Tony Blair’s Labour authorities pressed forward with unrestricted migration from japanese Europe regardless of mounting issues amongst his allies, state information say

Tony Blair‘s Labour government pressed ahead with unrestricted migration from eastern Europe despite mounting concerns among senior ministers, according to newly-released official files.

Papers released to the National Archives in Kew, west London, show deputy prime minister John Prescott and foreign secretary Jack Straw both urged delay, warning of a surge in immigration unless some controls were put in place.

But others – including home secretary David Blunkett – argued that the economy needed the ‘flexibility and productivity of migrant labour’ if it was to continue to prosper.

The files from their discussions leading up to the EU’s enlargement in May 2004 suggest the government knew its immigration claims were ludicrously low.

Ministers had insisted between 5,000 and 13,000 migrants would come each year when former Soviet bloc countries such as Poland joined the EU on May 1 that year. 

In the end, more than a million people from eight new member countries made the UK their home.

Whitehall papers from the time reveal growing unease behind the scenes in Downing Street as the numbers soared.

As the numbers arriving began far outstripping previous estimates, one official said they faced an ‘elephant trap’ and advised ministers to ‘err on the side of publishing less rather than more’ when it came to releasing official data.

Tony Blair with then foreign minister Jack Straw. National Archives papers show Mr Straw was among ministers urging Blair to delay allowing migration from eastern Europe

Then deputy prime minister John Prescott (pictured) said he was ‘extremely concerned’ about the pressures on social housing from a sudden influx of migrants

Mr Straw later admitted that the failure to put in place any transitional controls – as nearly all other EU nations had done – had been a ‘spectacular mistake’ which had far-reaching consequences.

It was widely seen as having contributed to a major increase in immigration in the years that followed – with net migration rising to more than 200,000 a year – with cheap labour from Poland and other new member states blamed for undercutting local workers.

With successive governments struggling to get the numbers back under control, it helped fuel the anti-EU sentiment which ultimately led to the 2016 Brexit vote.

By November 2004, instead of the 6,000 or so immigrants they claimed would come, some 91,000 from the new EU countries had registered to work here. A Downing Street memo noted this ‘far exceeds the Home Office prediction of 13,000 [a year]’, and advises ministers to answer uncomfortable questions by saying: ‘This was never an ‘official’ Home Office estimate’.

Britain was the only major EU economy to give the new citizens free access to its labour markets – along with Ireland and Sweden – while others such as Germany and France opted to keep them out.

It had been expected that other member states would follow Britain’s bold decision.

However, with less than three months to go, Mr Straw wrote to Mr Blair calling for a rethink, warning that the situation had changed dramatically in the intervening period.

‘If we do not think this through now, I believe we could be faced with a very difficult situation in early May, and could then be forced to take urgent action to suspend the concessions,’ he warned.

He was backed by Mr Prescott who said he was ‘extremely concerned’ about the pressures on social housing from a sudden influx of new migrants.

Blair’s Home Secretary David Blunkett urged him to stick to the plan

However Mr Blunkett, backed by work and pensions secretary Andrew Smith and the Treasury, insisted they should stick with the plan.

Mr Blair, it appeared, was beginning to have his own doubts, questioning whether tougher benefit rules would be enough. ‘Are we sure this does the trick? I don’t want to have to return to it,’ he said in a handwritten note.

A warning of a possible influx of Roma people from Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia seeking to claim UK benefits only added to his concerns about the need to send out a deterrent message.

‘We must do the toughest package on benefits possible & announce this plus power to revoke visa plan and message to Romas,’ he scrawled in a handwritten aside.

Other papers suggest the government knew full well that its 5,000 to 13,000 estimate was unrealistically lower than the true likely numbers. Mr Blair’s private secretary Kate Gross wrote a memo in April 2004, two weeks before the new countries joined the EU, letting the cat out of the bag. 

Referring to job vacancies for low-skilled professions such as farm workers, she told the PM ‘we expect demand [for these roles] to be met by EU free movement of workers’. 

At the time, the number of such vacancies in the UK was approximately 300,000 – vastly higher than the 13,000 a year which ministers were telling the public would come.

By the end of 2004, just over half the new arrivals were from Poland, with the next biggest contingent from Lithuania, then Slovakia.

In an echo of recent Conservative prime ministers who tried to bring in schemes such as Rwanda – opposed by Labour – the papers show that Mr Blair told his Cabinet on February 17, 2003, that a ‘policy of deterrence’ was the ‘only’ way to ‘tackle the problem’ of rising asylum numbers. 

He is recorded as having said that while ‘this could lead to accusations of rough justice…that was inevitable if the asylum system was to be restored to manageable levels’.

Shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick said: ‘Tony Blair is the original architect of mass migration.

‘He started it and forced it though despite fierce opposition from the public and within his own cabinet.

‘Thirty years later, many of our cities are unrecognisable. We are poorer and more divided for Blair’s disastrous experiment.’