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"In a scathing 5,700-word attack on the prime minister and his would-be successors published on Tuesday night, Blair argued that the party’s agenda should move firmly to the right, calling for the government to crack down on welfare spending, abandon net zero goals and support Donald Trump."
"They break our legs and tell us to be grateful when they offer us crutches."
'Hey guys, let's meet across the aisle here. Instead of saying 'no more climate change' and 'let's not hang around with orange fascist paedophiles' maybe we do SOME climate change and hanging around with fascist orange paedophiles'.
[Post edited 27 May 16:10]
I'm one of the people who was blamed for getting Paul Cook sacked. PM for the full post.
A principled man has spoken! on 10:11 - May 27 by lowhouseblue
so he's saying that because he's been paid and he's wrong that ai is changing every aspect of our economy and our lives?
No. You can tell he's not saying that because it's literally not what he wrote.
The person quoted is pointing out the BBC's failure to highlight the conflict of interest. I'm probably more on the AI is useful vs garbage side of the equation, but it matters if someone is paid large sums of money by the industry they are promoting, while that fact is not disclosed or obvious to the listener/reader/viewer.
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A principled man has spoken! on 15:20 - May 27 with 816 views
A principled man has spoken! on 11:55 - May 27 by DJR
It is really difficult to know what Blair's motives are because his intervention certainly isn't helpful to Labour especially when fighting a by-election that is not a dead cert. It also plays in certain narratives of both Reform and the Tories more generally.
He must surely realise that the Labour party is such that it could accept very little of what he says. And if he feels that strongly about the direction of the Labour party, the time to have made such an intervention was before the last general election but I am not aware that he did.
Maybe it is just a roundabout way of trying to tip things in Wes Streeting's favour. Streeting has always struck me as an uber-Blairite, even though his recent pronouncements on GGT seem a bit out of character.
[Post edited 27 May 13:16]
I suspect this is his motive:
I'm one of the people who was blamed for getting Paul Cook sacked. PM for the full post.
A principled man has spoken! on 13:43 - May 27 by Herbivore
AI is good for some things, really not good for others. It's not a solution to absolutely everything as is being pushed by those with vested interests. There's also the issue that rarely gets spoken about, which is the eye watering amounts of electricity and water needed to support AI. At the minute I don't think the benefits outweigh the drawbacks, other than for particular applications of it. It's a shame the genie is out of the bottle before people have really stopped to think about the impact.
As you say, you are judging AI on what it can do right now. I appreciate there is not much else you can do but it is getting better so rapidly that it will progress faster and faster as time goes on. Right now it's not going to take jobs away but it's a matter of time.
Agree on electricity and water. Might be worth people looking into investing in solar/nuclear power and the materials needed for those (not financial advice etc etc).
I don't think this can be stopped now. The US and China know if they even hesitate the other will take the opportunity to double down.
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A principled man has spoken! on 15:34 - May 27 with 798 views
A principled man has spoken! on 15:33 - May 27 by J2BLUE
As you say, you are judging AI on what it can do right now. I appreciate there is not much else you can do but it is getting better so rapidly that it will progress faster and faster as time goes on. Right now it's not going to take jobs away but it's a matter of time.
Agree on electricity and water. Might be worth people looking into investing in solar/nuclear power and the materials needed for those (not financial advice etc etc).
I don't think this can be stopped now. The US and China know if they even hesitate the other will take the opportunity to double down.
It will always have limitations and some of these will be amplified the more AI starts to use AI generated content to feed itself. Some of the problems are fundamentally related to how AI works rather than to how good or well developed it is.
A principled man has spoken! on 11:58 - May 27 by lowhouseblue
growth doesn't mean that we need to consume more resources. productivity led growth implies the opposite. building infrastructure and green energy means we'll consume less. but people do want their material lives to improve over time - to be better off than their parents. without that over decades you get populism. if you think dividing the current gdp differently solves these problems your sums just don't add up.
redistributing the status quo means that more and more is absorbed by the state. ever ballooning welfare budgets and waste on the scale of hs2. every other european country can build railways - here it takes 3 times as long and costs 5 times as much per mile. it isn't just that it was a tory project, the civil service, the planning system, the inability to negotiate between interest groups and different objectives is endemic in the uk. scandal after scandal is exposed in public institutions - enquiry after enquiry into failures in social services - and yet the left isn't honest about state failures.
if the aim is to empower and benefit the many not the few, all this is just as relevant as the market failures we all know about.
