Abu Dhabi: Former British prime minister Tony Blair on Wednesday admitted that the Brexit vote came as a surprise to him which he did not see coming, and warned that a segment of politics in the West was moving towards a more isolationist and anti-immigration policy.

Blair was speaking at the Emirates Centre for Strategic Studies and Research on Wednesday, and touched on a number of topics with the main focus centred around globalisation and the challenges it faces from far right and far left movements.

Conspicuously absent from the discussion was one of the main cornerstones of Tony Blair’s legacy — the 2003 invasion of Iraq, with a recent British inquiry into the war concluding that the invasion was not necessary and based on flimsy evidence to support it.

“The right analysis of politics today globally …[is] between what I would call the open minded, who see globalisation as an opportunity, and the close minded that see it as a threat.

“As the 21st century is bringing the world closer together, there are these popular movements, left and right, that are growing up in reaction to it. So both tend to be in favour … of an isolationist foreign policy, both are moving against free trade and towards rejectionism, and the right [is] certainly moving strong against immigration,” he said.

Speaking on Brexit, Blair said, “I think it is a catastrophe for Britain actually [to leave the European Union] and I think we will have to watch very carefully as this negotiation unfolds [with the EU] and then we will see what we are going to be offered,” he said.

“I have to accept my side had lost the debate, but we were 48 per cent [of the voters], [making up] 16 million people, so we have the right to carry on speaking and thinking,” he added.

Explaining the reasons for this shift, Blair said that many people in the West felt like they were being left behind by globalisation.

“Undoubtedly in the western world, there is a stagnation of incomes, particularly [in] lower and middle income families who feel their lives are not improving, who feel their children are leaving school with less opportunity, and who feel they are being left behind by the change around them … that they are powerless to stop it,” he said.

Blair also scrutinised the role of social media in helping populist movements grow exponentially.

“Social media in my view is a revolutionary phenomenon … its power is that it allows movements and insurgency against the status quo, it allows these movements to arise at a scale and at a speed and in a way the world has not seen before …[they] grow at such a scale and speed that they reach a tsunami force while you are still becoming aware of it, so this is very disorienting for leaders,” he said.

With this shift in politics against globalisation, Blair warned that this trend would create conflict in the future.

“The politics that is based on antiglobalisation — the risk is very clear, if you end up creating a politics which is based on division between one country and another, one race and another, one faith and another, if people break apart on that basis, then that is a very dangerous phenomenon [which] in the end will lead to conflict,” he said.

Speaking on the UAE, Blair said the UAE stands as a positive model for the region and a counter trend to extremism.

“Polls of the youth in this region about what country they would most like to emulate … in the last five years, the UAE has come top [in the polls]. It shows you two things — there is a model [of religious tolerance and being connected to the world] in this region, and the young people would prefer that model than some of the other things they see going in the region.

“So in my view the people in this region want the open-minded approach,” he added.

When it comes to eradicating extremism, Blair said the fight would require more than just eliminating the terrorists themselves, and would also need an approach to challenge the ideology that leads to terrorism.

“In my view the problem is not simply the fanatics or extremists that will commit acts of terrorism, you also have to deal with the ideology which is the soil from which this extremism breeds. If you simply tackle the product of the ideology, and don’t deal with the ideology, you will never defeat it,” he said.