Tony Blair’s chilling comments target 'unsustainable' sick & disabled

Right, so I suppose it was a foregone conclusion that with Keir Starmer now as Prime Minister, leading what I’ve seen called his sandcastle government, essentially because that is what his majority is built on, that Tony Blair would crawl out of whatever fetid pit of damnation he happened to be occupying since his last rare intervention, but those interventions might now start to become a lot less rare now, opining at a speech yesterday at his own Tony Blair Institute on the unsustainability of the number of sick and disabled people in this country, whilst also musing that the best way to head off the threat of the far right, like Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, is to be more like them. Not so much a Labour government that is Tory-lite, but racist-lite as well it seems.
Right, so that was a short clip of Tony Blair, making a speech yesterday at the Future of Britain conference, being held at the Tony Blair Institute, so of course he was going to be there as well, giving his opinions and plenty of other Labour figures were as well, another notable clip doing the rounds on social media is of Wes Streeting proudly boasting that his Department of Health and Social Care and the NHS itself is no longer a public service, but is now an economic growth department, so pray tell what are you going to be selling off or charging for in order to generate a profit then Wes? Is it going to be the growth of our economy, or ooh I dunno, just the economic growth happening in shareholder wallets? We’ve seen this play, you’re not doing anything different to the Tories, it’s more privatisation, more outsourcing, more of the NHS budget ending up in private pockets, but anyway, back to Blair.
Standing there in that piece of footage, Blair, an insanely rich man who’s hands will never wash clean of the blood of a million dead Iraqis appears to be saying that Labour should be coming for the long term sick and disabled next, along with those with mental health issues, because why not include them too if you’re going to go down this road.
Have these people and their families, their carers, not suffered enough. This is a soapbox I will never get off, because this is personal, this is my family he’s talking about, a carer as I am to two disabled family members, but equally so many other families around the country, some of whom sadly have lost family members at the hands of Tory disability and social security reforms.
Blair calls these issues unsustainable. Well, it’s not like those affected have a choice is it Tony. You have the choice to inflict your opinions on us from a stage at your own think tank, about as welcome as a dose of the clap as they are, but people suffering the long term effects for example, of long COVID have no choice. For those where Tory Britain and struggling to get by living in it for so long, failure in government as that was, something I’m sure you’d agree with, even if you’d basically do very little different, eroding people’s mental health and the dearth of NHS support to deal with it at the same time, is not the fault of the sufferer. And disability can come to us all. We could get hit by a bus tomorrow, we could come down with some awful, life limiting disease and here we have a very wealthy man, a man who’s wealth in no small part stems from his time in government as Prime Minister as a peace envoy, telling us that those who’s health has failed, or is failing them, are essentially failing the economy.
Well, according to the government’s own website, social security spending for the year 2024/25 is forecast to be £305.6bn. That seems an insane amount money, 11% of GDP and I’m sure Blair would point at that and say it proves his point, by 55% of that is the state pension and pension credit. Few consider the state pension a benefit, since they pay in all their lives to get it, yet a benefit is how it is treated and very much the largest part of the bill, £168bn of it. In fact if THAT were sufficient, pension credit wouldn’t even be needed, but we have a measly pension in the UK compared to other countries.
Of the rest of the bill, £138bn is on working age and child benefits, this can include of course Universal credit for people who are indeed working, so this isn’t as simple as pointing at and saying these people aren’t working and that paying these benefits are unsustainable – and I note Blair doesn’t point the finger at in work benefits – but ultimately if their wages were higher they wouldn’t need the top up. Low wages I would argue is what is really unsustainable.
Then there is £89bn for disabled benefits and £35.9bn on housing benefit. Imagine how much of that you could save if you brought in rent caps, but with all those landlord MPs, it would never pass would it?
Now if Blair weren’t the walking talking equivalent of bile rising in our throats, if he actually meant to talk about what is truly unsustainable, instead of putting the fear of God into the disabled and the long term sick and those suffering from mental health issues, he might consider something like tax avoidance for example? How about instead of attacking the disabled we talk about tax havens instead?