Where do you get this stuff from? The energy per unit time does what? Entropy does what?
If we substitute the word magic for the word productivity then it makes sense.
Tech bros will never be the answer to the problems on this planet.
Many people on this site have been through this with you before, Jevons Paradox (backfire and rebound effects), planetary boundaries etc. Why are you not learning? You showed me you don't understand dimensionality, its chapter one in the undergraduate physics textbook, put that into what you have describe and give us some proper metrics to analyse, not these discombobulated rants.
A principled man has spoken! on 15:54 - May 27 by CoachRob
Where do you get this stuff from? The energy per unit time does what? Entropy does what?
If we substitute the word magic for the word productivity then it makes sense.
Tech bros will never be the answer to the problems on this planet.
Many people on this site have been through this with you before, Jevons Paradox (backfire and rebound effects), planetary boundaries etc. Why are you not learning? You showed me you don't understand dimensionality, its chapter one in the undergraduate physics textbook, put that into what you have describe and give us some proper metrics to analyse, not these discombobulated rants.
[Post edited 27 May 15:56]
And so as the loose-bowelled pigeon of time swoops low over the unsuspecting tourist of destiny, and the flatulent skunk of fate wanders into the air-conditioning system of eternity, I notice it's the end of the show
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A principled man has spoken! on 16:11 - May 27 with 693 views
A principled man has spoken! on 15:41 - May 27 by itfcjoe
He speaks sense as always
If you ignore everything in the essay, he's making perfect sense. We absolutely SHOULD fry the planet and cosy up the obese orange paeophile across the pond. Both things will definitely end well.
I'm one of the people who was blamed for getting Paul Cook sacked. PM for the full post.
A principled man has spoken! on 15:33 - May 27 by J2BLUE
As you say, you are judging AI on what it can do right now. I appreciate there is not much else you can do but it is getting better so rapidly that it will progress faster and faster as time goes on. Right now it's not going to take jobs away but it's a matter of time.
Agree on electricity and water. Might be worth people looking into investing in solar/nuclear power and the materials needed for those (not financial advice etc etc).
I don't think this can be stopped now. The US and China know if they even hesitate the other will take the opportunity to double down.
Right now it is taking jobs away. I’m removing a bunch of roles due to tech we’ve deployed that automate tasks that were done previously by people.
Need some people to manage the new tech but fewer than were in place previously.
A principled man has spoken! on 16:11 - May 27 by BlueBadger
If you ignore everything in the essay, he's making perfect sense. We absolutely SHOULD fry the planet and cosy up the obese orange paeophile across the pond. Both things will definitely end well.
Yep, that's clearly exactly what he says in there - definitely doesn't make a load of sense in lots of other areas where the UK is being left behind and why
A principled man has spoken! on 11:08 - May 27 by positivity
we had a discussion about most consequential prime ministers which developed into a debate on their post downing street behaviour.
blair is really ony worse than truss and johnson on this metric, apalling comments parrotting his fossil fuel paymasters. complete opposite to the decent, honourable work done by brown since (and even major & may)
Having read your comment earlier, just seen this on Bluesky, which supports your point.
Have some longer thoughts on the Blair intervention, but big challenge for him is, fairly or not, the public aren't particularly inclined to want govt to listen. When we asked about which ex-PMs (and podcasting MPs) govt should listen to he got lowest 'worth listening to' of any ex PM bar Truss.
A principled man has spoken! on 13:24 - May 27 by lowhouseblue
the us wasn't my comparison.
why does high speed rail track cost $25m per km in france but $260m in the uk?
why is the neet rate in germany half that in the uk? why in germany, for claimants under the age of 25, if they reject one job offer do they lose their basic benefit completely (only receiving an allowance for housing and heating) and if they reject a second offer they lose all benefits? are the two linked?
