No, they will find that, on the whole, the migrants were well behaved, worked hard, paid their taxes and were a net economic benefit to the country.”
Blair recalled other bogus arguments that were used by Brexit advocates and that have already evaporated — like the notions that leaving the E. U.
would save Britain some $440 million a week for its national health care service and
that there was a danger — most effectively exploited in a fear-inducing poster — that Syrian refugees would overwhelm the U. K., but there was no Syrian refugee flood.
Blair is unpopular in the U. K. — but that’s precisely what liberated him to say what many in British politics know to be true
but won’t say: Brexit was a stupid idea, based on an old political fantasy of a minority of conservatives; it was sold with bogus data; and following through on it will make Britain poorer, weaker and more isolated — and Europe more unstable.
If we choose at this time to diminish America’s global leadership
and these big stabilizing systems — and just put America first, thereby prompting every other country to put its own economic nationalism first — we will be making the gravest mistake we possibly could make.
We’re now in the post-post Cold War world, when U. S. leadership
and the glue of these big global systems are needed more than ever — because the simultaneous accelerations in technology, globalization and climate change are weakening states everywhere, spawning super-empowered angry people and creating vast zones of disorder.
In the post-Cold War era the world was glued together by these big global systems and a U. S. hegemon.
“None of this,” concluded Blair, “ignores the challenges
that stoked the anger fueling the Brexit vote: those left behind by globalization; the aftermath of the financial crisis; stagnant incomes for some families; and the pressures posed by big increases in migration, which make perfectly reasonable people anxious and then feel unheard in their anxiety.”
That is true in America, too.