Ex British Prime minister Mr Blair has resolved his little difficulty trying to launch a new 'political centre' from what he hoped would be the burning embers of a left wing Labour Party. The 2017 June General Election result was not only a surprise to Blair, it destroyed his immediate plans to rebuild a centre (as he calls it) to the polarised politics represented by a Corbyn led Labour Party on the one hand and the extreme Tory Brexiteers on the other. But Blair has recuperated. He now wishes to to use the Brexit arguments to force a longer term re-composition of British politics. He is aware that Prime Minister Teresa May is hunted and haunted, becoming more and more a puppet of the Tory right and, at the same time, he is determined to crush the political momentum behind the Corbyn Manifesto as it assumes the status of the alternative answer to Tory drift and failure. It is the gathering collapse of Tory Brexit and the response to it that Blair now sees as the turning point of British politics.
So what does he do?
Like all underwhelming strategists he tries first to steal his enemies main argument. Blair is not an ideological racist. To be frank he could not care less about immigration from EU countries except in terms of the impact that it makes on the political life of 'his' nation and his status within it. His recent discovery, that unskilled, low paid labour that flooded into the UK under his government, is no longer just a great boon to the small and medium businesses that paid no premium for training, holidays, sickness, pregnancy or pensions, has turned his previous policy into its opposite. The new immigrants were used by UKIP and various Tory leaders as the reason for over-stretched services and the virtually universal 'pitiful pay levels and no workers' rights. So Blair, who does not focus on a decade of impoverishment and austerity, but on the immigrants, casually flicks his own racist card on the table.
'That was then' he commented to Andrew Marr, a BBC reporter who asked him why he had allowed wide-scale immigration during his period in office; 'and this is now.'
Blair never supported the 'free movement' of labour in the EU as such. His choice was a political one, made to widen Labour's 'big tent' in the direction of Britain's novel and expanding entrepreneurs in the early 2000s. He waves the anti-immigrant flag today because he wants his tent to cover ex UKIP voters while maintaining the free movement of Capital in the EU, plus the UK, summed up by the EU's 'free' market. And this is what he means by building the centre in UK politics. This, in the greatest crisis of the Tory Party since Edward Heath, is his alternative to the Corbyn Manifesto.
Unfortunately for Blair, and despite Tory despair over both PM May and the set of half-baked assassins around her, most Labour supporters and a large part of society in general would rather have warts than witness the return of Blair. The collision now shaping up about living standards, led by organised labour on the one hand and a weakened fractious government on the other, does not primarily turn on Brexit and least of all on Blair's formula for the UK and the EU. The battle emerging has, paradoxically, much more to do with the gathering storm in France against Macron's 'reforms' than any particular British singularity. It is a true European initiative, which really represents the freedom of labour. The freedom, exercised in practise, to resist the domination of Capital and overthrow austerity.
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