Hallelujah! Blair and Clegg have seen the light on migration (shame it’s years too late)

immigration under Tony Blair contributed to the Brexit result.’

Alp Mehmet, from campaign group MigrationWatch, said: ‘Of course immigration was encouraged under Labour. The facts speak for themselves. There was net migration of 2.2million between 1997 and 2010.’

Mr Blair also said Britain should plan to delay quitting the eU next March. he compared leaving without a deal to ‘holding a negotiation on the top floor of a high-rise building and threatening to jump out of the window if our demands are not met’.

THE Bible tells us there is more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over 99 righteous people who have no need to repent.

So perhaps we should rejoice that Tony Blair and Nick Clegg, who in the past resisted all checks on EU immigration into this country, have finally come around to the idea that there should be some.

As deputy prime minister and leader of the Lib Dems in 2014, Clegg said the following: ‘I want to be unequivocal — freedom of movement between EU member states is a good thing. It’s a cornerstone of European integration.’

Yet the same Nick Clegg performed a U-turn this month, without telling us that was what he was doing. He wrote in the Financial Times: ‘The belief that freedom of movement is an untouchable principle cannot go unchallenged.’

Motives

Even for a man accustomed to jettisoning apparently deeply held beliefs (remember how he abandoned his opposition to university tuition fees overnight so that he could go into coalition with the Tories?), this was an astounding volte-face.

I would like to rejoice. But I’m afraid I can’t help being a little cynical about his motives. Clegg is saying what most people believe in a desperate, last-minute attempt to keep us in the EU.

He has convinced himself that if Brussels could only offer us a few concessions on free movement (having failed to do so in talks before the June 2016 referendum), the British people might choose to stay in the EU after all.

The trouble is, he is several years too late. Why didn’t he and his party campaign against unrestricted EU immigration when it was such a contentious issue — and the Mail was demonised by the Left for even raising the subject?

Tony Blair is another man who has transformed his views — and for similar, selfinterested reasons. The former prime minister, who encouraged by far the greatest surge in immigration in British history, now calls on the EU to reform its immigration rules to deal with people’s fears.

He argued as much in a speech in Brussels in March and he was at it again on Radio 4’s Today programme yesterday, before the European Summit today and tomorrow, which will be dominated by immigration.

And what a re-fashioned Blair was on show! He spoke of people’s ‘genuine anxieties’ and of the need to deal with their ‘ legitimate concerns’. Immigration could be ‘ of enormous benefit’, but there had to be ‘rules and order’.

All this is pretty much what this paper has been arguing for the past 20 years. It argued it when Blair opened the doors to uncontrolled immigration from the EU in the crassest possible way.

Needless to say, yesterday he denied he had done any such thing, saying it was ‘a huge myth’ that his administration had fostered mass immigration. Why, he had advocated identity cards for the express purpose of regulating immigration.

The facts are these. When Poland and seven other East European nations joined the EU in 2004, the Blair Government declined to impose any restrictions on immigrants from those countries working here. By contrast, Germany and France prohibited them from taking jobs for seven years, as they were able to do under EU law.

Almost unbelievably — and in his characteristically selfdelusional mood, Blair didn’t mention this yesterday — the Home Office forecast an annual influx of between 5,000 and 13,000 immigrants from Poland and the other countries.

It was a wild prediction. Within two years, 264,560 had arrived, and they kept on coming in huge numbers until, soon, there were a million. I don’t deny most of them were pleasant, efficient and hard-working, but the sheer speed of the inflow inevitably put pressure on public services and the cohesion of some communities. The truth is that the Tony Blair who today supports tighter controls — and even speaks approvingly of proposals put forward by the hardline anti- immigration Italian government — was relaxed about the free-for-all while in office.

Between 2001 and 2011, the foreign- born population of Britain rose by more than three million. It is true that slightly more than half of them came from outside the EU. It is completely untrue, as Blair pretended yesterday, that the Labour government put ‘huge controls on immigration from non-EU countries’.

No, he is shamelessly re- writing history, which is what he likes to do, whether it is over his highly dubious role before the Iraq War or his equally illusory recollection of what happened to immigration when he was in power.

Now, of course, he claims to see the light, though, like Clegg, his 11th-hour conversion is driven by a surely fantastical belief that, if the EU adopts stricter immigration policies, the British people will change their minds and demand to stay in Europe.

If only the two of them, as well as other prominent figures on the centre-Left, had engaged in a mature and reasoned debate about immigration a decade and more ago.

Uncontrolled

It’s not too much to say that had Tony Blair then adopted the views which he claims to hold now, what he calls the ‘tragedy’ of Brexit could have been avoided.

Brexit gathered force as a cause largely because many people felt their fears about uncontrolled mass immigration were being ignored by the political class and especially by Labour.

What an illuminating moment it was when, during the 2010 election, Gordon Brown was berated by former Labour supporter Gillian Duffy over the huge numbers involved in East European immigration. The then-prime minister was overheard describing this palpably decent woman as a ‘bigot’.

The gulf between the governed and Government scarcely narrowed under David Cameron’s prime ministership. Before Romanians and Bulgarians were allowed to come and work in the UK from the beginning of 2014, he slyly refused to release official forecasts about likely numbers.

This did not prevent our state broadcaster, the BBC, from repeatedly suggesting the influx would be small and sneering at those who suggested otherwise.

Repentance

In May 2014, its then-political editor, Nick Robinson, scoffed: ‘So much for those predictions of a flood of immigrants coming from Romania and Bulgaria once the door to the UK was opened.’

Well, there has been something like a flood. By the end of last year, more than a quarter of a million more migrants from those two countries had settled here in less than three years.

The good thing is that, however disingenuously, centre-Left politicians such as Clegg are openly arguing for tighter immigration controls, while it is no longer deemed racist by the BBC at least to discuss the issue.

But how late in the day this is! What a collapse in public trust in politicians there has been — even more so in much of Europe, where hard-Right parties are on the rampage, than in the UK.

It’s not too much to say that the summit today and tomorrow is largely about repairing the damage done by politicians, most spectacularly Germany’s Angela Merkel, who, three years ago, highhandedly encouraged a million migrants to settle in Germany in a matter of months. She may be toppled because of her presumption.

Yes, let there be joy where there is true repentance. How much better it would have been if our rulers had acted earlier. And what momentous consequences have flowed, and will continue to flow, from their arrogant and myopic decisions.