Something rather unusual happened this past Sunday. The Financial Times published an article revealing that Tony Blair’s eponymous foundation, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (often shortened to TBI), had been involved in backroom plans for the sweeping post-war redevelopment of the Gaza Strip.
Those plans “envisaged ‘kickstarting the enclave’s economy with a ‘Trump Riviera’ and an ‘Elon Musk Smart Manufacturing Zone’” that would boost Gaza’s economic value from “$0 today” to $324 billion. This is not the first time Blair’s name has been linked to the Gaza Strip since Israel began its genocidal operations there on October 9, 2023.
A report published in early 2024 by the Israeli broadcaster Channel 12 claimed that Israeli leaders were looking to Blair to mediate between Israel and some moderate Arab countries on post-war Gaza, and help oversee the “voluntary resettlement” of Palestinians in other countries.
Blair’s representatives denied those rumours, saying that neither Blair nor his team were consulted before the story’s publication. But the allegations in the FT are going to be much more difficult to swat away:
The plan outlined in a slide deck, seen by the Financial Times, was led by Israeli businessmen and used financial models developed inside Boston Consulting Group (BCG) to reimagine Gaza as a thriving trading hub.
Titled the “Great Trust” and shared with the Trump administration, it proposed paying half a million Palestinians to leave the area and attracting private investors to develop Gaza.
While the Tony Blair Institute (TBI) did not author or endorse the final slide deck, two staff members at the former UK prime minister’s institute participated in message groups and calls as the project developed, according to people familiar with the work.
One lengthy document on postwar Gaza, written by a TBI staff member, was shared within the group for consideration. This included the idea of a “Gaza Riviera” with artificial islands off the coast akin to those in Dubai, blockchain-based trade initiatives, a deep water port to tie Gaza into the India-Middle East-Europe economic corridor, and low-tax “special economic zones”.
The TBI document said the devastating war in Gaza had “created a once-in-a-century opportunity to rebuild Gaza from first principles . . . as a secure, modern prosperous society”.
A Tony Blair Institute spokesperson initially told the FT that their story is “categorically wrong . . . TBI was not involved in the preparation of the deck, which was a BCG deck, and had no input whatever into its contents.” However, when presented with documents attesting to the participation of TBI staff and an unpublished TBI document shared within the group titled “Gaza Economic Blueprint”, the institute acknowledged its staff had been aware of and present during related discussions but insisted:
“It would be wrong to suggest that we were working with this group to produce their Gaza plan.
The FT’s revelations represent a rare example of a British legacy media outlet taking Blair, or in this case TBI, to task. While broadly reviled by the British public, Blair continues to be feted and fawned over by the British establishment and media. Even after the “crushing verdict” (in The Guardian‘s words) of the Chilcott Inquiry — that the Blair government’s case for the Iraq war was “deficient” — was made public in 2016, Blair remained a go-to person for the British and international media on all manner of topics, including the Middle East.
Of course, the Tony Blair Institute’s participation in such a scheme should not surprise anyone, for at least four reasons that I can think of (I invite readers to .
#1: Form
When it comes to committing war crimes, Blair has plenty of form — albeit as someone who led a Western country into an illegal war on the basis of a mountain of lies. As such, he has not had to face justice in any sense of the word.
Whether he’s lobbying for JP Morgan in Gadafi’s Libya, providing advice on good governance to Kazakhstan while its regime tortures and executes its opponents, or cashing in on his contacts from the war in Iraq, Tony Blair is a deeply compromised individual for whom money does all the talking. Why wouldn’t he — or the institution he heads — support, or even facilitate (on the QT, of course), one of the worst war crimes of the post-WW2 era, the genocide of Gaza?
Boston Consulting Group’s role should not come as a surprise either.
As NC commenter Colonel Smithers pointed out in a comment yesterday, the firm was Netanyahu’s first port of call following his graduation from MIT in 1972. BCG has already come under fire in recent months for its involvement in the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), an Israeli and US-backed body that currently oversees aid distribution, if you can call it that, in the Gaza Strip. The program has seen at least 700 Palestinians killed and more than 4,000 wounded by Israeli forces while trying to access said aid.
#2: Connections
While Blair himself has not been directly named as a participant in the so-called “Great Trust” project, his ties to Israel, and Zionism in general, run long and deep, as Middle Eastern Eye reports:
Phil Reilly, whom Middle East Eye previously reported served as a senior adviser at BCG for eight years and began discussing Gaza aid with Israeli civilians while still in that role in early 2024, met with Tony Blair in London earlier this year…
TBI said Reilly requested the meeting and described Blair’s involvement as limited: “Again, Mr Blair listened. But as you know, TBI is not part of GHF.”
A British charity associated with former prime minister Tony Blair displays a map on its website including the occupied Golan Heights, West Bank and Gaza Strip as part of Israel.
This is not the first time Blair or his foundation has faced controversy. He serves as an honorary patron of the UK branch of Israel’s Jewish National Fund (JNF), which has faced heavy criticism for its activities — including donating £1m to what it described as “Israel’s largest militia” and erasing Palestine from its official maps.
