The House Article | Tony Blair’s remedy misses something crucial: the citizen

Sir Tony Blair in February 2026 (Associated Press/Alamy)

4 min read19 min

We are living through a harder age. Great power rivalries, weaponised supply chains and large-scale wars – not least in Ukraine and the Middle East – are signs of a more dangerous world. Plenty of people see it, Tony Blair among them. He is right about the danger: people do feel that the Labour government is drifting, and drift ends in the comfort zone – a place the country is sick of, and that ends in defeat. The trouble is his remedy.

To respond to the new challenges we face, both globally and at home, the state will need to step up and intervene. An industrial strategy with the muscle to build, make and defend. Incentives and partnership are not enough: the state needs to provide direction, and this should be a politics rooted in the country as it actually is. Family. Work. Place. Nation.

It is terrifying that more than a million young people now have little prospect of work, training or education, the highest in over 12 years. We tell them to get the skills and climb the ladder, then cannot tell them which ladder, because nobody has decided what this country is going to build. Meanwhile, we spend billions on defence and billions more on wind and solar, and let most of it be built abroad. We put up more wind turbines than almost anyone in Europe and can barely build one of our own. The money goes out, the jobs go overseas, and the towns that need the work are left with the benefit office. That is not a welfare problem – it is an economy nobody is steering.

The answer to lost jobs and soaring rent cannot be “leave your community”: people love where they live, and our politics should recognise that. Industrial strategy and rent control can show working people that the state has their backs, and that our politics values jobs and homes over outsourced supply chains and landlordism.

There is a deeper thing missing from Blair’s remedy. Like too much of our politics, he names three actors: the state, the private sector, the voluntary sector. The citizen is absent. Treated as a recipient of services, a unit of human capital, a problem on a welfare roll – never as someone with a contribution to make. That is why so much of what we do feels like something done to people, not something done with them.

Homes for Ukraine was one of the best designed policies of recent years. The state set the frame, councils did the checks, the contracts were in place. But it only worked because the British people did the work, opening their doors to strangers on a scale this country has not seen in generations. No account of Britain’s future can be written without what the British people give to it.

A party that puts its causes before its people will keep losing them

A smaller welfare state is the right goal, but you get there by asking more of citizens and more of the state in return. Work, training, a stake in your community on one side; decent jobs, real opportunity, services that function on the other. Not sanctions on people the system has already failed. Dependency is not dignity. Contribution is.

This is where apprenticeships matter. They were once a relationship: a trade, a master, a young person, a place. The apprenticeship levy turned them into a tax credit for big companies and a way to rebadge graduate training. And we never gave them a home.

University students have campuses like palaces. The young person learning a trade is lucky to get a portacabin. It tells you what this country values.

There is a challenge here for the progressive class too. People have come second to their causes. The working class were told their concerns could wait, or that they were wrong, and when they refused to wait any longer, they were called the problem. A party that puts its causes before its people will keep losing them.

A list of policies is not a story about the country, its people, and what we owe each other. That story starts with the citizen, and the contribution only they can make. It is what the country is waiting so desperately for. 

Dan Carden is Labour MP for Liverpool Walton