Fury at Tony Blair for insisting he was right to open UK borders to migrants
TONY BLAIR was blasted yesterday for insisting he was right to let hundreds of thousands of Eastern European migrants move to Britain.
The former Prime Minister was accused of creating a “dispossessed, impoverished underclass” in the UK after he opened the door to mass immigration 11 years ago.
But Mr Blair said it was not a mistake to open Britain’s borders to eight former Communist countries.
Mr Blair was responding to Labour leader Ed Miliband, who said he had “got it wrong” when he let people from Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic work in Britain without restrictions, while most EU countries had imposed controls to slow the rate of migration.
The decision led to around 170,000 Eastern Europeans a year moving to the UK.
Mr Blair said: “I don’t agree it was a mistake.
"All we did was bring forward what would have happened anyway.
All we did was bring forward what would have happened anyway
"In 2004 the economy was booming and we had a requirement for skilled workers from abroad.
“Supposing you put all those people from Eastern Europe back out of Britain again, would we be a stronger, better country?
"The answer is no.”
Mr Blair claimed the only way to defeat Ukip and other anti-immigration parties was to expose their plans.
He made the remarks in an interview with Trevor Phillips, former head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, for a Channel 4 documentary to be shown on Thursday.
Ukip’s Migration spokesman Steven Woolfe said last night: “By allowing these UK members of the labour force to be substituted by immigrant labour and paying its members benefits instead of helping them to become productive members of our society, Labour and Tony Blair doomed whole sections of our communities to lives with little or no hope.”
The row comes amid reports Mr Blair is to step down from his role as a Middle East peace envoy mediating in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
He has reportedy met US Secretary of State John Kerry and the EU’s foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini to discuss a possible job change.
