How embarrassing for Blair that his own poll reveals Britain wants Brexit more than ever

TONy BLAIR is the most discredited politician in Britain. Any cause in the world is liable to be weakened by his embrace.

Many Leave supporters will therefore have been cheered by his latest anti- Brexit remarks over the weekend.

He told Sky News’ Sophy Ridge yesterday what he had already said on Radio Four’s Today programme on Saturday morning — namely that Brexit may not happen. In his view, it is ‘absolutely necessary’ that it doesn’t because of the ‘damage’ the Leave vote is allegedly causing the UK economy.

Set aside that last week’s employment figures were the best for over 40 years. Forget too, for the moment, how all the previous scare stories spread by the Remain camp about instant economic Armageddon following the last June’s Referendum have been confounded.

Manipulative

What is most interesting about Blair’s characteristically manipulative intervention is that he seems at last to be very dimly aware of how important the issue of immigration is for Leave supporters.

This is because his own foundation has done some illuminating polling. It found that a whopping 76 per cent of respondents think immigration policy in this country is too open. Meanwhile 56 per cent agreed that ‘Brexit must mean Brexit’.

Needless to say, Blair did not cite these figures during his tour of the studios. Indeed, he told Sophy Ridge that ‘public opinion is moving’ on Brexit although his own poll suggests the precise opposite. But then what is truth to a man like Tony Blair?

Notwithstanding his ingrained inability to be straightforward, the former prime minister — who encouraged unprecedented levels of immigration into this country during his time in office — has apparently belatedly half woken up to the importance of the issue.

He has moved from hinting six months ago that a second referendum might be necessary, to suggesting now that the EU might be prepared to compromise on the free movement of people in order to keep the UK in the single market. Europe, he claims, is now ‘ looking at its own reform programme’.

This is absolute rubbish, of course. There is no evidence that either the bureaucrats in Brussels or EU leaders have changed their minds about the sacrosanct nature of open borders.

Only last week, the EU chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, said that freedom of movement of people, goods, services and capital — the four core principles of the EU single market — were ‘indivisible’.

During his unproductive negotiations before the Referendum, David Cameron was unable to wrest any substantial concessions enabling us to control our own borders. The EU might possibly stretch a little further in order to reverse the outcome of the Referendum, but it is inconceivable that it would jettison one of the cornerstones of the single market.

So Tony Blair, who has referred only vaguely to conversations he has had with unidentified EU figures, is pretending that something might be on offer which categorically is not.

Intransigent Remoaners such as Blair will never accept how crucial it is for most people that Britain should regain control over its own borders. If his own poll is anything to go by, this wish has grown stronger rather than weaker over recent months, despite all the scare stories over Brexit.

Insulated from the real world, and enjoying life as a member of the pampered super-rich, it is hardly surprising that he should be so out of touch. For once in his life, the Shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell, got it right when he said over the weekend that Blair ‘hadn’t really listened to the nature of the debate going on in the pubs, the clubs and school gates’.

People can see on the television and read in the newspapers that the EU is unable to deal with the stream of refugees, especially those coming from Libya. More than 86,000 have crossed the Mediterranean to Italy this year, a 20 per cent increase on 2016.

According to a recent leaked German government report, up to 6.6 million people are waiting in countries around the Mediterranean to cross into Europe. They are thought to include more than 2.5 million in North Africa alone. The United Nations says that seven in 10 people coming from Libya are economic migrants. In other words, most shouldn’t be described as refugees.

So desperate is the Italian government as a result of this state of affairs that its officials have threatened to use a Brussels directive to allow 200,000 migrants who have entered the country to travel across Europe.

Unacceptable

Meanwhile the Austrian government has just announced it is ready to use soldiers and tanks to stop migrants crossing its border with Italy even though both countries are part of the EU’s border-free Schengen zone, which is supposed to eliminate passport checks at the frontier.

In Brussels, the likes of Michel Barnier cling to the central principle of free movement of people. It is a principle which the British have rejected, and continue to reject. It is also a principle which millions of ordinary Europeans (though not yet the political class in most countries) find increasingly unacceptable.

Surely it is clear as can be that Brussels has no sensible plan to deal with this neverending tide of migrants. The British people realise this is the case, which explains why Blair’s poll found that so many respondents think immigration policy in this country is too open.

And it also explains, I believe, why his attempts to inveigle us into changing our minds will never succeed. He simply does not understand the magnitude of the problem, and has never done so. Indeed, as prime minister he did a great deal to make it worse.

Doom-mongers

A similar charge can be made against most of the doommongers who are prophesying catastrophe and pronouncing that a second referendum is inevitable, or that somehow we will stay part of the EU. Vincent Cable, who is set to be the next Lib Dem leader, said again yesterday that he doubted Britain would ever leave.

Gus O’Donnell, the former Cabinet secretary, threw in his sixpence worth by issuing various dire warnings about what would happen unless the British Government agreed to negotiate the kind of soft Brexit he has in mind, which would inevitably mean that we did not regain control of our own borders.

So it will go on day by day, week by week, month by month, as members of the liberal pro-EU Establishment use every trick they can think of to instil fear and panic in the British people.

What, like Tony Blair, most of them fail to grasp is the paramount importance for the majority of proper immigration controls. This, of course, is not a separate issue from sovereignty. It is the other side of the same coin: control of our own destiny.

This is why I believe that the never- ending succession of scare stories won’t succeed in shifting public opinion, let alone change the mind of the ordinary Britons.

Blair and many in the political elite will never get it, detached and deluded as they are. They don’t see how deeply the idea of taking back control resonates with the majority of their fellow countrymen, and so they can’t and won’t understand that there is no going back on the democratic decision of the British people.