Blair was right to let in the Polish plumbers

by Denis MacShane| @denismacshane| @DenisMacShane


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There has been a nostalgic trip down the byways of the process that led to Brexit with the publication of Cabinet papers of 25 years ago. John Prescott and Jack Straw urged Tony Blair to impose a 7 year pause on freedom of movement after 2004, when Poland and other new member states joined Britain as full EU members. The Prime Minister disagreed and held his ground.

​I was Europe Minister at the time. There were indeed differences in Cabinet. Some of my fellow ministers were worried that the hate campaign in some of the press against the Poles, Romanians, Portuguese and others (who were working in Britain’s deregulated and unsupervised labour market) would produce a voters’ backlash.

​The Federation of Poles of Great Britain published a dossier of 100 hate headlines in the Daily Mail alone – “Polish killer”, “Rapist Pole”, “Polish swindler”. Long forgotten were the Polish Spitfire pilots, the heroes of Normandy, Monte Cassino and Arnhem. Instead, the paper drew a picture of unwanted and unwelcome Poles, just as it had for German-Jewish refugees in the 1930s.


​The argument was made, and has now resurfaced with the publication of Cabinet correspondence, indicating that Britain was alone in being willing to let Poles and other new EU citizens start work straight away.

​Nothing could be further from the truth. Germany in theory applied the 7 year transition period, but had been cute enough to adopt a new immigration law (Einwanderunggesetz) which permitted any German employers to hire workers from the new EU states if it was judged essential for the firm’s competitiveness and profits.

​France had always depended on immigrant workers for its heavy industries, agriculture and construction sectors. It hired new EU member state citizens as before.

​Many countries had agreements between Works Councils and management to agree on new hires which allowed hiring specialist workers as required. Unlike Britain, which had seen the run-down of apprenticeships under Tory governments after 1980, Continental economies insisted on employer-financed apprentice schemes to train future workers. In consequence they did not need to import skilled workers on the scale of the UK, which had shortages due to disinvesting in workplace training.

​Britain, especially in the construction and IT sectors, depended heavily on foreign arrivals. When I was an MP 25 years ago, nearly everyone working in the many restaurants and bars in Parliament were from abroad. The Commons couldn’t function without its bars, cafeterias and they rarely hired Brits for the very unsocial hours when MPs need refuelling.

​There was a political point as well. Blair and his government wanted to reinsert the UK as a leading player and decision taker in Europe. Margaret Thatcher had been an EU dominatrice – in the political sense of the word. She was also the Passionara for the Single Market, based on the abolition of national rules and regulations to create a giant single economic free trade area like the United States.

​No-one was keener to see the European Court of Justice overrule national laws if they were used to limit free trade and the abolition of frontiers. Tony Blair picked up that torch from Mrs Thatcher. But Labour was still full of the arguments against the “Common Market” from Labour’s 1960s and 1970s veterans. These included Tony Benn, Jack Straw, Robin Cook, Margaret Beckett, John Prescott, Peter Shore and a majority of Labour MPs who had been brought up to believe being in Europe was bad for Britain.

​A new generation under Blair, John Smith, Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson, as well ex-MEPs who knew how the EU worked to Britain’s advantage, like Joyce Quinn or Geoff Hoon, persuaded Labour to drop its primitive Europhobia which still lingers even today.

​Blair was positioning himself against Paris and Berlin as leader of a new EU grouping including Spain and Portugal, Poland, Hungary and the Nordic states, who wanted a Europe-wide labour market. He also wanted to see Europe drop the primitive anti-Americanism, which often seemed to infect French positions on EU policy.

​For Blair to follow the advice of Labour veterans of anti-European posturing in the 1970s and 1980s was unlikely. I represented the Foreign Office on a Cabinet Committee with David Blunkett and was surprised at how positive a man from his Sheffield industrial working-class background was on the need for a free trade Europe. For Blunkett, this meant freedom to hire the best workers irrespective of passports.

​Every study showed that the new EU workers made a substantial net contribution in terms of value added or tax paid to the UK. But the rolling waves of media (and, let us be honest, often xenophobic) hostility to Europeans working in the UK from UKIP, the BNP and both Tory and Labour MPs was undoubtedly a major factor in the Brexit vote.

​The 7 year limit on fully opening Britain’s labour markets ended long before the Brexit vote. In other EU member states the far Right has risen independently of Europe’s flexible, partly open labour market. Had Prescott and Straw succeeded in their wish to delay for the full seven years before a complete opening of the UK labour applied, it would have made no difference to the Brexit vote in 2016. Britain’s economy grew rapidly during the Blair era, in part thanks to the early opening of the labour market to workers from Poland and the other new EU member states. It was the right decision then, just as closing those markets with Brexit was the wrong one.

Denis MacShane was Labour MP for Rotherham for 18 years and Minister for Europe under Tony Blair.