There is something grotesque about Tony Blair’s return to policy advocacy. Though hardly flourishing, England was still just about England when he became Prime Minister in 1997. By the time he left office, it had been transformed into something unrecognisable and hateful. He gave us over illegal wars, mass immigration, and a constitutional vandalism so sweeping that even the ruins today no longer resemble what came before. For his war crimes alone, he should stand trial. He should also be tried for treason. That we are still expected to listen to his views on “modernisation” is a measure of how degraded politics have become in this country.

Now, under the bland branding of The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, we are given a new slab of technocratic gospel: Investing in Britain’s Future: Ten Priorities for the Spending Review. It is the usual Blairite stew—high on jargon, low on reality, written in the same dead, pseudo-corporate prose that the former Prime Minister and his servants believe to pass for intelligence. But before we pick apart the fantasies and the frauds, let us begin by acknowledging what little truth has been smuggled in.

AI is already being deployed in the private sector to automate routine work, deliver real-time insights and augment frontline staff. The public sector should be no different…

For once, whoever put this report together is right. The potential of artificial intelligence to cheapen and improve services is real. The cost of collecting, processing, and analysing data can indeed be driven towards zero. AI already outperforms the average GP in diagnosing symptoms—mine included. I regularly input test results into AI tools which interpret them faster and (usually) more accurately than any overstretched human. Shared with my doctor, the insights have improved my own healthcare, avoiding unnecessary appointments. I have not yet needed serious treatment beyond dentistry, but the tools I use already give me more control over my health than I ever thought possible.

Implementing AI across navigation services could free up 29 million GP appointments each year… productivity gains worth £340 million a year for non-clinical workers via GP and NHS 111 services; this is about one-fifth of the cost of NHS 111.

This, from another Institute report, is not fantasy. It is a suggestion grounded in technical reality. Unlike the American system—broken and predatory—the NHS is salvageable. There are better models conceivable, but no better on practical offer. Its main faults are managerial: too much money spent on nothing in particular, while patients suffer in silence. Applying AI here would be a worthwhile use of budget—one of the few justifications for state spending that might yield both efficiency and dignity. Of course, this being the Blair Institute, such common sense cannot be allowed to dominate the report.

Because soon enough, we are back to type.

A secure, interoperable digital-ID system should be a cornerstone of modern government. For citizens, it would streamline access to services, reduce fraud and enable more personalised and responsive support.

Mr Blair simply cannot help himself. There was a time when his proposals for identity cards seemed like the sinister fantasy of a man who mistook Gattaca for a documentary. Now, as digital surveillance has become so normalised it is barely noticed, he sees his chance to finish the job. Back comes the authoritarian dream of a single, centralised identity system, pegged to every transaction, every movement, every breath.

The old arguments against this scheme—that it would create an omnipresent police state—are out of date. We already do live in a police state. A low-grade, patchy, mismanaged one, yes—but a police state nonetheless. Yet Mr Blair wants to make it efficient. His Institute proposes that, rather than resist surveillance, we should welcome it as “personalised support.” One can hear the language of tyranny softening into self-care.

And as ever, the supposed benefits are lies. Identity cards do not reduce fraud. They do not prevent illegal immigration. They do not eliminate inefficiency. There is no identification system that cannot be faked, no database that cannot be corrupted. The only difference between a physical ID and a digital one is that the latter centralises all risk and all control. The former requires a forger; the latter requires a bribe.

That Mr Blair should return to this obsession is no surprise. Like all third-rate visionaries, he mistakes system for solution. The idea that government should work better is to him self-evident, rather than self-condemning. But this report is not about less government. It is about more—more planning, more “targets,” more nudging, more bureaucracy. Where our lives are not yet under surveillance, they soon will be. Where inefficiency remains, it is to be “streamlined.” And where consent cannot be bought, it will be extracted by design.

The Spending Review must be used to signal a break from the stale policy orthodoxy that has contributed to years of low growth.

The Blairite mindset cannot see that it is itself the orthodoxy. Every government since 1997 has operated under the same assumptions: that the state should engineer the economy, that central planning should replace dispersed decision-making, that technology should be used to control rather than liberate. What Mr Blair offers is not a break from the past, but its grotesque continuation. His only innovation is to propose that we do it faster, with better data collection and more PowerPoint slides.

The report’s “ten priorities” include predictable demands: early years investment, productivity reform, green energy, R&D, housing, AI, infrastructure, lifelong learning, public-sector transformation, and digital identity. You’ve read them all before. If these were wedding vows, no marriage would last ten minutes.

Even where the goals are superficially reasonable, the authors refuse to entertain the idea that government might not be the best actor. Can R&D not be left to the market? Could housing supply not be addressed by abolishing planning restrictions? Is it possible that skills might be learned best outside state-run schemes? These questions never occur to the Blairites. Their answer to every problem is always the same: a better-managed intervention, governed by smarter metrics and slicker design.

And then again there is the prose. No piece of writing so dead should be left unburied. The report is riddled with sentences like this:

The UK should strengthen its policy architecture by adopting an active industrial strategy supported by investment institutions and outcome-based frameworks.

This is not writing. This is what happens when a chatbot takes dictation from an illiterate arts graduate. Every paragraph is a collage of consultant-speak—“unlocking productivity,” “driving transformation,” “harnessing data”—none of it with any substance. It is style without content, vocabulary without voice. The report’s authors cannot write, but worse, they do not know that they cannot write. It is one thing to read like a computer. It is another to write in praise of AI while giving proof that its outputs are as dull as its inputs.

What are we left with? A half-decent case for applying AI to public services, buried under an avalanche of authoritarian ambition and bureaucratic groupthink. I will end with this: given the choice between a bloated but inefficient government and a well-run tyranny, I will take the inefficiency. I do not want a smarter boot on my neck. I want no boot at all.

And as for Mr Blair, he remains what he was in 1997: a tyrant and a warmonger. The blood of Iraq still stains his hands. There is no perfume to sweeten them. He should not be advising governments. He should be answering charges in The Hague.