Labour should be chasing Green voters, not Ukip supporters
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Version 0 of 1. Seven Labour MPs call for restrictions on immigration from poor European Union countries. Ed Miliband acknowledges – again – that Labour got it wrong on immigration. With the notable exception of Diane Abbott, the only politicians robustly defending immigration as a positive good are from the pro-globalisation New Labour right: Alan Milburn, John Hutton and Tony Blair. It's been a weird couple of weeks and I have followed most of it from a dark corner of a Cardiff radio studio, where my play If Only – about the making and possible unmaking of the coalition – was being recorded. The second half of the play is set in August this year, and imagines what a beleaguered Conservative leadership might have to do to persuade enough defecting voters to return to the fold. I've had to update my list of imaginary dystopian policy ideas (charging migrants for using A&E services, withdrawing from the European convention on human rights, using water cannon against rioters), as real proposals from the headbanger Tory right moved into the mainstream. But of course it's on immigration, particularly when it intersects with welfare, where the previously unthinkable is becoming prevailing orthodoxy. One underlying reason for all this goes back to the subject matter of the first half of my play, the creation of the coalition itself. What seemed at the time to be a matter of convenient political arithmetic was something much more profound: the drawing of a new faultline across the political map, with economic and social liberals (the Orange Book Liberal Democrats and the Cameroons) on the winning side. Marginalising the socially authoritarian Tory right as well as the economically interventionist Lib Dem left, the coalition promised a centre-ground politics that could be in power for ever. The result was to create the huge vacuum on the other side of the faultline (socially conservative but economically interventionist) which Ukip has filled. Hence Ukip's strategy of attracting angry, white, poor men on the issue of immigration. But hence too signs of an increasingly statist, interventionist rhetoric. Though Nigel Farage himself is a Thatcherite libertarian, his party's domestic manifesto will clearly be defined by recent polls that place Ukip voters nearer to Labour on economic issues (81% of them thinking that "big business takes advantage of ordinary people"). Whatever the truth about Ukip's present and future support, it would be crazy as well as wrong for Labour to abandon those formerly migrant communities who have stuck with the party precisely because of its historical – if sometimes patchy – opposition to racism (lest we forget, the occasion for Enoch Powell's rivers of blood speech was Labour's 1968 race relations bill). It would ignore the fact that those communities are suffering from the same post-industrial, globalisation-induced trauma that's afflicting the white working class. And, if part of a wider socially conservative strategy, it would risk severing Labour's links with other social campaigns, such as feminism and gay rights. And it might not even be necessary. The idea that Ukip bit great chunks out of Labour's loyalist vote is supported neither by the opinion polls nor the real one. In places like Sunderland, Ukip's figures could be entirely explained by a concentration of the pre-existing anti-Labour vote. In his massive poll of voters in the European election, Lord Ashcroft found that only 15% of Ukip's votes came from Labour (50% from the Conservatives). Ukip may have stopped Labour taking more votes from the other parties, but the idea that it recruited great swaths of loyalist Labour voters is unproved. And, elsewhere, there is sight of an alternative. Labour's new voters are largely Lib Dems appalled by their party's pact with Osbornomics. On 22 May the Lib Dems were also leaking votes to another party that beat them in the European elections. The Greens are socially liberal and economically interventionist; they also believe in the kind of devolutionary, enabling politics that is being developed in Labour's policy review. In other words, the 1.36 million people who voted Green were supporting policies that the Lib Dems abandoned in government and that Labour is seriously exploring. And if you put the Labour and the Green vote together, it beats Ukip. |