In 2005, fresh from his third general election victory, Tony Blair delivered one of his most ideologically confrontational speeches to the Labour Party. “I hear people say we have to stop and debate globalisation,” he observed. “You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer.”
Two decades later, Keir Starmer’s Downing Street has declared what Blair deemed impossible: “globalisation is over”. This message was received by some with bewilderment, treated as a knee-jerk reaction to Donald Trump abroad and Nigel Farage at home.
But the most striking thing – in a government not renowned for its consistency – was that we’d heard this before. “Globalisation, as we once knew it, is dead,” asserted Rachel Reeves in Washington DC in May 2023 as she announced her doctrine of “securonomics”. “We must care about where things are made and who owns them.”
This was a time when Labour was still invoking “Bidenomics” and when Farage hadn’t even announced his return to politics. But it’s a reminder that the death of globalisation (or at least a form of it) has been a process rather than an event. Joe Biden, remember, kept most of the tariffs imposed by Trump during his first term and even increased those on China.
Starmer is often likened to Blair for his pro-business rhetoric and wooing of Conservative swing voters. Yet, through both circumstance and design, he is repudiating his predecessor’s assumptions. It was folly, argued Blair in 2005, to “think we protect a workforce by regulation, a company by government subsidy, an industry by tariffs”.
Contrast that with Starmer’s argument in yesterday’s Telegraph: “We stand ready to use industrial policy to help shelter British business from the storm. Some people may feel uncomfortable about this – the idea the state should intervene directly to shape the market has often been derided. But we simply cannot cling on to old sentiments when the world is turning this fast.”
This isn’t mere rhetoric. New Labour was sceptical of or even hostile to public ownership – Starmer is renationalising the railways and has launched the first new publicly owned company since the 1970s: GB Energy (the fate of the Chinese-owned British Steel, threatening 2,700 jobs, will be a test of the government’s interventionism). Blair cherished the UK’s “flexible” labour market, Starmer’s Employment Rights Bill heralds a more regulated model. Tax and spending are on a similarly European trajectory.
But there is one Blairite concept – “the third way” – that might help illuminate Starmer’s outlook. Blair was seeking to chart a course between Thatcherism and traditional social democracy. Today, as his speech in the West Midlands will make clear, Starmer is rejecting both protectionism and free-market liberalism.
“There are two wrong paths to go down in this era,” a No 10 strategist told me. “One is defending the status quo, defending institutions as they are, saying there’s a few things that we can do differently but the grown-ups are in charge.
“The other path you can go down is destroying those institutions, that’s the way of the populist right. We don’t think that stopping global trade is the answer.”
Rather than heralding the end of globalisation entirely, Starmer’s hope is that a more balanced version can emerge. He aims to maintain consent for the UK’s open model by delivering on his original promise – to ensure ordinary workers better share in the fruits of growth. But the challenge, as the spectre of recession looms, will be achieving any growth at all.
Content from our partners
