Tony Blair has triggered a furious reaction online for making an unusual comparison between immigration from Europe and the rest of the world.
The ex-prime minister, who is famously pro-EU, slammed the impact Brexit has had on the UK in an interview with BBC presenter Amol Rajan.
Blair said: “The number of people coming in rose somewhat during my time in office, but the economy was booming.
“A lot of those people were Europeans, single people that came and worked in our hospitality sector. Was that wrong?
“It actually helped our economy. Of course what you need to do is to provide control and order on immigration, this is why we reduced for example, the number of asylum seekers dramatically, but I can deal with the problems arising out of immigration.
“What is completely dishonest for me to do, if I were leader today, is to say, ‘I can stop your job – for which there is now a technology solution, I can stop your job from being lost’, because I can’t. ‘I can stop all migration into this country,’ because I can’t.
“There’s no way that’s going to happen, there’s no modern developed country in which that is happening.
“If you do end up trying to do this, as we’ve done with Brexit, what’s the result?
“We’ve now got higher levels of immigration than ever before, and we’ve swapped out usually single people coming from Europe for families from Asia and Africa.
“How has this helped us?”
Net migration soared in 2023 to 685,000 due to an increase in non-EU citizens arriving on British shores, according to the University of Oxford’s Migration Observatory.
EU citizens made up most of immigrants in the run-up to the 2016 EU referendum – but, since 2017, it’s been in the negative. In 2023, it fell to -76,000.
Blair also said there is no “simple solution” to protect Brits from the way the world is changing.
When Blair’s comments about swapping “single people coming from Europe for families from Asia and Africa” were shared online, almost two million users on X viewed the clip – and many were infuriated by his remarks.
Does he realise how many people voted for Brexit precisely because of this, what is essentially racism? It’s saying white immigration = good / brown immigration = bad. https://t.co/BBH9RFVt3Z
— Elizabeth (@elizabeth__db) September 4, 2024
However, some accounts interpreted his remarks differently, suggesting Blair said we could only choose where mass migration came from – not how many migrants came.
The underlying premise of everything he says here is that we can’t choose not to have mass migration, we can only choose (well not really haha but he’s going to pretend) where it comes from https://t.co/sR8Z1w4GfM
— Mary Harrington (@moveincircles) September 4, 2024
And others pointed out there was plenty of non-EU immigration during Blair’s time in office.
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