FOR A former prime minister whose legacy has become increasingly discredited on many fronts, Sir Tony Blair crops up a surprising number of times concerning the major issues of the day, as we saw during the fallout from the 2016 EU Referendum and the campaign by the British Establishment to first block it, then water it down as much as possible, and his notorious intervention in the mandatory vaccine controversy.
Indeed the Starmer regime’s current push for British citizens to have digital ID appears to have Blair’s fingerprints all over it. He is also involved in the current push for a ceasefire in Gaza recently announced by Donald Trump, amazingly being nominated for a leading role in an interim administration to govern Gaza.
How does Blair keep resurfacing in this way? His connections with the World Economic Forum are widely known, but what of the rather lower-profile Tony Blair Institute for Global Change?
Causes it claims to be connected with include ‘combating extremism’, ‘the fight against populism’, governance and the Middle East, ‘helping governments and leaders get things done’. And a quick visit to the website finds it at the vanguard of the current push for digital ID. The fact that this is likely to have a profound impact on personal liberty and privacy and to further upend our way of life is swept aside as ‘old-fashioned thinking’. The fact that this proposal never featured in the government’s election manifesto is glossed over with references to it being a non-party political issue.
To have such influence Blair’s institute requires massive funding and he has that in spades. One of his key backers is Larry Ellison, co-founder of Oracle and one of the world’s richest businessmen, said by Bloomberg to be worth £291billion.
Ellison has largely slipped under the radar compared with Bill Gates, George Sorus, Klaus Schwab and, to a lesser extent, Larry Fink. However he has invested much in backing Blair, committing to invest as much as £257million to the Institute, if research via Grok is accurate. This backing has enabled Blair to increase his staff from around 200 to approaching 1,000.
Intriguingly, Ellison is also a close ally of Donald Trump, which may explain how Blair came onboard with Trump’s project for Gaza. Other than that, their relationship would appear to be largely commercial. Oracle secured major UK government contracts during Blair’s premiership, resulting in Oracle running more than 50 per cent of the British Government’s financial software.
Ellison and Blair share an obsession with health databases and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Blair has been a longstanding champion of identity cards. Oracle would be naturally poised to gain from lucrative contracts building and maintaining such a digitally based system, including data management and AI integration. Both the Times and the Daily Mail have been running stories regarding Tony Blair lobbying Business Minister Peter Kyle on behalf of Oracle. Oracle have also been in consultation with Chancellor Rachel Reeves and Heath Secretary Wes Streeting. The Mail story refers to 29 meetings in the last nine months between Oracle and government ministers and officials.
The consequences for all of us if this technology goes ahead will be profound. There is little comfort to be had from Ellison’s own comments on the subject, where he said that ‘citizens will be on their best behaviour’ amid the constant recording of their activities.
Everyone, including law enforcement, would face regular surveillance as daily life becomes digitally documented nonstop. What could possibly go wrong?
This article appeared in Patrick Clarke’s Column on October 3, 2025, and is republished by kind permission.
