Tony Blair Institute for Global Change

Yeah.

And the, you know, Corruption is a word that gets thrown around, especially when talking about Eastern Europe, quite a lot by a lot of very bad actors who like it's like Tony Blair Institute's favorite word.

What it means is just like.

liberalize your economy or let in like G4S to like so we can start selling like your children's teeth or some shit like so I was like okay I think the so I was kind of like convinced myself that like the corruption aspect of serbia was overblown it was probably comparable to the corruption that we would find in germany or france and the and the real lie is that like these other countries are free from corruption but then similar to what happened with orban he's gone for like two seconds and like local news in vovidanya in the north is just like We're sorry about everything we did for those last 14 years.

And that what this really is about is just changing the narrative around it, wanting to sort of please the right-wing press.

You know, someone was saying to me that the Tony Blair Institute has really sort of encouraged this sort of shift in rhetoric.

And, you know...

It's a more interesting story that actually might cut through to people if you say, oh, Andy Burnham and the new chancellor are, you know, they've kind of picked a bit of a fight with Ed Miliband.

Before joining CPI, the first part of my career I was a civil servant working for the UK government on EU policy as well as in Brussels.

It was a really formative experience for me and led me to the second half of my career when I worked mainly in Africa building the government advisory practice of what is now the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change.

Working in and around governments and governance has taken me really all over the world and through that work I've been able to play a part in, I hope, changing things for the better.

In today's rerun, we speak to two incredible public servants about their own personal journeys working in government and the pride they take in serving their communities.

So there's clearly a lot of action that needs to be done.

At a time where even people who would have been on the Labour benches in the past, like Tony Blair and the Tony Blair Institute, seem to be arguing against meeting that 2050 deadline, do they feel like they've slightly lost control of the political conversation around this and the sense of urgency that they had?

Tony Blair and his think tank have taken a quite reactionary position on all this on net zero, sort of suggesting that it's somehow at odds with affordability.

So I

He's very close to Tony Blair.

He single-handedly bankrolls the Tony Blair Institute, which is this, you know, NGO.

What the

fuck is the Tony Blair Institute? God fucking damn.

I leave England.

Anyway.

We could probably do an episode just of the Tony Blair Institute.

I'd like to know more about it myself.

The directories describe her as, variously, as an out-and-out star, a gifted legal mind, and a dream to work with.

Interestingly, and rather unusually for a silk in full practice, Lucy also took an 18-month sabbatical from the bar, moving to Freetown in Sierra Leone to work with the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change alongside the city's elected mayor.

[on-hold music] Lucy, welcome to the SCL Hong Kong Fireside Chat.

Thank you.

Yeah.

So, look, we had prior to Labour Party conference, Tony Blair making an intervention on Europe where Tony Blair Institute published a paper saying, yes, the UK should rejoin, but only after the EU has deregulated AI.

Now, he is not without a few Bob or two from the big tech companies.

A lot of big tech have a very vested interest in AI being less regulated.