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Blair considered putting asylum seekers on Scottish island

Home Office lawyers warned that the measures would fall foul of the Geneva Convention on refugees…reports Asian Lite News

Drawn up just months before the US-UK invasion of Iraq, the scheme also called for the creation of regional “safe havens” in countries such as Turkey and South Africa

Tony Blair’s government considered setting up a holding camp on the Isle of Mull to drive down the number of asylum seekers entering the UK, according to newly released official papers.

The plan, put forward by one of the then-Labour prime minister’s closest aides, was part of a “nuclear option” that would see people who arrived in the UK by unauthorised means detained on the Scottish island before being removed.

Drawn up just months before the US-UK invasion of Iraq, the scheme also called for the creation of regional “safe havens” in countries such as Turkey and South Africa, where refugees who could not be returned to their own country could be sent.

Although the plan was not taken up, it echoes the debate still taking place more than 20 years later around Rishi Sunak’s plans to deport people to Rwanda, with officials in Blair’s government also discussing denouncing the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) to get the scheme going.

The proposals, contained in files released by the National Archives in Kew, west London, reflect Mr Blair’s frustration that “ever-tougher controls” in northern France had not had an impact on the number of asylum claims – which reached a new monthly high of 8,800 in October 2002.

“We must search out even more radical measures,” Blair scrawled in a handwritten note.

Following a brainstorming session with senior officials and advisers, the prime minister’s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, produced a paper entitled Asylum: The Nuclear Option, in which he questioned whether the UK needed an asylum system at all.

Powell said because the UK was an island, people who had arrived by sea had already passed through a safe country “so in fact what we should be looking at is a very simple system that immediately returns people who arrive here illegally”.

He said that officials in the office of the attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, had suggested setting up a camp on the Isle of Mull in the Inner Hebrides where people could be detained until they could be removed.

Powell said the government would have to legislate to allow for the removal of people despite the risk of persecution.

“We would like to extend this to return any illegal immigrant regardless of the risk that they might suffer human or degrading treatment,” he advised.

He conceded the plan would be challenged by the ECHR in Strasbourg but said this would take two to three years and in the meantime “we could send a strong message into the system about our new tough stance”.

He said if the government lost in Strasbourg “we would denounce the ECHR and immediately re-ratify with a reservation on Article 3 (the right not to be tortured)”.

Home Office lawyers warned that the measures would fall foul of the Geneva Convention on refugees.

An exasperated Blair scrawled “just return them”, adding: “This is precisely the point. We must not allow the ECHR to stop us dealing with it.”

The discussion draws parallels with Sunak’s flagship Rwanda plan. The deportation scheme has cost £290m despite no flights taking off due to a series of legal challenges. Sunak has put forward legislation to address this but it has caused a war among his own MPs, with Tories on the right wanting it to go further and those on the moderate wing keen to stick to the UK’s international obligations.

Echoing another debate that is still ongoing, other cabinet papers released today reveal Blair was keen to return the Elgin Marbles to Greece in an attempt to boost support for London’s bid to host the Olympic Games in 2012.

Number 10 advisers believed the Marbles – also known as the Parthenon Sculptures – could be a “powerful bargaining chip” but warned any attempt to reach a sharing agreement with Athens could face stiff resistance due to the “blinkered intransigence” of the British Museum, where they have been housed since the 19th century.

Greece has long demanded the return of the marbles but the debate spiralled into a diplomatic row last month after Mr Sunak ditched a planned meeting with his Greek counterpart Kyriakos Mitsotakis, who he accused of grandstanding over the issue.

The ancient sculptures were removed by Lord Elgin from occupied Athens in the early 19th century and are now owned by the British Museum – with Downing Street said to be opposed to any sort of loan agreement that would allow their return.

Also in the cabinet office files were revelations about the perception of Mr Blair’s combative communications chief Alastair Campbell, who spent nine years as the former PM’s closet aide.

After Campbell resigned in 2003, Blair was warned by remaining advisers that the Number 10 press office had lost “all credibility.. as a truthful operation” under his reign and that the prime minister’s own authority was being undermined because Downing Street was seen as a “politically-dominated spin machine”.

The warnings followed a series of bruising rows between the Labour government and the BBC over its coverage of the US-UK invasion of Iraq in 2003.

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Labour cannot fix UK through tax and spend, says Blair

“The radical agenda today is all about understanding, mastering, harnessing the technological revolution — everything else is secondary to that.”…reports Asian Lite News

Sir Tony Blair has warned that Sir Keir Starmer will inherit “a country that’s in a mess” if Labour wins next year’s UK general election, and that the party must accept it will not be able to tax and spend its way out of trouble.

The former Labour prime minister praised Starmer for saving Labour from “the brink of extinction”, and insisted he will not be a back seat driver if his party returns to office in an election expected next year.

But in an interview with the Financial Times, Blair said Starmer would confront a much worse economic situation than the one he inherited from John Major’s Tory government when he won his first election in 1997.

“If Keir Starmer wins the election, which I think he’s got a good chance of doing, he’ll be the sixth prime minister in eight years,” said Blair. “That’s a country that’s in a mess. We are not in good shape.”

