold, fangs bared to suck out the lifeblood and driving his wrecking machine into a system which we have done well to ring-fence and keep out of reach of the companies and private interests which have ravaged the NHS south of the border.
They don’t need him or want him in this. If they had any choice in the matter he wouldn’t be. But Scottish Labour remains the creature of Westminister, and so where they go Sarwar and the rest have to follow. Labour keeps claiming it will “govern in the national interest”. We’ve seen enough since Starmer took over to know exactly what that means. He governs for the same narrow set of interests as every Tory before him—and he walks in Blair’s footsteps doing it.
These people swear they’re Scotland’s friends.
With friends like these, who needs Nigel Farage?
I said in this site’s first piece that our political square is overrun with rats because we keep feeding the rats. That actually comes from the TBI. Blair’s doctrine—adopt right-wing policies to neutralise the far right—sounds clever in a political science seminar. In practice it creates the country the far right wants.
Blair is an agent of chaos.
Farage is a small-time goon with a chancers dream of power and no clear idea of how he’d use it. Blair is a former Prime Minister who leads a multi-billion-dollar global corporation and has ministers on speed-dial. The fox isn’t just in the hen-house; the hens are being told it’s for their own good.
The damage Reform can do is nothing on this.
The greatest threats to Scotland’s NHS have always come from Westminster. Scottish Labour now invites the very architect of English NHS marketisation to redraw our system. That is more dangerous than any threat posed to us by the likes of Farage and his dogwhistling clique of weirdos.
That Labour wants the power to throw open the floodgates and execute such schemes should be all the reason not to vote for them the Scottish electorate needs. It’s up to us to remind them of that fact over and over again.
Reform doesn’t possess the wit or the muscle to do what these people would do to our system. There is no question as to where the real danger lies.
We laugh at Farage’s clown show and torment ourselves with the dark “what if?” questions. Meanwhile Blair and Starmer, two men with the power to actually make big decisions, openly discuss handing corporate healthcare lobbyists the master-keys to Scotland’s health care system.
While we squabble inside the Yes movement, the vampire has chapped on the front door wearing a Labour rosette. Yet according to legend we still need to invite him in and so the Tony Blair Institute just gave us perfect clarity: if you value the NHS, this is what the enemy looks like, not the phantom threat of Farage.
Ask yourself: which of those two futures truly scares you?
If this were a movie Farage and Reform are The Day After Tomorrow. The TBI threat is Threads. One is a wholly unrealistic, Hollywood apocalypse so absurd that it branches out at times into unintentional comedy. The other is genuine nightmare fuel, based on scientific research and the cold hard facts, and is uncompromising and all too realistic.
If that realisation horrifies you as much as it does me, then the time for side-fights is over. The enemy is at the gate, and he’s wearing that famous toothy grin.
Blair once told us we were in a “war on terror”. Today he and his ilk are the terror, even if it wears a nicer suit and calls itself reform.
I don’t care whether your “thing” is women’s rights, trans rights, gay rights or employment rights ... if these people get the keys to the control room everything you and I care about is up for grabs, and all the advances that we made together will be reversed or weakened to the point where they no longer matter.
Even the Parliament itself will be set back decades, if it survives at all and that’s an open-ended question which is long overdue a proper debate.
This is a war, and we’ve lost sight of who the enemy is.
If we don’t wake up, and soon, the battlefield will be our hospitals, the casualties our patients, and the victims all the progressive policies which it is our first duty to defend. It’s time to focus, and the irony is that if we do we might even have Tony Blair himself to thank for putting us back on the path to victory.