Tony Blair is right about one thing: we are living through a historic rupture. The old certainties of the 20th century are breaking apart under the pressure of technological revolution, geopolitical instability and economic insecurity. AI will transform how we work, learn and govern as profoundly as steam power or electricity reshaped the world before it.

Britain needs a seriousness equal to the scale of that challenge – and Labour needs the confidence to shape the future rather than retreat into arguments about the past. The answer to global disruption cannot be a longing for the Britain of the 1970s, nor even the Britain of the 1990s. The task of progressive politics is not to recreate yesterday, but to ensure ordinary working people have power, protection and opportunity in the world now emerging.

But here is the striking weakness at the heart of Tony Blair’s intervention: across thousands of words about technology, geopolitics and political strategy, the defining issue of our age is barely confronted at all. Inequality – the economic, social and democratic fracture running through modern Britain – is treated as peripheral rather than fundamental. But inequality, rather than being incidental to the crises reshaping western democracies, is actually their cause.

People are told Britain is succeeding while they cannot afford a home, and that opportunity exists even though their children face........

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