He said critics of Starmer who said his policy offering was too bland were talking “nonsense” and that Labour had to hold to the centre ground and stop “equating being radical with just taxing and spending”. “The Conservative party has taxed and spent to the point where we’re in an economic crisis,” said Blair.

“The radical agenda today is all about understanding, mastering, harnessing the technological revolution — everything else is secondary to that.”

Blair, who won three elections in a row, is once again an influential figure with Labour, and his Tony Blair Institute for Global Change will host a series of events at the party’s annual conference in Liverpool next month.

But the former premier said that while he met Starmer “reasonably frequently”, the current Labour leader was “his own person” who deserved credit for vanquishing the hard left and making his party electable.

After years of being vilified by some inside Labour — his name was booed at the 2011 party conference and he was dubbed a “war criminal” because of his support for the Iraq war — Blair is back.

He is the only Labour politician born in the past 100 years to have won a general election, a detail that he said was a “shocking” indictment. “I’m afraid it has not been a successful political project.”

He said Starmer had shown “agility and determination” in remodelling Labour after his hard left predecessor Jeremy Corbyn, adding: “I didn’t give up on Labour. But I think the Labour party would have been finished if we had carried on under Corbyn.”

Blair’s new mission is to persuade political parties — not just in the UK — that they must embrace tech and change the way they govern if they are to deliver high-quality public services in an era of high taxes and debt.

He said that if this sounded like the kind of thing the current prime minister Rishi Sunak would wholly endorse, that was a good thing, because it might help Starmer to build a consensus in office.

Blair argues that generative artificial intelligence and other tech developments can revolutionise healthcare and the fight against crime, among other things — but only if governments understand how to use them.

He said the civil service had to be completely overhauled to reflect the coming change. “The civil service is an excellent institution if you’re trying to maintain the status quo,” he added.

Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s former chief adviser, had similar ideas, trying to recruit “weirdos” and tech nerds into the heart of government. “Some of what he says is sensible,” said Blair. “Some I totally disagree with.”

Blair and former Conservative leader Lord William Hague have called for all citizens to have digital identification cards, in an echo of the physical ID cards that he tried and failed to introduce when he was prime minister.

“It was right then and it’s a thousand times more right now,” he said, arguing that citizens need to be able to engage with the “21st century strategic state”.

Blair acknowledges that there are “big worries” associated with the use of ID cards and over the protection of personal data. But he said the tech revolution was coming anyway — and that politicians needed to regulate it, just as they did with health and safety rules in the wake of the industrial revolution. Blair channels many of his ideas through his think-tank cum consultancy. He said his not-for-profit institute — “we’re not a charity” — has about 80 policy staff, out of a total payroll of about 800, many working on global issues, and its advice is available to political parties around the world.

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Blair warns West should prepare for bio-terror threat

The former prime minister earlier slammed the US for an “imbecilic” decision to withdraw troops from Afghanistan in his first statement since the Taliban regained the control of the Asian country…reports Asian Lite News.

The west still faces the threat of 9/11-style attacks by radical Islamist groups but this time using bio-terrorism, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has warned, The Guardian reported.

In a speech to the defence thinktank Rusi marking the 20th anniversary of the 11 September 2001 Al Qaeda terrorist attacks on the US, Blair, who was British Prime Minister at the time, and supported military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, insisted the terrorist threat remained a first order issue, The Guardian reported.

He insisted that “despite the decline in terrorist attacks, Islamism, both the ideology and the violence, is a first-order security threat; and, unchecked, it will come to us, even if centred far from us, as 9/11 demonstrated. Covid-19 has taught us about deadly pathogens. Bio-terror possibilities may seem like the realm of science fiction; but we would be wise now to prepare for their potential use by non-state actors”.

On Afghanistan, he stressed “our ‘remaking’ didn’t fail because the people didn’t want the country ‘remade’. For sure, we could have ‘remade’ better, but Afghans did not choose the Taliban takeover. The last opinion poll in 2019 showed them with 4 per cent support among the Afghan people.

“They conquered the country by violence, not persuasion. The barrier to ‘nation-building’ is usually not the people, but poor institutional capacity and governance, including corruption, over many years; and most of all the challenge of trying to build whilst internal elements combined with external support are trying to destroy.”

Blair does not name the external elements, but he has long believed Pakistan supported the Taliban, the report said.

The former prime minister earlier slammed the US for an “imbecilic” decision to withdraw troops from Afghanistan in his first statement since the Taliban regained the control of the Asian country.

“The abandonment of Afghanistan and its people is tragic, dangerous, unnecessary,” Blair, who took Britain into war in Afghanistan alongside the US in 2001, wrote in an article published on the website of his Institute for Global Change last month.

“We didn’t need to do it. We chose to do it,” he said, noting that the military withdrawal was carried out “in obedience to an imbecilic political slogan” about ending “the forever wars”.

“The decision to withdraw from Afghanistan in this way was driven not by a grand strategy but by politics,” he said.

Blair broke his silence as chaos at the Kabul airport has worsened amid reports of stampedes and people being crushed to death.

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