As for that disability benefit bill? 47% claiming it are also pensioners. Are unsustainable too? Where will this conversation end up leading?
Bearing in mind those figures I quoted, a report by Tax Justice from 2022, and let’s face it, the Tories haven’t dealt with this in the two years since, so this is likely bigger now, but in 2022, they quoted the amount of money being held in tax havens by British citizens to amount to a staggering £570bn. That’s a staggering figure, but so will be the lost tax revenue on that. If you’re wealthy enough to be able to use such schemes, you’re wealthy enough to pay more in to the economy, but they don’t contribute to the economy at all do they Tony? You’d know.
People might recall the leaking of the so called Paradise Papers and the Panama Papers and the Pandora Papers relating to tax havens. Blair himself was mention in the Pandora Papers, having bought a company based in a tax haven, in order to secure a property he wanted and avoid over £300,000 in stamp duty. People like you Tony Blair are what this country cannot afford.
For as much as you attack the long term sick and disabled, what they get they spend in the economy, their money works for a living if you like, that drives the economy, that promotes growth, more money in ordinary people’s pockets is the best thing any government can do to drive economic growth. That isn’t going to happen under Starmer’s Labour carrying on where the Tories left off, with wealthy donors backing them, choosing to buy policy in effect rather than contribute to the economy properly themselves and Blair is singing from a hymn sheet they might as well have written.
Blair has also weighed in with advice let’s call it for Keir Starmer. One of the things we observed during the General Election and for years frankly leading up to it, was Starmer trying to appeal to Tories for their votes. Whilst he may have gained some, by losing others it was figured would stick by him, he ended up getting fewer votes despite winning his majority. But given the Tories lost 20% of their vote share and Labour didn’t even gain 2%, clearly most Tory votes went the way of Reform UK. Blair’s advice to Starmer, helpfully platformed in the Guardian, because of course that’s who published it? Go even further right. Nothing like centrists to enable the far right.
Although Blair still believes in making the case for good migration, because all these migrants crossing the channel, blamed for so long for the nations ills, wrongly, please see the aforementioned point on tax havens again if you dispute that, but the grievance is there, the favourite target of the far right populist and of course Starmer thinks he can stop the boats with his new border command, but again, you can stick as many boats in the water as you like, those crossings will still be attempted and the only way you will do away with them and put the people traffickers out of business is to have a legal safe route, the last one of those we had, Tony Blair slammed the door on when he was PM.
Not only that, but it is incidents of war like Iraq, but equally other conflicts we have been involved in as a country, like Afghanistan, Libya, now we’re cocking around in the Middle East again as well, that create refugees and then, when they turn up on our doorsteps, we complain about it. How about we stop adding to the problem as well as deal with it as we need to.
I’d also hesitate if I was Keir Starmer to take advice on tackling the far right from Blair, given that by the time he quit as PM in 2007, by 2008 the BNP were one of the fastest growing parties in the country, winning 100 councillors in that years local elections and in 2009, won 2 MEPs. He didn’t tackle the far right, he enabled it and of course that is a conversation being had here and now with regards to Starmer already, that if he doesn’t actually show he can deliver the change he promises to the country, the door to the far right will be opened even wider.
While Blair encourages Starmer to see off populists on the far right over migration by becoming more like them, less Tory-lite, more racist-lite, he’s happy enough to invoke that same populism to attack the long term sick, disabled and people with mental health issues. This isn’t the language of a party, or a government which will help and solve these crises, when one of their grandees, as despised as he is every time he rears his head, who loves the sound of his own voice far too much, can also demonstrate such hypocrisy and be so utterly, completely, and venomously wrong on every point.
Meanwhile a service that absolutely would help some of those people currently on sickness benefits back into work, would be to get whatever treatment they are waiting for expedited. Sadly with Streeting crowing about running the NHS for some kind of profit to promote an economic return and the appointment of Blair’s old health minister who subscribes to the NHS belief that it needs to privatise or perish, that very much doesn’t look to be on the cards. Find out about that problem in the making in this video recommendation here and I’ll hopefully catch you on the next vid. Cheers folks.