It is fashionable to blame Tony Blair for everything. To some in the Labour party, the former prime minister took it on a neoliberal detour and lost 5m votes between 1997 and 2010. To others gleefully awaiting the Chilcot report, he is a war criminal who deserves to be tried at The Hague. These aspersions are wrong, but there is one matter we can hold Mr Blair responsible for. If Britain votes to leave the EU on June 23, he should arguably shoulder a good deal of the blame.

It all goes back to 2004, when the EU was significantly enlarged with the accession of several eastern European countries, including Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. Unlike the Germans, Mr Blair unwisely decided against imposing transitional controls on freedom of movement for these new EU citizens. His government predicted that enlargement would see 13,000 people a year coming to Britain. The number ended up being closer to 170,000 a year.

As a Financial Times editorial piece argued recently, Mr Blair “seriously underestimated the number of east Europeans who would come to Britain” and his mishandling of the EU’s eastward expansion created the widespread notion that immigration is out of control.