Matthew Taylor

Sunday shows round-up: Blair says Britain can limit immigration without leaving the EU

Tony Blair – Britain can limit immigration without leaving the EU

Former Prime Minister Tony Blair has been trying to find a way to reduce immigration to the UK without leaving the European Union. The Institute for Global Change, the organisation that Blair set up earlier this year, has published a report on this very topic. Outlining his proposals to Andrew Marr, Blair also called on sympathetic MPs to unite against Brexit in order to prevent ‘economic and political damage’:

AM: A lot of people already this morning have said ‘It’s a little bit rich coming from you given how you opened the doors back in the 2000s to mass immigration and changed lots of communities.

TB: We shouldn’t exaggerate this… In 2004, we could have imposed transitional arrangements on those accession countries, the 8 countries… But the real point is, the situation back then was different… 2017, post financial crisis, post austerity – no you’ve got to listen to what people are saying and react to it.

AM: But we did have hundreds of thousands of people coming in to this country after that decision quite quickly. And lots of communities up and down the country… were changed very very fast, and people didn’t understand that… Do you accept that among all the reasons for the Brexit vote, that was part of it?

TB: I accept that EU migration including from those accession countries was obviously a factor. I do think it probably isn’t the biggest concern on immigration. But here’s what I’m saying now… the circumstances are completely different and we’ve had the Brexit vote. If, for example, the anxiety is downward pressure on wages as a result of an influx of EU migrants… we have it within our power to deal with that by domestic legislation.. There is a directive being supported by the French President which would specifically bar the undercutting of wages and local bargaining from EU migration so if we want to deal with those questions, we can deal with them without the sledgehammer that through Brexit destroys the migration that we actually need… and it doesn’t deal with the other parts of the migration issue, which I think are the greater concern.

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