The Guardian view on anxiety, anger and frustration in Insecure Britain

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/16/anxiety-anger-frustration-insecure-britain

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The portrait of Britain that emerges from the polling we publish today, bleakly illustrated by individual stories of anxiety, anger and frustration, is of a country going through hard times. For the first time in modern history, the economy is growing strongly but without delivering the customary surge of optimism. For those who live beyond London and the south-east, it still feels like a chimera, another example of the pervasive sense that what politicians say fails to reflect what voters experience. Worse, they don't even understand voters' insecurities. Politicians have, as they say in the US, "no skin in the game".

This is a dangerous moment for politics. When voters feel that politicians do not share their worries about their jobs, their financial security or their children's futures, the politics of democracy itself becomes insecure. It is a problem for politicians across Europe. But in Britain, even after four years out of power, Labour still gets more blame than the coalition. The geographical disjunction, where the further from London voters live, the more disenchanted they are, only adds to the threat to the old way of doing politics. This is not confined to those people who would describe themselves as working class. Many would have been among those successfully wooed by Tony Blair in the run up to 1997, families who were confident and ambitious – until the financial crash hit in 2008. The party that can find a way to halt the dynamic of fear that is revealed by our reports is the party that will win the next election. It ought to be Labour.

The urgent priority is to talk credibly about immigration. The disturbing headline finding that nearly half of those polled blame migrant workers for their sense of insecurity is only partly mitigated when, asked if immigration is affecting their own lives, the share falls to a fifth. When such a large proportion of the country blame their broader concerns on migrant workers, whether those concerns are about low pay and zero-hours contracts or the sense among older white voters that the culture they grew up in is being transformed without their permission, it is an indicator that an alarming sense of otherness is developing. That is the baleful consequence of politicians making unachievable pledges on immigration – and also of Nigel Farage's populist message that leaving the EU would make tomorrow a better version of yesterday. But it is a consequence too of insensitive talk about the benefits of migration to the wider economy, a sentiment that has no bearing on the reality of being an out-of-work builder in Wisbech told he is not eligible for a job because he speaks only English.

As politicians have discovered at the cost of their credibility with voters, it is easier to promise to curtail immigration than to do it. So, even if they found wriggle room in the operation of the EU's founding commitment to the free movement of labour, it could come at a heavy cost. The coalition has failed to deliver on its promise to cut migration to "tens of thousands", and its attempts to do so have done far more to harm diplomatic relations with India and China and the viability of some universities than they have done to curb illegal migration.

Changing the narrative depends not on telling, but showing. Politicians – as the Labour leader Ed Miliband is promising – must improve protections for workers, police the minimum wage more closely, and monitor employment agency practices to prevent recruiters discriminating in favour of particular national groups. They must invest in extra services like primary schools and GP surgeries to meet new demand. In short, they must demonstrate that the government values both migrant workers, and the people whose lives are disrupted by their arrival. On Thursday, Ed Miliband launches a major report from the IPPR thinktank, billed as a blueprint for a Labour government. This is a big moment: the chance to define progressive politics for the new era of continuing austerity and meet, head-on, voters' anxieties about the future.