Documents from Tony Blair’s time in office have been released by the National Archives today. And despite being published two decades later, there was something remarkably familiar about them.
If you swap the names and dates, internal documents showing the PM grappling with migration, the BBC and the Elgin Marbles could easily have been taken from last year’s Cabinet minutes.
As the current Government is rocked by opposition to its beleagued Rwanda plan, 20 years ago the Government was drawing up a plan to house migrants in a camp on the Isle of Mull and send asylum seekers to offshore housing in Turkey and South Africa.
Echoing the current fight within the Tory Party, Blair’s top aide called for the Government to “denounce” the ECHR in an attempt to get the plan off the ground.
Documents from Tony Blair’s time in office have been released by the National Archives today
PA
If you swap top Labour aide Jonathon Powell’s name for Jenrick or Braverman and it could be almost indistinguishable from this year’s migration debate.
The Elgin Marbles was another issue grappled with by the Blair administration – in documents published just weeks after Rishi Sunak had his public spat with Kyrios Mitsokasis.
Meanwhile, MPs fuming at the BBC while in office is yet another cross-party – and cross-decade – problem.
Dubbing it “belligerent”, spin doctor Alistair Campbell threatened to take legal action against the licence fee-funded broadcaster for what they perceived to be unfair coverage of the Government.
Starmer is campaigning on the promise of moving on from “thirteen years of Tory failure”.
With a 20-point gap in the polls, it is clear that longstanding problems cannot be the only thing to blame for public unhappiness with the state of the nation. There is evidently a strong public feeling that the last decade of Conservative government is at least in part to blame.
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But the 20-year wingspan of some of these issues – laid bare in today’s documents – highlights that it cannot just be seen as a “Tory” problem.
On some issues, it clearly bleeds deeper than the last 13 years – meaning that, unfortunately for Starmer, it cannot simply be a matter of taking the keys and putting things right.
These issues have been bubbling over for two decades – it may well take two more to put them right.
