Daily Mail
"..At the very least, so any competent interviewer would have suggested, Tony Blair and New Labour failed to address the social ills that lay behind the unprecedentedly extensive civil unrest. In fact, I would go further, and argue that they did not merely allow problems to fester but, as a result of several short-sighted political decisions, contrived to make them worse. .....More damagingly still, during those boom years Mr Blair and, both as Chancellor and later as Prime Minister, Mr Brown failed to get members of the so-called underclass into work. Nearly all the 1.67 million jobs created between 1997 and 2010 went to new immigrants. These people were often deemed by employers to be better skilled or more employable than members of the indigenous underclass. It has been plausibly alleged that New Labour at least partly encouraged mass immigration in the hope of building up its electoral base, most first-generation immigrants being inclined to vote Labour. ...Reading his article, one gets the impression that he is scarcely any longer of this world, but poised in some stateless limbo unconnected with the rest of us.
As he has brazenly rewritten the history of why we went to war against Iraq, so he disowns any responsibility for what has happened to our society, even though he was Prime Minister for ten years. Of course, no one could sensibly maintain that the entire country is in the grip of a moral decline, and of course by no means all the causes for what has gone wrong can be laid at New Labour’s door. But that there is an immense problem no one could sensibly doubt. Hearing Tony Blair’s unself-critical voice again, I am relieved that he is not going to be called upon to put it right."
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