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The Labour Party is in serious trouble in the United Kingdom (UK). After winning a huge majority in 2024, Keir Starmer’s government has rapidly lost authority, with recent YouGov polling putting Labour as low as between 16% and 18%, behind Reform UK on 25% to 28%, while one YouGov survey found that 50% of adults thought Starmer should stand down and be replaced as Labour leader and prime minister. The party has been hit by local election losses, weak public confidence, internal anxiety, and the sense that it won power by default after Conservative collapse rather than through enthusiasm for a convincing Labour project.

Blair’s essay was prompted by the collapse of the party he once led, warning that it is governing without a clear national plan, is vulnerable to pressure from both the left and right, and risks responding to failure by retreating into old left-wing habits rather than building a serious programme around growth, cheap energy, welfare reform, artificial intelligence, and private-sector confidence.

He argues that Labour is now in danger of mistaking office for authority and tactical survival for national strategy. If that is the level of the thinking, Blair argued that Britain may drift further into decline while its governing party fails to produce a serious answer to weak growth, expensive energy, technological disruption, geopolitical rivalry, welfare dependency, and a state that too often cannot deliver.

Under pressure, parties tend to retreat into their oldest instincts. For Labour, Blair warns, that means higher spending, higher taxes, heavier regulation, suspicion of business, welfare expansion, and symbolic commitments that satisfy activists while weakening the country’s capacity to compete.

He could have been writing for South Africa.

The African National Congress (ANC) has also suffered a historic rebuke from voters. In 2024, it lost its national majority for the first time since 1994, falling to 40% of the vote. The Government of National Unity (GNU) was born not from ANC strength, but from ANC weakness. Such a result should have forced a break with the assumptions that produced it. Yet the ANC still appears tempted to treat the GNU as a tactical arrangement rather than a strategic rupture, while quite what its Democratic Alliance (DA) partner in that government sees it as remains unclear, given the parlous performance of many DA Cabinet members. The problem, as in Britain, is that Ramaphosa and the DA use the GNU to steady the politics to preserve some stability around the governing philosophy that brought South Africa to its present condition.

That is the South African version of Blair’s warning. The risk is not only a leftward shift under pressure from ANC factions, the Economic Freedom Fighters, and the uMkhonto weSizwe Party, but as much that the DA and the “right” of the ANC fail to ruthlessly drive the reforms needed to lift the investment rate.

That remains the key problem. The investment rate measures fixed capital committed to South Africa as a share of GDP. The rate today, at around 14%, is around half the emerging-market average. It is also lower than when Ramaphosa came to power and lower than when the GNU was formed. From the investment rate flows the economic growth rate, now forecast at around 1% of GDP.

Striking is that South Africa and Britain are the two economies tracked by The Common Sense that have seen the most severe growth forecast reversals as a consequence of the Iran war. Whereas the global economy and the balance of both advanced and emerging economies are holding up very strongly in the face of the war, South Africa and the UK have had their growth numbers dialled back strongly. Why? They are both run by a similar statist philosophy that exacerbates exposure to global risks and insulates against global upsides.

Blair’s argument on net zero also has direct relevance and is that no serious government can place abstract climate targets above cheap energy, industrial competitiveness, and national recovery. In South Africa, that should require no explanation. A country still emerging from load-shedding, with mass unemployment and a hollowed-out industrial base, cannot afford energy policy shaped by elite fashion rather than developmental necessity.

Yet both the GNU and Labour governments do place net-zero objectives above the need to exploit cheap energy resources. In South Africa, the refitment of the defunct coal fleet would quickly and cheaply put the country in an energy position to aspire to a 4% economic growth rate, if other reforms followed.

What are those?

First is for the ANC to accept that the DA has won the battle on empowerment policy, both in the sense that its policy would work while that of the ANC does not and in terms of the battle for public opinion, all of which this newspaper has expanded on in detail.

Second is to fully outsource all port and rail operations to private operators.

Third is to redraft expropriation law to make clear that investor assets cannot be taken for less than market value, as the current Act allows.

Fourth, strike a massive investment pact with Donald Trump’s America. Blair offers essentially the same advice to Labour.

Do that, with the energy reforms, and South Africa’s economy will most probably multiply its rate of growth from 1% to 2% and then 3% in short order.

Blair’s essay is, at its core, a warning against political self-deception. Ramaphosa and the GNU now face exactly that trap. South Africans did not vote for a stable version of the old order. They withdrew the ANC’s majority because the old order had failed. The GNU will fail if it simply becomes a mechanism for preserving some stability of that order. It needs a plan. It needs growth. It needs cheap energy. It needs the private sector. It needs to stop governing for its activists and donors and start governing for the country. That is as true in Pretoria as it is in Westminster.