Briefings for Britain, 24 June, Catherine McBride
Watching Alastair Campbell smarting about Brexit on the BBC’s Question Time panel last night made me smile. He can carry on about lying politicians, but if it weren’t for a massive miscalculation by his old boss, I am not sure that Leave would have won the 2016 Referendum. It was Tony Blair’s decision to allow immigrants from the former Soviet bloc countries (A8) which joined the EU in 2004, to move to and work in the UK, that drove many working people to vote to leave the EU.
Most of the other wealthy EU members restricted employment of workers from A8 countries, which was allowed under the EU’s Accessions Treaty of 2003. They probably had a better idea about the disparity of wages between their countries and the new ex-soviet member states. Even EU countries such as Germany, which only allows access to its social security system after five years of employment, limited eastern EU immigration so as not to disrupt their jobs market.
It is strange that a Labour Party Prime Minister didn’t think about what this immigration would do to the incomes of his own supporters. Maybe he thought his programme to increase university education would turn the whole UK population into lawyers and accountants so we would need to import low skilled workers? Maybe his advisors told him that as few people from the wealthy EU countries had moved to the UK, this would also hold true for the new Eastern EU countries. Trying to predict the future based on the past is always difficult, but impossible if the statistical population has changed dramatically. Had Blair’s advisers calculated the after-tax wages in the A8 countries and adjusted for cost of living differences, they might have realised that their estimates of annual net A8 immigration of between 5,000 to 13,000 was out by miles. Between May 2004 and June 2006, 427,000 A8 workers had registered to work in the UK. Almost one million A8 immigrants had arrived by the end of the Blair/Brown government in 2010.
In terms of Blair Government dodgy dossiers, the Report that predicted 5,000-13,000 net annual immigration takes some beating, even by Campbell. But Government ministers believed it. Home Office Minister Beverley Hughes told MPs: “The number coming here for employment will be minimal.”
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