Blair’s big idea
Stopping Brexit at the border
“It’s tempting simply to laugh at Tony Blair’s latest intervention in the Brexit debate,” said Paul Goodman on Conservativehome.com. As PM, he unleashed a flood of EU immigration in 2004 by waiving restrictions on entry for workers from ten new member states. His government predicted that 13,000 people would head to the UK from Eastern Europe; in the event, over a million did. But now that the horse has bolted, Blair is desperately flapping at the stable door. His grandly named Institute for Global Change has called for tougher border controls, including mandatory registration for entrants and an emergency brake on EU migration if numbers require it. Such measures could satisfy public concerns about immigration, Blair argues, perhaps obviating the need for us to pull out of the EU.
Blair bears a heavy responsibility for the Brexit vote, said Matthew Norman in The Independent. His administration encouraged rampant immigration, having allowed the lure of “economy-turbocharging cheap labour to blind it to the possible consequences when the economy stagnated or crashed”. Now that the predictable backlash has happened, Blair suggests the situation can somehow be magically fixed. While such “glib vagaries” served him well in the “mid-1990s boom times”, they won’t wash at a time “when people in full-time work cannot afford to feed their children, let alone to buy or rent a decent home”. I don’t question Blair’s motives, said Matthew d’ancona in The Guardian, but I can’t see the EU agreeing to his immigration curbs. David Cameron was “handed his hat when he asked for considerably less from Brussels before the referendum”.
The irony, said Jenni Russell in The Times, is that the UK has long had many powers to control free movement that it hasn’t bothered to use. Not only did our leaders waive the right to restrict migration from new EU members for seven years; they also removed exit checks in the 1990s, only reapplying them in 2015. Under current rules, new EU migrants can already be sent home after three months if they have no job or other means of support. Belgium, which registers every visitor, is increasingly strict about enforcing these rules. Germany is clamping down on the employment of Romanians and Bulgarians in the construction industry, arguing that they are not covered by pay-bargaining deals. Having neglected to use the tools at their disposal, our leaders are now proposing harsh new controls that risk alienating our EU allies. “What a miserable, avoidable mess.”