Has Blair’s rebate cut cost the UK more than the £1.7bn payment would?
Anna Sonny, 31 October 2014
Following the by-election in Heywood and Middleton earlier this month, in which Labour only just scraped a win with 36.2% of the vote, former Prime Minister Tony Blair is back with some more advice for Ed Miliband on how to deal with the Ukip threat.
Ukip – as we should probably now come to expect – did better than expected, and came within 617 votes of winning the safe seat. So not only are Ukip doing well, they are influencing the policy of other parties without having even developed their own properly yet (outside of the EU at least).
In response to Labour’s attempts to harden its line on immigration after Ukip’s, Blair insisted that Labour should not “end up chasing after the policies of a party like Ukip, who you don’t agree with, whose policies would take this country backwards economically, politically, in every conceivable way, and who, ultimately, at the heart of what they do, have a rather nasty core of prejudice that none of us believe in, which you’ve actually got to take on and fight.”
On the immigration issue Blair may sound reasonable, but on the economic argument, figures from the FT shows that his decision in 2005 to cut the British rebate by 7 per cent has added more fuel to Ukip’s fire.
The FT reports that although much fuss has been made over the £1.7bn payment demanded by the EU, this will actually amount to £150mn over a 12 year period, which is much less than the extra net contribution of £4bn that Britain is making to the EU every year, partly as a result of Blair’s compromise on the rebate, which he agreed on the condition that the Common Agricultural Policy would be reformed.
The rebate has fallen from £5.4bn in 2009 to £3.3bn in 2013 while total payments from the UK have gone from £14.1bn to £17.2bn over the same period.
Margaret Thatcher famously won the rebate for Britain back in 1984 but years later, Blair gave some of it back. And although Cameron achieved the first ever cut in the EU budget last year and managed to protect what was left of the British rebate, the EU is demanding more in British contributions. It seems that whenever Britain tries to plug a hole in its outpouring of contributions to the EU, it always manages to leak out somewhere else.
Blair’s arguments on immigration would only sound reasonable to someone who actively favoured mass immigration. We know precisely what Blair’s position on immigration is, namely, allow as many in as possible to change the nature of Britain. The evidence for this is the millions of immigrants he allowed in and the words of a No 10 insider during the Blair years Andrew Neather:
“I [Neather] wrote the landmark speech given by then immigration minister Barbara Roche in September 2000, calling for a loosening of controls. It marked a major shift from the policy of previous governments: from 1971 onwards, only foreigners joining relatives already in the UK had been permitted to settle here.
That speech was based largely on a report by the Performance and Innovation Unit, Tony Blair’s Cabinet Office think-tank.
The PIU’s reports were legendarily tedious within Whitehall but their big immigration report was surrounded by an unusual air of both anticipation and secrecy.
Drafts were handed out in summer 2000 only with extreme reluctance: there was a paranoia about it reaching the media.
Eventually published in January 2001, the innocuously labelled “RDS Occasional Paper no. 67”, “Migration: an economic and social analysis” focused heavily on the labour market case.
But the earlier drafts I saw also included a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural.
I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended – even if this wasn’t its main purpose – to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date. That seemed to me to be a manoeuvre too far.
Ministers were very nervous about the whole thing. For despite Roche’s keenness to make her big speech and to be upfront, there was a reluctance elsewhere in government to discuss what increased immigration would mean, above all for Labour’s core white working-class vote.
This shone through even in the published report: the “social outcomes” it talks about are solely those for immigrants.
And this first-term immigration policy got no mention among the platitudes on the subject in Labour’s 1997 manifesto, headed Faster, Firmer, Fairer.
The results were dramatic. In 1995, 55,000 foreigners were granted the right to settle in the UK. By 2005 that had risen to 179,000; last year, with immigration falling thanks to the recession, it was 148,000.
In addition, hundreds of thousands of migrants have come from the new EU member states since 2004, most requiring neither visas nor permission to work or settle. The UK welcomed an estimated net 1.5 million immigrants in the decade to 2008.”
http://www.standard.co.uk/news/dont-listen-to-the-whingers–london-needs-immigrants-6786170.html
As for the giving up of part of the EU the rebate in 2005, this is my all time favourite example of Blair’s psychopathic ability to lie and then show no embarrassment let alone shame when the lie is discovered.
In this instance two days before Blair went to Brussels to give away part of the rebate he was asked during PMQs whether he would give way to demands from other EU members to relinquish part of the rebate./ Blair replied that “The UK rebate will remain and we will not negotiate it away. Period.” http://www.theguardian.com/news/observerblog/2005/jun/06/week
A couple of days later he gave away part of the rebate. Incredibly, the Tories did not make an issue of him lying to the Commons.
Those interested in Blair’s personality traits may find this of interest
http://livinginamadhouse.wordpress.com/2010/09/01/22/