TBI has also received money from a financial fraudster linked with illegal Israeli settlements and an American Islamophobic network.
#3: Motives (With Blair, It’s All About the Money)
This is a constant thread throughout Blair’s post-Downing Street career: he — and by extension, his foundation, TBI — will take money from just about anyone, and the conflicts of interest that arise sometimes end up shaping the world around us.
For a man who, in his own words, is “not interested in money,” Tony Blair has an incredible knack of attracting it. TBI’s biggest donor is Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, who has pledged to take his total donations to the foundation to $375 million. That’s the equivalent of loose change for someone like Ellison, but for TBI it represents a significant chunk of its operating income.
Coincidentally, two of Ellison’s biggest business interests are AI governance and digital health records, which also happen to be two of TBI’s most important policy guidance areas. As we predicted before Starmer’s election last summer in our article Tony Blair and His Associates Are Waiting in the Wings to Seize Back Power, Blair, largely through TBI, is wielding significant influence over the Starmer government’s policy choices.
In his comment yesterday, Colonel Smithers provided a nice little explainer of how that came to be:
Blair’s influence on the Starmer government should not be underestimated. It’s not an exaggeration to say there’s no such thing as Starmerism, as Starmer has pointed out. As professor David Edgerton said last week, Starmer is reheating tired and inappropriate Thatcherism and Blairism.
Let’s go back a bit.
As the pandemic receded, Blair began to hire civil servants, especially those with experience of the pandemic. He saw such emergency management as the next wave to ride and wanted to sell his firm’s services based on that knowledge. In addition, Blair foresaw the Tories losing, not Labour winning, as in 1997 and wanted his people in place. The Blair team is at all levels of the government, beginning with ministers and advisers like Jonathan Powell and officials like Peter Mandelson (ambassador to Washington and friend of Epstein). Those not seconded to Whitehall are at his office, conducting similar work.
The team that put Starmer at the helm of Labour is really Blair’s team, but with some reporting to Mandelson, like Morgan McSweeney and Wes Streeting. McSweeney and his wife, Imogen Walker, also report to Gary Lubner, a triple citizen oligarch and sanctions busted.
It is easy to see Blair’s influence over certain policies. For example, we have the Starmer government’s accelerating digitisation of health with its pledge last week that all patients with the NHS app will soon be able to get same-day appointments — not a face-to-face appointment with a real doc, of course, but rather a digital or telephone consultation. All of which bears echoes of a much-publicised TBI report by Blair and former Tory Party leader William Hague on the need to digitise the NHS and sell off its patients’ data in order to drive AI treatment.
Mark our words @Keir_Starmer, your sheer arrogance about state overreach will come back to bite you hard with the next big NHS data breach & your precious app.
Because let’s face it, the NHS has poor legacy infrastructure & a rich history of cyber incidents. pic.twitter.com/9ENE2B0qz2
— STOPCOMMONPASS 🛑 (@org_scp) July 4, 2025
This is all part of the Starmer government’s push to digitise governance in the UK. At the same time, a Daily Mail investigation of electronic patients records awarded by NHS trusts has revealed that Ellison’s Oracle has won deals totalling more than £1.5 billion through its Cerner healthcare unit.
Meanwhile, the UK’s AI-driven economy continues to gain ground…
Keir Starmer’s Labour Party launched AI Growth Zones (AIGZs) in January 2025, these are the digital versions of Freeports and Special Economic Zones (SEZs). In June 2025, Starmer’s Govt published a policy paper Industrial Strategy Zones Action Plan, which is a rebranding…
— EuropeanPowell (@EuropeanPowell) July 7, 2025
As for Tony Blair’s favourite policy tool of all, digital identity, it could soon become mandatory, as we warned over a year ago. Blair has repeatedly called for the development of a digital identity system in the UK, after trying but failing as prime minister to introduce an identity card system in the country:
🆔The Government is considering introducing a mandatory digital ID system called ‘BritCard’
A digital ID poses serious risks to privacy, security and equality.
We’ve just launched a speedy tool for YOU to have your say about this Orwellian proposal⤵️https://t.co/48lpBqFa2b pic.twitter.com/suBsGIa4HP
— Big Brother Watch (@BigBrotherWatch) July 7, 2025
The beauty for Blair of being able to pull Starmer’s strings, whether through Blairite figures in his government such as Peter Mandelson, Alan Milburn or Wes Streeting, or through TBI, is that he will be able to continue expanding his global influence at the same time through his fast-growing political consulting empire. Which brings us to the fourth and final reason.
#4: British Participation, Not Just Complicity, in the Genocide of Gaza
It is hardly surprising that a UK-based not-for-profit run by one of the biggest war criminals of the 21st century is participating in the “Gaza Riviera” project when the UK government itself, headed by a former human rights lawyer, is participating daily in Israel’s Gaza genocide.
