LEO MCKINSTRY: In 1997, the Mail warned about the danger Tony Blair posed to Britain. Now, he's flexing his muscles over the EU - and proving nothing's changed

On the eve of the 1997 landslide that brought New Labour to power, this newspaper published a remarkably prescient editorial.

It warned that Tony Blair’s ‘ruthless’ outlook, his headlong pursuit of devolution and European integration, ‘could destroy the United Kingdom’.

In sober but vivid language, the editorial concluded: ‘There is a terrible danger that the British people, drugged by the seductive mantra that “it’s time for a change”, are stumbling, eyes glazed, into an election that could undo 1,000 years of our nation’s history.’

How accurate those words turned out to be. Perhaps the greatest fallacy in recent political history is the claim that Blair, that deeply strange individual, was some kind of ‘moderate’ who merely shifted his party back to the centre-ground after the Loony Left excesses of Labour town halls and the impotent socialist posturing of Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock.

In truth, Blair was far more radical than the worst municipal ideologues and militants of the 1980s. A revolutionary to his core, he signalled his desire to break with the past by extolling a vision of Britain as ‘a young country’.

We are of course no such thing. Britain, including its great constituent nations, is an ancient land with a formidable history. Yet Blair saw that – and wanted to shape it into something new.

Tory party campaign poster from 1996 in the build-up to the following year's general election

Despite the years passing, Tony Blair still likes to show his political muscle on the world stage

In this ambition, he has never stopped. On the eve of Labour’s recent party conference in Liverpool, the ex-PM was busy publicly urging his latest successor Andy Burnham to overturn Brexit and put rejoining the EU at the heart of the party’s plans. This, said the ex-PM, should be set out with clarity and pursued with resolution. ‘There is no point in inching towards Europe as we feel what British public opinion might accommodate,’ he declared in a report for his modestly named think-tank, the Tony Blair Institute For Global Change.

Sure enough, Burnham used the conference to reopen for the first time since 2016 the debate around overturning Brexit, refusing to rule out a commitment to rejoining in the next manifesto.

It is almost two decades since Blair officially held office but the 73-year-old has lost none of his messianic self-belief, his fondness for power or his love of money.

As the Daily Mail’s Richard Eden reports today, Blair’s ‘institute’ turned over an astonishing £137million last year. Needless to say, despite his near-incalculable riches, you and I are still paying for the security and perks afforded to him as to everyone else on the growing roster of ex-PMs.

Nor has his europhilia slackened since his days in Downing Street, when he dreamt of a continental federal superstate and of dragging unwilling Britons into the single currency (only to be thwarted by his chancellor, Gordon Brown).

This mix of zeal and towering ambition not only made Blair a formidable politician: they made him a dangerous one. His globalist eagerness to end for good Britain’s ancient independence was matched by his mission to reshape the constitution of the United Kingdom, to create a new social order and transform the demographic fabric of our country.

His impatience for revolution shone through his 1999 speech to the Labour conference in Bournemouth, where he described his refashioned party as ‘the new progressive force in British politics which can modernise the nation and sweep away those forces of conservatism’.

Just a year after he became Labour leader, he said: ‘I did not come into politics to change my party. I came into politics to change my country.’

He certainly did that. During his ten years in office from 1997, Blair left a trail of destruction across the public realm. Thanks to his ill-conceived policy on devolution, nationalist movements have never been stronger in Wales and Scotland, and the bonds that hold together our kingdom have never been weaker.

Yet the advance of Plaid Cymru in Cardiff and the SNP’s stranglehold on power in Edinburgh has worsened the quality of governance in both nations. Over the last fortnight, for example, official reports have highlighted the disastrous impact of the SNP’s policies on education, a sector in which standards have plummeted, and illegal narcotics, where its soft-touch approach has turned Scotland into the drugs death capital of Europe.

In another flawed experiment, this ex-barrister overturned centuries of tradition by downgrading the role of Lord Chancellor, abolishing the Lords of Appeal, and establishing an American-style Supreme Court, which has turned out to be an engine of judicial activism, thereby undermining the democratic authority of Parliament. Blair claimed that he was instituting a programme of constitutional reform but to his many critics he was engaged in constitutional vandalism.

A further, even more damaging element of his plan was his decision to incorporate the European Convention on Human Rights into British law. This was achieved via the 1998 Human Rights Act, which was hailed by supporters as a humanitarian triumph.

It was nothing of the sort. In practice, it took a wrecking ball to the foundations of our legal system. The big winners were Left-wing human rights lawyers like his wife Cherie, as well as criminals, illegal migrants and social justice warriors, who found new protections and scope for litigation.

The big loser was the British public, which saw morality turned on its head. In the twisted world of the Human Rights Act, brave, professional soldiers found themselves in the dock for doing their duty for their country, while judges barred the deportation of foreign offenders.

The former prime minister's New Labour swept to power in the late 1990s bringing big changes

Blair has always displayed globalist eagerness to end Britain's ancient and loved independence

When the act was passed in 1998, then Home Secretary Jack Straw described the measure – proudly and without irony – as ‘the single most important change in the relationship between the citizen and the state this century’. But by 2024 Straw himself was complaining that it should be amended because it was being abused ‘in ways that were never, ever intended’.

The scale of the havoc wreaked by Blair is astonishing. He grievously undermined the integrity of our democratic process by the introduction of postal votes on demand, which led to widespread abuses and dangerously empowered self-appointed community leaders in our inner-cities.

