It’s easy to forget that Tony Blair once called globalisation ‘irreversible and irresistible.’ Like a tide or a weather system, he treated it as something beyond politics, beyond the nation-state, and certainly beyond the capacities of the British working class to resist. At the 2005 Labour Party Conference, two years into the Iraq War and well into the dismantling of Britain’s industrial fabric, Blair declared: ‘I hear people say we have to stop and debate globalisation. You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer.’ It was a shrug wrapped in inevitability, delivered from behind a lectern, flanked by flags, at a time when offshoring was gutting British manufacturing towns and the financial services sector was consolidating its grip on New Labour’s imagination.
Blair’s globalisation wasn’t just about trade or technology. It was a political project: a transnational regime that disciplined labour through capital flight, deregulation, and the delegitimisation of alternatives to capitalism. For Britain’s working class, this meant redundancy packages in former mining towns, temp work in Amazon warehouses, and a generation of school leavers funnelled into student debt rather than apprenticeships. Manufacturing collapsed; finance soared. What was sold as meritocracy was in fact deindustrialised precariousness.
Now, in 2025, as tariffs slam down like shutters in a closing shop, Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Blair’s chosen heir, at least in tone, has been forced to admit what Blair could not: that globalisation, far from being inevitable, has failed. ‘The model is broken,’ he said, responding to Trump’s latest volley of tariffs against British goods. The 10 per cent hit on UK imports is more than just economic policy; it is a declaration of the return of economic nationalism, and a symbol of the disintegration of the very world Blair swore could never end.
But ideas die slowly. Even as the flat world fragments, its ideological scaffolding remains intact. What Blair once called ‘globalisation’, Starmer now calls ‘resilience’. Instead of free markets, we have ‘secure supply chains’; instead of deregulation, ‘green innovation’. In place of the invisible hand, we get the gloved hand of the state, subsidising AI, quantum and defence tech. The language has changed, but the class logic hasn’t. The technocratic afterlife of Blairism persists in Labour’s plan to reindustrialise without nationalisation, to grow the economy without empowering labour.
For Britain’s working class, the end of globalisation is both a reckoning and a risk.
Starmer and Rachel Reeves now speak of ‘securonomics’ a new model that promises to re-anchor the economy in national production. But this is less about socialism than state-capitalist triage. Without strong unions or democratic control over investment, the promised revival may amount to little more than tech clusters with zero(minimum)-hour contracts. What’s being reshored is not Fordist stability, but precarious high-tech piecework wrapped in patriotic rhetoric.
Across Europe, the story is less one of rupture than of drift. The EU was itself a machine of managed globalisation, with its single market designed to ensure the free movement of goods, capital and labour. This suited Germany, whose export economy thrived on integrated supply chains and outsourced assembly lines. But it left southern and eastern Europe with mass youth unemployment, brain drain and the hollowing-out of public services under austerity mandates. The collapse of globalisation threatens to expose how little autonomy member states really have. As the tariff wars escalate, the EU finds itself squeezed between US protectionism and Chinese state capitalism, with Brussels offering little beyond digital trade rules and technocratic platitudes.
China is the missing protagonist in Starmer’s drama.
It was the rise of China that made globalisation look inevitable; it is China’s resilience that now makes deglobalisation possible. The West spent three decades offshoring its productive capacity to China, treating it as factory and landfill. Now, it panics as China’s hybrid model—authoritarian, nationalist, state-capitalist—outperforms the liberal variant. In mimicking China’s industrial planning while disavowing its politics, Labour hopes to have green reindustrialisation without workers’ power, tech sovereignty without class conflict. But the contradiction is plain: you can’t beat Beijing’s techno-statism with Oxford-trained economists and polite panels on ‘inclusive growth’.
And in the Global South, where Blair once claimed that globalisation would be the ‘rising tide that lifts all boats’ the end of the global order is already producing shipwrecks. Countries like Bangladesh, Vietnam and Ethiopia, whose industrial growth was fuelled by integration into Western supply chains, now face the prospect of disinvestment and economic contraction. Foreign direct investment is drying up; garment factories are closing; the informal sector is swelling. The gig economy, exported from Silicon Valley with the enthusiasm of a missionary, is now imploding under the weight of its own surplus labour.
Howard Lutnick, the Trump administration’s Commerce Secretary, recently laid bare the new vision: ‘The army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little screws to make iPhones, that kind of thing is going to come to America.’ But even as he uttered it, he admitted automation would do the bulk of the work. This is not about re-employing the working class, it’s about retooling production for capital while leaving the labour surplus intact. Lutnick’s fantasy of patriotic reassembly lines is a ghost-image of Fordism without the wages, without the unions, without the dignity of human labour.
Here, William I. Robinson’s theory of surplus humanity becomes essential.
Robinson argues that under global capitalism, entire populations are rendered economically superfluous, not because their labour isn’t needed, but because it is no longer profitable to exploit them through traditional wage relations. What emerges is a structural redundancy: millions forced into precarious, informal, or criminalised sectors of the economy, surveilled rather than employed, policed rather than paid. The automation of screw-turning is not the future, it is the alibi. The real story is the expansion of this surplus population and its management through carcerality, surveillance, and nationalist affect.
That management increasingly takes the form of militarised borders and biometric regimes. As capital pulls back from global integration, states ramp up the policing of mobility. Fortress Britain, Fortress Europe, and Fortress America are less about protecting jobs and more about controlling people, especially racialised migrant labour rendered redundant by automation and crisis. Migration, once spun as the lubricant of global growth, is now recast as a threat to national security. The same people Blair once described as ‘aspirational’ are now framed by Starmer’s Labour as queue-jumpers, welfare cheats, or ‘illegal immigrants.’
Beneath it all lies the ecological floor collapsing. The long supply chains of the globalised era were made possible by cheap oil, limitless extraction, and the fantasy of a world without limits. That fantasy is ending. The move to localised production, to ‘resilient economies,’ is not just economic strategy, it’s an admission of planetary constraint. Yet Labour’s green industrial policy does not break with globalisation; it greens it. There is little talk of degrowth, or sufficiency, or justice—only efficiency and carbon metrics. The climate crisis demands systemic transformation; we get tech optimism and export targets.
Blair imagined a world without friction: borderless, flat, and governed by expertise. His vision was built on the assumption that markets would moderate politics, and that democracy could be reduced to management.
That world is now over.
In its place is a return of the political: tariffs, borders, capital controls, class antagonisms. But unless that politics is reshaped by workers themselves, organised not in service of a softer nationalism, but in the pursuit of a democratic economy, the post-globalisation world risks becoming even more brutal than the one Blair built.
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