"why does high speed rail track cost $25m per km in france but $260m in the uk?"
citation needed...
You are the obsolete SRN4 to my Fairey Rotodyne....
A principled man has spoken! on 16:59 - May 27 by Dubtractor
Having read your comment earlier, just seen this on Bluesky, which supports your point.
Have some longer thoughts on the Blair intervention, but big challenge for him is, fairly or not, the public aren't particularly inclined to want govt to listen. When we asked about which ex-PMs (and podcasting MPs) govt should listen to he got lowest 'worth listening to' of any ex PM bar Truss.
A principled man has spoken! on 15:41 - May 27 by itfcjoe
He speaks sense as always
I was about to post that what he had said was little different to what Rishi Sunak might have said, but I have just heard Gove on PM saying that, with the exception of Brexit being a bad idea, he agreed with everything Blair said.
It has always struck me that the Blairites are much closer to the (less extreme) Tory party than they are to people like Brown. Indeed, it was said that the Blairites were pretty comfortable with the Cameron government. And I am inclined to think that at heart Blair is a One Nation Tory.
The problem though is that if Labour were to follow what Blair says they might as well merge with the Tories.
My other observation is that it is easy from the side-lines to say that, say, the pension triple lock should be abolished but it would would be much more difficult to implement were Blair PM because of the obsession the Blairites had with focus groups.
[Post edited 27 May 21:10]
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A principled man has spoken! on 18:47 - May 27 with 405 views
There was an interesting programme on Radio 4 about 10 years ago about the accession to the EU in 2004 of countries like Poland,
It involved a couple of ministers, one of whom I think was David Blunkett.
It emerged that a large part of the reason for not imposing freedom of movement restrictions on people like the Poles was because it was thought that the UK would get a competitive advantage over countries that did impose restrictions as a result of the driving down of wages.
I suppose that was the Blairites for you, and I am surprised the revelations in the programme never got anything in the way of publicity.
[Post edited 27 May 18:50]
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A principled man has spoken! on 20:18 - May 27 with 348 views
A principled man has spoken! on 15:20 - May 27 by BlueBadger
I suspect this is his motive:
Yeah, it’s not difficult is it. He’s massively bankrolled by Silicon Valley tech bros to the tune of several hundred million dollars. You need look no further. He’s promoting the tech and country he’s being paid to promote.
A principled man has spoken! on 10:53 - May 27 by naa
Principled!?!? He took us into the illegal war to please the US and is advising we do the same now with the illegal Iran war just to please Trump, who is obviously unstable.
He also suggests dropping any progressive policies Labour might have.
Can hardly call himself a Labour member these days surely.
Irony meet naa, naa meet irony.
"They break our legs and tell us to be grateful when they offer us crutches."
A principled man has spoken! on 16:23 - May 27 by itfcjoe
Yep, that's clearly exactly what he says in there - definitely doesn't make a load of sense in lots of other areas where the UK is being left behind and why
Oh, Joe. Don't turn into Middle Aisle Aldi Lowehouse.
I'm one of the people who was blamed for getting Paul Cook sacked. PM for the full post.
A principled man has spoken! on 20:18 - May 27 by reusersfreekicks
Do you support his work on the executive committee for the Board of Peace?
No, feels an area that shouldn’t be touched with a barge pole by anyone sensible - but I don’t think it’s worst thing in the world him being there if it does come to anything
This from Blunkett, with his background in South Yorkshire, was good.
“We are on the edge of major technological revolution and the last two big ones, which was the 19th century and the 1980s, saw the most enormous number of victims.
The lesson from the 80s, where I was leader of Sheffield at the time, where we lost 50,000 jobs in three years, was that a social democratic government would not block modernisation and change but would be on the side of those navigating their way through it. Make it a positive rather than a negative in their lives.
What was missing from Tony’s essay and his interview was a recognition that government aren’t just there to facilitate the Industrial Revolution, they’re to facilitate people being able to live through it with a degree of dignity and to come out the other end seeing it as a positive gain rather than [being] victims."
And there was nothing in Blair's essay that acknowledged, or had measures to counter, the rise of parties like Reform.
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