The New Dark Age

Probably the least surprising news in Keir Starmer’s “order” to push imposed Digital ID on us was the close involvement of Tony Blair and his “Institute for Global Change.”

Since his first failed ID cards push – scrapped in 2010 at a cost of up to £20bn to the taxpayer – Blair has been obsessively trying to impose a national ID system on us all. But scrutiny of the vehicle he uses to front this effort – the Tony Blair Institute – raises serious questions.

The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (hereafter TBI) was set up in 2016, absorbing the Tony Blair Faith Foundation created by Blair in 2008 after he left Parliament, which was supposed “to educate, inform and develop understanding” about different religions.

At first TBI was funded by the reserves from the old organisation, but soon it attracted donations from governments, with £9m from Saudi Arabia and the US. These days, it says “We help governments and leaders get things done. We do it by advising on strategy, policy and delivery, unlocking the power of technology across all three.”

TBI accounts for 2023 filed with Companies House list donors including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Larry Ellison Foundation – TBI’s biggest donor by some distance.

The role of Ellison, a US tech tycoon and fourth richest person in the world, deserves particular scrutiny. Last year, The Times reported:

“Figures recently published by the foundation in the US show it has set aside $272 million (£213 million) for TBI in the coming years. The institute has previously received just over $100 million from Ellison.

TBI said it would use this money over five years to support its work “helping governments with reform and change programmes”.

The funding marks a new chapter in a decades-long bromance. Ellison, one of the world’s richest people with a fortune estimated at $135 billion by Forbes, became an ally of Blair during his time as prime minister.

Oracle, the software giant of which he is still chairman and chief technology officer, became an IT provider to the government during Blair’s time in office, and still has several Whitehall contracts.

After his departure from Downing Street, Blair remained friendly with Ellison. In 2009, two years after he left office, the pair were pictured during a stay aboard the American’s superyacht while it was moored off Sardinia.
The financial relationship between Ellison’s foundation and Blair’s body took off during the pandemic when TBI started collaborating with the Ellison Institute for Transformative Medicine and a team of scientists at Oxford.

In 2020, TBI and Oracle launched a cloud-based management system to help governments keep health records for vaccination programmes for yellow fever, HPV, polio, measles and Covid-19.

Filings by the Larry Ellison Foundation show it made donations to TBI of $5 million in 2018, and $10 million in both 2019 and 2020. The foundation made further payments of $34 million and $44 milllion to the TBI in 2021 and 2022, according to filings published by ProPublica. The latest document also reveals the $272 million that has been “approved for future payment” to the London-headquartered TBI to “support effective governance work in Africa”.

Database management is an area of expertise and business interest for Ellison and Oracle, which in 2022 bought Cerner, a healthcare software specialist, for $28.3 billion. His plan is to create a giant database of US medical records…

TBI was founded by Blair in 2017 and last year recorded revenues of $140 million… Blair… said his institute had provided advice to more than 40 governments and would soon surpass 1,000 staff.

It has come under scrutiny for its work advising authoritarian governments. It continued to do paid work for Saudi Arabia after the murder of the dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.”

Ellison’s firm “Oracle still runs more than half of the UK central government’s financial and planning software, including the Department for Work & Pensions, Ministry of Justice, Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs, Cabinet Office, Home Office, HM Treasury, and Ministry of Defence,” reported tech website The Register in 2023. Huge recent donations from Ellison to TBI were:

“…set to contribute to a joint partnership the pair established in 2020 which aims to offer African countries a database of vaccination records to help monitor and combat diseases. The Institute hopes to increase the scope of the system across Africa… (Ellison has also) promised to deliver “a unified national health records database on top of all of these thousands of separate hospital databases” in the US…

“Health databases have been something of a shared obsession between Blair and Ellison. While UK prime minister, the former attended a notorious Downing Street seminar on Monday 18 February 2002 at which Microsoft pitched the idea of a mega tech programme for the NHS, which became the £12 billion National Programme for IT. It was a disaster which was stopped early in 2011 and “did not deliver key benefits,” according to spending watchdog the National Audit Office…”

Frankly, 80 year old Ellison’s vision of the future sounds like hell.

Envisioning a world of complete AI-based surveillance, he gleefully told a conference last year, “citizens will be on their best behaviour because we (will be) constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on”:

It doesn’t take a genius to see where this is all heading – a national digital ID system, sucking in ever more sensitive personal data, and used as a management tool to ensure “citizens will be on their best behaviour” is a grave threat to everyone’s freedom, privacy, and safety.

All this, and we haven’t even touched on the “elephant in the room” when it comes to Blair: his pivotal role in instigating the Iraq War, which led to the deaths of over a million people.

Needless to say, the aftermath of this war created a chain of crises throughout the Middle East, contributing to a massive wave of immigration to the UK… the very problem Blair now shamelessly makes out he can solve, if you’ll only shut up and accept his national digital ID scheme.

We’re fighting back – but, as you see, we’re up against extremely powerful opponents. If you aren’t yet a Together member, please join thousands of members of the public who have joined to support the fight, HERE.