London, Sep 16 (Inditop.com) Former prime minister Tony Blair has condemned recent racist marches in Britain, telling a multi-ethnic audience of professional and business leaders that migration has been a “huge net strength” for the country.
Blair told an awards ceremony audience Tuesday night that attitudes to race had changed over the last four decades, but there remained “appalling instances of racial discrimination” as well as “disturbances between people who are racist and people who were protesting against them”.
“Of course we have a distance to go. But if you think of the predictions made back in the 1960s about how Britain would be unable to cope with migration, I would say that migration has been a huge net strength for this country and its diversity and something for which we should be really proud in this country,” he said.
Blair spoke at the Leadership and Diversity Awards night that is held every year by GG2, publishers of Garavi Gujarat and other leading ethnic media in Britain.
His comments follow recent marches by white anti-immigration groups in multicultural cities such as London and Birmingham that fuelled clashes with South Asian protesters and led to scores of arrests.
Blair said a marker of how attitudes to race had changed came after the July 7, 2005 terrorist bombings in London that killed 52 people and injured hundreds.
“The interesting thing is that London did come together. We didn’t fall apart, we didn’t see it break into its different faiths,” Blair told his audience of leaders in politics, business, media, arts and entertainment, including Ramniklal Solanki, the veteran Indian-origin journalist who founded the GG2 group and his sons Kalpesh and Sailesh, and a large number of MPs and businessmen.
