Labour shouldn't stoop to Ukip's level for the anti-immigrant vote
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Version 0 of 1. The leader of the Labour party, Ed Miliband, is a well-meaning man. So his speech in Thurrock was a largely thoughtful one. But throughout it you could hear the steady drumbeat of pressure from his paid advisers, most of his shadow cabinet colleagues and many of his close circle. And this overwhelming pressure is to move right on immigration, in response to the supposed electoral threat from Ukip. The proponents of a more rightwing stance on immigration never spell out exactly what new policies they want. It is wrong to argue that Labour does not talk about immigration. Miliband has given three major speeches on it and devoted a whole party political broadcast to it. So it has to be assumed that what they actually want is for Labour to talk even more about immigration and adopt a more aggressively anti-immigrant tone. Such a move would be disastrous. Labour cannot win the 2015 election fighting on Tory ground. But there are other more practical reasons to resist the push to the right on immigration. Some people try to claim that the immigration debate is no longer about race. But Miliband himself gave the game away in his Thurrock speech when he said: "Immigration has been changing communities fast, including here in Thurrock, a growing west African community, people coming over from eastern Europe". The fact that he felt the need to talk about Africans goes to the heart of the policy challenge posed by trying to chase anti-immigrant votes. In popular parlance "immigrant" means anyone who is black, brown or foreign-looking, and what anti-immigrant opinion actually yearns for is to see fewer of these people on their high street. But no government can easily deliver this. This is because the majority of so-called immigrants are British nationals, refugees and asylum seekers as well as economic migrants. So cutting the numbers would not just mean coming out of the EU it would also mean abrogating the European Convention on Human Rights. It would mean adopting what a recent YouGov poll revealed was the favoured solution of about half of Ukip supporters of "encouraging" lawfully settled immigrants (together with their British-born children) to return to their country of origin. Short of that package of measures, pandering to anti-immigrant feeling actually raises expectations no government can deliver on. But there are other problems about getting down in the gutter with Ukip to tussle for anti-immigrant votes. Thousands of Labour party members have worked for months to deliver excellent results on the ground in the recent local elections. They did not join Labour to see their leader sounding like a milk and water version of Nigel Farage. Miliband's advisers, in their Westminster bubble, seem to have forgotten that the Scottish Labour party is fighting a fierce battle over the referendum. The swing voters have come down to Labour supporters in the central belt. Seeing the Labour party edge towards Ukip could tip some into thinking that, if they want a genuinely progressive government in Scotland, they might as well take their chances with Alex Salmond. In his speech, Miliband talked about the pressures that immigration puts on people. But without immigrants Britain would not have an NHS. And immigrants do not cause low wages; predatory employers, deregulated labour markets, the rise of zero-hour contracts and proliferating agency workers do that. And there is a contradiction in telling Ukip voters in Thurrock that you share their pain about west Africans and expecting those same west Africans to vote for Labour elsewhere in the country. Nobody says it's easy to stand up to Ukip. It obviously means unpicking the party's lies. For instance, it claimed that ending border controls would mean a flood tide of Bulgarians and Romanians entering the country. In fact, the numbers of Bulgarians and Romanians actually dropped. But standing up to Ukip also means engaging with people's deepest and most visceral fears in an era of economic uncertainty when racism is on the rise. But, if the Labour party merely contents itself with echoing and confirming the Ukip narrative, then we will not win the upcoming general election – and we will not deserve to. |