Tony Blair to launch new institute for centre-ground politics

Tony Blair has announced that he is to launch a new institute for centre-ground politics in response to what he said were growing concerns about the global forces of right and leftwing populism.

The institute will be launched in the new year, the former prime minister said in a statement, but added it should not be interpreted as a desire to return to party politics.

“This is not about my returning to the front line of politics,” Blair said. “I have made it abundantly clear that this is not possible. However, I care about my country and the world my children and grandchildren will grow up in; and want to play at least a small part in contributing to the debate about the future of both.”

Three of Blair’s current programmes, the Africa Governance Initiative, the Tony Blair Faith Foundation and the Initiative for the Middle East will now come under the banner of the new organisation, which does not yet have a name.

The new institute will also examine a fourth pillar, the global forces of left and right that contributed to a major disruption in world politics, including the EU referendum and the election of Donald Trump.

Blair said that although different ends of the political spectrum took different approaches to a groundswell of anti-globalisation feeling – the left anti-business, the right anti-immigrant – there were many similarities he said were “especially around isolationism and protectionism, in what is an essentially closed-minded approach to globalisation and its benefits and to international engagement.”.

The new organisation would not be a thinktank, but a policy unit and networking space, Blair’s office said, calling it “a platform designed to build a new policy agenda for the centre ground” which would seek a return to “reasonable and evidence-based discussion of the future which avoids the plague of social media-led exchanges of abuse”.

Blair said in his statement that the organisation would be not-for-profit, with the business side of his work shut down and millions of pounds of assets gifted to the new institute.

“It is what I know I would want were I still in the frontline of politics,” he said. “Part of its focus will plainly be around the European debate; but this will not be its exclusive domain. It has to go far wider than that since in many ways the Europe debate is a lightning rod for the whole of politics.”

The former Labour prime minister accepted his work since stepping down had been chequered with criticism. “I have learnt a huge amount about the world and frankly what I can do and can’t do to affect it positively,” he said.

He also described much of the scrutiny of his business dealings as inaccurate. “It was open to misrepresentation and to criticism either that we were conflating private and public roles or that we were working in countries which aroused controversy,” he said.

Focusing his not-for-profit work on one institution made sense because of the way in which extremism in the Middle East, populist politics and globalisation as a method of tackling poverty were all intertwined, he said. “Extremism is also today a barrier to development. The Middle East conflict impacts extremism. Changing and reforming government applies to Middle East nations as well,” the statement said.

“And since all of these approaches basically represent the open-minded response to global problems, the salience of these new approaches depends on us having an answer to the new populism of left and right which exploits the anger and drives the world apart.”

The Guardian previously reported that the institution will focus on practical policy answers to issues that have fed into the rise of populism, immigration, manufacturing and stagnating wages. The organisation is not set up to directly oppose Brexit or push for a second referendum.

Blair is understood to have Jim Murphy, the former Scottish Labour leader and shadow defence secretary, as one of his advisers, alongside Patrick Loughran, a former special adviser to Peter Mandelson when he was business secretary.

Alan Milburn, the former Labour health minister and government social mobility tsar, is also set to head a new group, funded in part by Sir Richard Branson, to bring together disparate pro-European groups to who wish to reverse the referendum decision to leave. The group is separate from Blair’s organisation.

Blair is understood stood to have met prominent politicians from across the spectrum in developing his new institute, including the former chancellor George Osborne; the former prime minister John Major; the Lib Dem leader, Tim Farron, and Farron’s predecessor, Nick Clegg.

Clegg, the former deputy prime minister, said he had met Blair since the referendum and said his point of view should not be delegitimised. “I’ve talked to him, I’ve talked to many people across parties about the choices we face as country,” he said.

“You can disagree with what someone did in the past, but if their actions are saying something that is valuable and insightful now, why do you seek to silence them? I disagreed with what Blair did on Iraq but the guy is a formidable politician.”

Bob Geldof was another name floated in reports to have been in conversation with Blair about his new organisation, but on Wednesday he denied knowledge of such a group, or of the group funded by Branson.

“I didn’t know about that until I read it. I know Richard, I know Tony, we are all old geezers, but I swear I haven’t talked once to them about it,” he told the Guardian while campaigning for the Lib Dems in the Richmond byelection.