Labour can win on immigration – but not by channelling Enoch Powell
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Version 0 of 1. How is it possible for the Labour party to get it so wrong on immigration, to tack so wildly in so many directions, all of them blind alleys? Conference saw interventions – public, semi-public and private – from the “right” of the party. None of these terms, incidentally, has much meaning any more. “Blairite” has very little descriptive power when it’s used pejoratively, even by people who broadly support Tony Blair. “The right” gives the impression of a coherent set of ideas that could be set on a spectrum between Jeremy Corbyn and Theresa May: yet this “right”, when it speaks, scatters itself at random, one minute lauding Aneurin Bevan, the next channelling Enoch Powell, with no moorings but electability. I’m coming to favour Paddy Ashdown’s term, “sensible Labour” – not because I think any of them are sensible but because the MP who speaks common sense in the eyes of Paddy Ashdown is actually very easy, at a gut level, to imagine. Sensible Labour’s latest interventions came from Rachel Reeves, its former shadow work and pensions minister, who gave the rivers of blood speech without the poetry. “We have got to get this right,” she said at the party conference, “because there are bubbling tensions in this country that I just think could explode. You had those riots in 2011 … If riots started again in Leeds and bits of my constituency – it’s like a tinderbox.” It’s a shiftless and opportunistic argument that makes no use of the plentiful analysis and research that has gone into those riots – none of which even name-checked the EU or freedom of movement – preferring to dangle the violence as a decontextualised spectre, reminding us that it’s a dark and dangerous world out there, the people are angry and their rage must be assuaged. Andy Burnham, Caroline Flint – sensible Labour falls over itself to show who is the most realistic, where realism stands for accepting without question a vision of the country confected by their opponents. Jeremy Corbyn, meanwhile, offers no cap on immigration, a stance that if we wanted to be literal we would properly call Blairite. It is perfectly easy to defend: as he emphasised in his speech on Wednesday, freedom of movement across the EU is not the cause of our stagnant wages and underfunded public services; it did not cause the housing shortage, it is not undermining the NHS. Trying to solve those problems by closing the borders is like trying to deal with rising damp by bolting your front door Trying to solve those problems by closing the borders is like trying to deal with rising damp by bolting your front door. It is senseless almost to the point of superstition. Yet Corbyn’s line falls like flesh among piranhas, instantly devoured as proof of his pointless idealism, his unelectability, his failure to be humble in the face of the public, which has spoken. There is no correct answer to this: if he had offered a cap, what would it be? Two hundred thousand? Most analysis suggests that EU migration probably peaked at that anyway, and it would be a limit offered in bad faith. A hundred thousand? Into tens of thousands, as Cameron famously, fatuously promised? The fact is that while migrants are held to represent a threat, and leeches on a scarce resource, 10,000 is too many. If any inward migration steals your job and takes your GP appointment, then it all represents a failure to prioritise the wellbeing of your citizens. If the Labour party accepts that as an accurate depiction – even as a starting point for promises for extra funding, the restitution of the migrant impact fund – then it has already lost. There will always be someone willing to go one rung lower, one rung meaner. And yet their only alternative, so far, has been not to talk about it at all. Immigration is a perfectly reasonable issue to have on the agenda, unless it’s item one. Then it becomes – and has become – a debate of unanswerable binaries: do you care more about the person in Bolton than you do about the person in Brussels? If so, then show it; and if not, good luck, because the person in Bolton won’t vote for you and the person in Brussels can’t. There is nothing new about this political manoeuvre, in which you throw all your nation’s hardship, all its cultural anxiety, all its fear of change, on to a demonised other. It is the oldest trick in the political book, and it is tedious to have to discuss it as though it is both novel and particularly relevant to our times. The real question is not the magic number of migrants that finally broke our national tolerance and cohesion, but rather the constellation of circumstances that made the ground for it so fertile. It could not have travelled without another demonisation, that of the person on benefits: if everyone who isn’t economically productive and self-sufficient is a scrounger then citizenship is reduced to a number, a wage, a tax take. When your own status to your nation is so precarious, so mercenary, when you are held to have no innate worth as a compatriot, then of course the ready acceptance of newcomers is a peculiar insult. And that narrative could never have taken hold without the stagnant wages that underpin it. Yet there is something deeper still: a political landscape in which nobody really believes themselves to be travelling somewhere better, only clinging to what they have in a global maelstrom whose every wind augurs ill. Labour cannot win this simply by saying don’t blame the migrants, blame the bankers, or the tax avoiders, or the corporations. It is perfectly possible to blame all those people at once. The party cannot win it by saying migrants aren’t responsible for your hardship. Labour can only win the argument by saying hardship is something we can solve together, and here’s how. Without a hopeful agenda, immigration will always be toxic to them; but with one, this will lift like a morning fog. |