He also removed most of the hereditary peers from the House of Lords but did nothing to enhance the democratic accountability of the second chamber, which is unelected to this day.

The lines between party and state were increasingly blurred by Blair’s politicisation of the civil service and a power grab from Downing Street, which saw traditional Cabinet rule undermined by his preference for informal ‘sofa’ government.

Under his rule, the number of special advisers more than doubled from 38 to 84, while highly political figures, such as his foul-mouthed and thuggish spin doctor Alastair Campbell, wielded unprecedented influence.

Democratic accountability was further weakened by Blair’s enthusiasm for quangos. During his his time in office, he created 92 of them, more than any other Prime Minister.

The roll-call of his bureaucracy featured the Equality and Human Rights Commission, the NHS Modernisation Agency, the General Social Care Council, the Food Standards Agency, the Healthcare Commission and the General Teaching Council.

In addition, there were the sprawling networks of local officialdom, such as 376 Crime Reduction Partnerships, nine Regional Development Agencies, 47 Learning and Skills Councils, 39 New Deal for Communities boards and 42 Local Criminal Justice Boards.

Every one of these weakened the most important relationship of all: between the people and their Parliament. Not content with inflating the state machine, Blair altered the very nature of our society, for he was architect of the great disaster of untramelled mass immigration, which has left many British citizens feeling like aliens in their own land.

From the moment he became Prime Minister, he was scheming to increase the number of new arrivals. Restrictions were lifted on the right of migrants to bring relatives here, while work permits and British passports were dished out like confetti. But the floodgates were really opened wide in 2004 when the Blair government decided – unlike most of other EU member states – not to impose transitional controls on citizens from eight former Soviet bloc countries that had just joined the EU.

The clueless Home Office forecast that between 5,000 and 13,000 people would settle here.

In fact 750,000 arrived in the first four years after 2004, with the total rising to 1.5 million by the end of the decade.

The scale of change was unprecedented. When the Tories left office in 1997, net immigration was running at 48,000 people a year. By the time Blair left office in 2007 that figure had risen to above 200,000.

So why was Blair so keen on revolutionary levels of mass immigration? Part of the explanation lay in the belief that newcomers would raise productivity through their greater flexibility. In addition, a significant increase in the size of the national workforce gave the illusion of growth because overall GDP was up.

The Human Rights Act 1998 was nothing short of a wrecking ball to the legal system's core

On a political level, the swelling influx boosted support for Blair’s party, since 80 per cent of migrants vote Labour. Moreover, the embrace of immigration signalled Labour’s Cool Britannia modernity, in contrast to the Tories’ supposed ongoing love affair with the reactionary past.

One of Blair’s own speechwriters, Andrew Neather, revealed in 2009 that the policy ‘was intended to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date’.

Blair occasionally posed as a British patriot but he appears to have had little reverence for his country’s past or affection for its people. He has the rootless air of a globalist keen on the international conference circuit – the ultimate Davos man, never more at home than when courting overseas despots, who paid handsomely for his services.

At times, Blair’s attachment to open borders smacked of a yearning for a literal change in the British people akin to the attitude of the post-war East German regime which announced that the people had lost the confidence of the government following an anti-communist uprising in 1953.

In a memorable riposte, the playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht sarcastically urged the pro-Soviet government to ‘dissolve the people and elect another’.

It was under Blair that equality and social inclusion became the central creed of the state, even as many Britons felt growing concern about the collapse of social cohesion in their neighbourhoods and the rise of misogynistic violence, extremism and Islamist sectarianism.

To maintain the liberal fiction that ‘diversity is our strength’, the Blairite establishment spewed out propaganda and suppressed free speech in a way that would have been unthinkable decades earlier.

Characteristic of the new authoritarianism was the creation of so-called Non-Crime Hate Incidents. This concept required the police to record any incident where a victim claimed to be the target of hostility because of prejudice, even if it did not meet the criminal threshold.

The measure was part of a disturbing shift that saw the state not just as a protector of order and a provider of services, but as an enforcer of the fashionable orthodoxy. Blairite legislation, such as the 2000 Race Relations Act, imposed new duties on authorities and employers to promote race equality, while firms bidding for government contracts were required to prove that they complied with the social values of the state.

But the official emphasis on minority victimhood could lead to grotesque double standards, epitomised by the long, shameful cover-up over the activities of predatory Asian grooming gangs in the North and the Midlands.

These abusers were able to exploit vulnerable white working-class girls with impunity because the authorities were terrified of being accused of racism and desperate to uphold the illusion of multicultural harmony.

Throughout his political career, Blair’s brand was built on the quest for modernisation. ‘New Labour, New Britain’ was more than a slogan. It was the encapsulation of his political philosophy.

Even as a rebellious but clever pupil at the exclusive Fettes school in Edinburgh, he made a fetish of novelty, raging against longstanding rules and questioning authority. His housemaster Sir Eric Anderson told me how he had called for volunteers when he was setting up a new boarding house with a more liberal ethos, and, ‘Blair came forward. He was always on the lookout for something new: New House, New Labour’.

But it is a mentality that has inflicted terrible damage on Britain. In an attack on the Tories in 1995, Blair declared: ‘It’s no good waving the fabric of our flag when you have spent 16 years tearing apart the fabric of our nation.’

Yet those words are absolutely applicable to him. Back in 1997, the Daily Mail could not have been more right.