At least two of the most powerful ministers in Tony Blair’s government defended a delay in the implementation of the principle of freedom of movement of EU citizens, enshrined in the Maastricht Treaty of 1992, which was regulated and developed in a directive. community of 2004. In May of that year, 10 Eastern European countries joined the EU, and many of their inhabitants emigrated to European countries with greater job opportunities.
British law obliges the Government to send documents held confidential until then to the National Archives every 20 years. Thus, with few exceptions, a lot of information comes to light every end of the year. This Tuesday it was possible to learn about the interior details of the years of Blair’s government (from 1997 to 2007), and thus better understand the germ of the turbulent decade of Brexit.
The New Labor Government opened its doors to the newly incorporated community members, despite the recommendations of Jack Straw, the then Foreign Secretary, and John Prescott, Deputy Prime Minister. Both asked Blair to reconsider holding out for a few months before authorizing the entry of new immigrants. The EU directive allowed its then 15 partners to impose restrictions, in the form of quotas or work permit requirements, for seven years after the new community members joined. Countries like France or Germany took advantage of this possibility of limiting freedom of movement.
“If we do not think about this now,” Straw wrote to the prime minister, “the Government may end up being forced to suspend the right to work later.” [en el Reino Unido] of the new community citizens, in the least favorable circumstances (…). We may end up facing a difficult situation if this goes wrong,” the minister warned.
The British Home Office then estimated that the number of new immigrants would not exceed 13,000 annually. In 2005, a year after the decision, the number of arrivals exceeded 96,000.
If the ministers opposed to the opening argued that a massive increase in immigration would put greater pressure on health, education or public services in the United Kingdom, another sector of the Labor Government, such as that headed by the then Home Secretary, David Blunkett , defended the need to incorporate “the flexibility and productivity of immigrant labor” into the British economy, so that it continued to grow.
Many analysts see in that moment the germ of the anti-immigration reaction that gave wings to populist politicians like Nigel Farage, and ended up promoting the Brexit referendum and the departure of the United Kingdom from the EU. In 2014, two years before the consultation, the annual number of EU citizens entering British territory was 142,000.
“If we had imposed the restrictions, seen from a distance, perhaps things would have changed, as far as the 2016 referendum is concerned. “I don’t know if it would have served to change the result, that’s impossible to say,” Straw told the newspaper. Financial Times.
Blair, Bush and the Iraq War
The published documents also show the stormy relationship forged between Washington and London around the so-called War on Terror that the US government of Republican George W. Bush unleashed after the 9/11 attacks in 2001, with military invasions in Afghanistan and Iraq.
In the course of a confidential conversation between the then US Deputy Secretary of State, Richard Armitage, and the United Kingdom ambassador in Washington at that time, David Manning, the former confesses that President Bush had to be injected with certain “doses of realism.” ” after he demanded that American troops “kick some ass” to the insurgents, in what became known as the Battle of Fallujah. The death of four American military contractors, whose bodies ended up dismembered and publicly hung, triggered bloody clashes in that city, one year after the overthrow and death of Saddam Hussein.
In that conversation, Armitage conveys to his interlocutor the request that Blair, who was scheduled to visit Washington on April 16, help convince the American president of the need to address the Fallujah issue “as part of a carefully calibrated political process.”
Tony Blair’s then foreign policy advisor, Nigel Sheinwald, sent the prime minister an internal document, which has now been made public, in which he describes Washington’s “sloppy way of handling” the situation in Fallujah, with “ “disproportionate military tactics and apocalyptic treatment by the media.”
In another of the documents that circulated on those dates through the offices of number 10 Downing Street, it was recommended that “public support be maintained.” [del Gobierno británico] to military objectives, but that some ‘difficult messages’ were privately transmitted to Bush calling for a more measured and moderate strategy on the part of the US military, with the corresponding political supervision.”
