Former PM Blair Calls For “Reformed Europe”, Criticizes Current Labour Leadership

Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair said an option for Britain during current Brexit negotiations could be “staying within a reformed EU” on Saturday.

Blair spoke on the subject after suggesting there was room for compromise on the free movement of people in an article for his own think-tank, the Institute for Global Change.

In the BBC Radio 4 interview, he went on to suggest that Brexit – if followed by a government led by the current Labor party leader Jeremy Corbyn — would leave the UK “in a very serious situation.”

Blair’s comments are at odds with the EU’s negotiating stance, which stresses there can be no “cherry picking” from the benefits of membership of the EU’s single market without accepting freedom of movement for EU workers.

Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair said, “The whole issue to do with Brexit is that we know why we left but we didn’t know last year what the terms of leaving would be. We’re now knowing a lot more about what it really means. Now, what’s happening in Europe at the moment, two things. First of all, you’ve got the election of Macron in France so Europe itself is looking at its own reform programme.

“They will have an inner circle of the EU that will be part of the Eurozone and an outer circle. They will make reforms that I think will make it much more comfortable for Britain to fit itself in that outer circle. On freedom of movement, the principle is indivisible. The question is, are people prepared to consider changes in the types of things that are concerns for us. “He said

Blair was prime minister for ten years until 2007. He wanted to take Britain into the euro zone and believed Britain should lead the way in the EU rather than withdraw from it.