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The former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s new essay on the Labour Party asks the right question. Britain is drifting. The Labour Government has no governing project. Something fundamental has to change. Then Blair hands the reader the wrong map.
The pushback has been swift and, in its way, telling. The Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, has attacked Blair for not mentioning inequality once in 5,700 words. The Treasury minister Torsten Bell has defended the Government’s net zero plans – but defended them as a cost the country can bear, rather than as the cheapest energy strategy on offer. Senior Labour figures have dismissed the essay as “reheated Blairism with no answers”. Each lands a punch. None lands the one that matters. The whole argument is being fought on a 1990s map of Britain that no longer resembles the reality of the country.
Blair’s essay is fluent, articulate and internally coherent. It is also a Victorian document, built around a view of how technological civilisation works that belongs to the age of steam, coal and empire. A clever Victorian reformer in 1888 might have looked around and declared the railway to be the thing. He would have been right – and he would have missed that the railway was one component of a far wider transformation, and that the next century would belong to whoever understood the whole.
Blair has done the same with artificial intelligence (AI). He calls it “the thing” and says it will change everything. He is right that it will – and he has missed that AI is one of five interlocking technological revolutions reshaping the entire economy of every country on Earth. Because he cannot see the whole, his prescriptions for the parts do not add up. His “Radical Centre” turns out to be the most conservative political settlement on the table – the late reflex of an old order trying to manage a transformation it cannot perceive.
Britain cannot afford to take Blair’s path. Burnham’s offer – a redistributive 1980s Labourism – cannot get there either. The argument requires a new horizon.
The Five Revolutions
I set out this framework in detail in my 2024 Foresight paper ‘Planetary Phase Shift’. The argument, in plain English: civilisations behave like other living systems. They grow, mature, break down, and either reorganise into a new form or collapse. We are in the breakdown stage – a moment when the way societies generate energy, move people and goods, feed themselves and process information is coming apart, even as a new way of doing all of that is being born in its shadow.
Five sectors of the global economy are crossing into new configurations at the same time. Each on its own would be a generational story. Together, they reshape everything.
Energy – Solar panels, wind turbines and batteries are now the cheapest source of electricity on the planet, on a cost curve that has been stable for two decades. Since 2011, onshore wind costs have fallen 59%, offshore wind 61%, solar 89% and batteries 83%. Some 84% of new global power generation in 2023 was renewable. Two trillion dollars a year now flows into clean technology investment – double the amount going into fossil fuels.
Transport –Electric vehicles, and behind them autonomous vehicles, are following the same cost curve. The internal combustion engine is heading the way of the horse and cart.
Food –Precision fermentation and cellular agriculture – using engineered microbes to produce proteins and fats at scale – are projected to make protein production five to 10 times cheaper than industrial animal agriculture by 2035. As the think tank RethinkX has documented, industrial livestock is heading for the same collapse that wiped out the kerosene-lamp industry in a decade. Up to 2.7 billion hectares of freed land could become available for rewilding, regenerative farming and carbon drawdown.
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Information – This is the part Blair has noticed. AI is following a much steeper cost curve. The cost to train a model such as GPT-3 fell from $4.6 million in 2020 to a projected $30 by 2030. What Blair has missed is what AI is connected to.
Materials –Advanced materials, 3D printing, robotics and circular-economy chemistry are converging into a different industrial base that uses far less mining, land and brute-force extraction. The Congolese cobalt mine belongs to a world on its way out.
These are five threads of a single story. Cheap clean electrons make precision fermentation viable. AI optimises the grid that carries those electrons. The grid powers the AI. Autonomous electric vehicles become moving batteries that stabilise the grid. New materials make the batteries lighter, cheaper and recyclable. The loop closes.
Together, these revolutions amount to what physicists call a phase transition – a system flipping from one form into a fundamentally different one, the way water flips into steam. The cascading crises everyone now talks about – the cost-of-living crisis, energy shocks, geopolitical fractures, the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine – are the noise of the old system coming apart. The five revolutions are the outline of what is being born in its place.
Blair sees AI. He misses the four others, and the connections between them. That single gap organises every error in the rest of his essay.
The Cheap vs Clean Fantasy
Blair’s most consequential line is rhetorical: “Does our economy need right now the goal of clean energy or cheap energy?” It is a question from 1995. Cheap and clean are now the same thing. Treating them as alternatives is akin to asking, in 1985, whether an office requires a typewriter or a word processor.
The North Sea cannot save Britain, and the numbers are devastating. Between 2010 and 2024, 14 years of Conservative drilling policy issued around 400 new exploration licences. Twenty fields were actually built. Their total lifetime production, at full exhaustion, will deliver the equivalent of six months of UK gas demand – two hours and 12 minutes per licence. The most recent renewables auction will offset 50 times that, every year, indefinitely. The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) has calculated a £364 billion fiscal hit from Britain’s continued reliance on global gas markets through 2050. Modelled across every realistic price scenario, the Treasury loses money on a typical new North Sea field. New licensing fails on its own chosen criteria: a wealth-transfer mechanism dressed up as energy policy.
The reason runs deeper than politics. For decades, every barrel of oil or cubic metre of gas pulled from the ground returned many times the energy it took to extract. That ratio – what researchers call the energy return on investment (EROI) – is collapsing for fossil fuels and rising for renewables. Britain’s national EROI peaked in 2000 at 9.6:1 and had fallen to 6.2:1 by 2012. An industrial economy of Britain’s complexity requires a ratio of at least 10:1 to function comfortably. Britain has been below that threshold for nearly two decades, hiding the deficit with imports that are becoming more expensive and more politically fragile – as the attack on Ras Laffan and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz have just demonstrated.
Work by Paul Brockway and colleagues at the University of Leeds, published in Nature Energy, shows that fossil fuel returns globally are dropping roughly 10% every quarter-century at the point the energy is actually used – the plug, the pump, the boiler. Solar and wind at the same point of use already do better than fossil fuels, and they are getting better still. Britain has crossed the line. Almost nobody in Westminster has noticed.
The Superabundance Britain Refuses to See
The other half of the story is what becomes possible when energy stops being a scarce input and starts being an abundance to be designed. The research is now strong enough to be treated as settled.
The reframing came when researchers asked a different question. Instead of asking how much solar and wind capacity is required to meet average demand, they asked what happens if enough is built to meet demand on the worst days – the cloudiest weeks of winter when wind drops off. The result is an enormous surplus of generation for the rest of the year. RethinkX’s Adam Dorr and colleagues ran the numbers on what that surplus makes possible. The more sola