Relatively Speaking: Euan Blair

Euan Blair

Growing up in Downing Street sounds like an unusual childhood, and in one sense it was. But children don’t experience their parents as history does. My father was just my dad — a nice enough man, nothing special. It was only later, when I began to understand what the role actually required, that I grasped how unusual that environment had been. The lesson I took from it was not political, and it was not about power. It was something simpler and, in retrospect, more valuable: if he could go and be Prime Minister, why couldn’t I do anything? That sense of possibility is, I recognise, pretty unusual. I don’t talk about it much. But it was there, and it mattered.

I went into banking partly because I was genuinely interested in how markets work and capital gets allocated, and partly because I knew I would always be in my father’s shadow in politics. Morgan Stanley gave me the mechanics. But what I actually cared about — what I couldn’t stop thinking about — was education and employment. The question was how to approach it. I was determined not to set up a charity. Philanthropy has real limits on what it can build. If you can construct a commercial model, you can scale it across geographies and attract the kind of investment that no charitable foundation could ever mobilise. We eventually raised $500 million — in dollars because all of it came from Silicon Valley — in pursuit of something I believed could do considerably more than simply make money.

The route I stumbled into was apprenticeships, which is of course how nearly everyone got a job for most of human history. Training in the flow of work, applied to the actual tasks in front of you, learning to do your job better and faster. It seems obvious. It is largely how most people actually learn best. There is, I would argue, a majority of the population who acquire skills faster in an applied working environment than in an academic one. We have spent decades sorting people into categories based on their academic performance in school and calling it meritocracy. Employers, once you actually speak to them, don’t much care what you know in the abstract. They care what you can do inside their organisation. The credential is not the point. The capability is the point.

Before Multiverse, I spent time working for an organisation helping long-term unemployed people find jobs. We were, I came to realise, putting a sticking plaster over something much deeper. Getting someone a job was only half the battle. Keeping them in it was extremely hard, and one of the core reasons was the absence of any training component — any structure for navigating the early experiences of work, which are genuinely difficult not just for young people but for anyone changing career. That gap between placement and retention is where so many social programmes quietly fail. The skills pipeline, rather than the academic credentialing pipeline, felt like the thing that actually mattered.

There’s a Picasso story — probably apocryphal — where he sketches a woman in a café in about a minute. She reaches for the napkin and he says that’ll be ten thousand francs. She protests: it only took you a minute. It took me forty years, he says. What AI is doing is compressing forty years of human expertise into something available at a fingertip. The question this raises for young people entering the workforce is genuinely open, and I don’t think anyone yet has an honest answer to it. The optimistic case is that as expertise gets commoditised, a different set of capacities — taste, judgment, context, the ability to hold other people accountable, the ability to discern which of ten AI-generated outputs is actually the right one — becomes newly valuable. The founder of On Running told me recently that when he started the company, the most important people were the craftsmen literally designing the shoes. Those people have largely been sidelined now because the crafting is done by AI. The most important role has become discerning which AI creation will actually sell. A whole new group of people, with a whole different set of instincts, has moved to the centre of the company. We are going to see this play out across every sector, in ways we can’t fully imagine.

These are also things that don’t correlate straightforwardly with academic credentials. That matters enormously for who gets access to the best opportunities. We have 150 to 200 qualified applicants for every apprenticeship place we offer at Multiverse. The mismatch between supply and demand is stark, and it has less to do with AI than with conscious political choices made in this country about how training is funded and valued. The apprenticeship levy was introduced with the right intentions — Britain invests less in workforce training than almost any other developed economy, and that is a serious structural problem — but the Treasury treats the money as its own, and the result is that it hasn’t flowed properly. The single intervention most likely to move the dial is a serious wage subsidy linked to long-term employment, reducing the risk-reward calculation that makes employers reluctant to take on entry-level talent at scale. That has never been made with the seriousness it requires.

On Ofsted: the criticism was that we weren’t having enough careers conversations with our apprentices. Last year, through our AI agent Atlas, we had 800,000 career-specific conversations with people on our programmes. Those weren’t recognised. We also see 60 percent of our apprentices receive a promotion or pay increase while still on their programme. One of the most common reasons someone leaves a qualification with us before completing it is that their employer has promoted them and told them they no longer need it. I am entirely comfortable with that outcome. What I am less comfortable with is a regulatory and political framework that still measures inputs — completion rates, qualification attainment — rather than the hard economic outcomes that actually change lives.

The schools question is the one that genuinely frightens me. We are still having debates about whether teachers are allowed to use AI in the classroom. Teaching unions have all sorts of views about it. Meanwhile Germany, not historically the most digitally agile large economy — 80 percent of German companies still use a fax machine, which is one of my favourite statistics — has just enshrined in its coalition agreement a commitment to train and upskill 46 million workers. France under Macron made sovereign AI a national priority and has made reasonable progress on it. The events of recent months have made clear that we cannot rely on the United States when it comes to technology sharing, even with its closest allies. We are going to have to build our own solutions. At the moment I don’t think we are taking that seriously enough, and the political instability — we are approaching our fifth Prime Minister in five years — does not help.

Britain does still have real advantages. We are ahead of most of the world in embedding technology across the workforce. We are not going to build the most sophisticated foundational models — the compute costs alone make that impossible, and we have the second highest industrial energy costs in the world — but we could be the fastest adopters of AI anywhere, if there were the political will to back it. That requires a seriousness of purpose, a willingness to make decisions and stick to them, that has been conspicuously absent. The window in which we can make that choice is not unlimited.

On the question of attitude and entitlement among young people: I studied ancient history, and if you read Suetonius on the youth of ancient Rome — their indolence, their criminality, their indifference to honest work, their obsession with spectacle over substance — you recognise that every generation has said exactly this about the next. I simply don’t see young people today as differently motivated from previous generations. Most of them want to work. Most of them wouldn’t rather rely on benefits. Most of them are not the creatures of social media caricature. What’s different now is that social media has given a global platform to influencers peddling a version of young people that has genuinely poisoned employer perception, and employers arrive at the hiring process with a set of assumptions that make placement harder than it needs to be. The government’s ban on social media for under-sixteens is one of the few recent policy decisions I would applaud without qualification. It has been, for this generation, one of the most damaging developments in living memory. The harm is not hypothetical. We see it directly in the people we work with every day.