Former UK prime minister Tony Blair has said the “big influx of people” into certain communities as part of mass immigration—kickstarted by former UK prime minister Tony Blair—caused “real strains.”
What a shame he didn’t think about this almost 30 years ago, when—as ‘New Labour’ speechwriter Andrew Neather later let slip—his government was setting out the “driving political purpose” of mass immigration to “make the UK truly multicultural” and “rub the Right’s nose in diversity.”
Blair’s unapologetic comments in a BBC interview this week have expectedly been the subject of much mockery. After the former PM insisted his handling of immigration was not a mistake, journalist Isabel Oakeshott noted that he “is barely ever in the UK, which explains why he still thinks his mass immigration policy was a good one. He should spend a few days in our ruined town centres.”
Robert Bates, who is research director at the Centre for Migration Control think tank, added that Blair “refuses to apologise for the cultural and economic vandalism he wrought upon our country because this devastation was likely his intent, pursued in the name of ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘diversity,’ the two horns of the mass migration experiment.”
Bates told The European Conservative:
Were this man to have never entered Number 10, I doubt the problem would be as acute as it currently is. He was the dealer who first introduced our political class to mass migration. Scrapping the Primary Purpose Rule and placing no limits on the number of Eastern Europeans coming in 2004 both changed Britain irreparably with the stroke of a pen.
Blair told viewers, “the truth is, we did need a lot of people for the British economy coming in from Europe,” and that once strains had begun appearing in communities, “if I’d still been in power, I would have been all over it.” That is, of course, easy to say now.
“There were,” he said, “lots of things we could have done to narrow down freedom of movement within the existing European rules”—that is, without leaving the European Union. Though Blair has also just come out in favour of a youth mobility scheme with Brussels—an effective reversion to open borders—which should bring his comments into question.
Perhaps most surprisingly, the former PM pointed to the “very clear question around the issue of Muslim identity and the distinction between Islam and Islamism” which “reverberates all around the world,” and described the intimidation of MPs by pro-Palestine activists as “ugly.”
But how come, asked commentator Alex Armstrong, is it considered “racist if Nigel Farage” raises such questions about Muslim immigration, “but not Tony Blair?”
