Labour's new motto: immigration, immigration, immigration
Some Labour people have settled on a daft strategy: outflank the Lib-Cons from the right, and so satisfy the proles
* John Harris
* guardian.co.uk, Friday 21 May 2010 21.00 BST
One week into the Labour leadership contest, all is atonement and apology. Andy Burnham reckons the last 16 years found his party being "too cautious and controlling". Ed Balls offers a reductive version of a conversation he endlessly heard on his campaign rounds: "You have lost touch with us, you are not our side, you are not in it for us." David Miliband says much the same, while his brother builds a modest bonfire of New Labour vanities: "The New Labour combination of free markets plus redistribution got us a long way, then reached its limits a few years back," he reckons. "Saying globalisation is good for you … is a good answer for economists but it is no answer for the people of Britain."
One element of New Labour theology, however, remains securely in place. You hear it in the pronouncements of the supposed leading candidates, and in anxious chatter around Westminster. The C2s – skilled manual workers, whose loyalties play a crucial role in so many marginals – have deserted Labour in droves, particularly men. Their key complaints are about supposed welfare malingerers, and new arrivals from abroad; and this is where Labour must focus that time-honoured ritual known as "listening and learning". So it is that the future of centre-left politics occasionally threatens to come down to kicking the dispossessed, and parroting the early summer's big Labour mantra: immigration, immigration, immigration.
All this is currently a matter of broad-brush rhetoric (strange how men so steeped in the forensic stuff of policy seem so hesitant about coming up with ideas of their own), but the signs are clear. When announcing his leadership bid on Wednesday, Ed Balls mentioned the "I" word endlessly, and praised a politician whose sour countenance and self-styled toughness have long embodied the most dried-up school of Labour politics: Phil Woolas, this week heard bemoaning the fact that Labour failed to make more of the policy whereby benefits are refused to those seeking indefinite leave to remain (which would have made for very uplifting posters).
As well as obligingly claiming that Labour has been deaf to worries about immigration, Andy Burnham has admiringly cited voters who thought that "money and help was going to people who were not, like them, trying to do the right things" – and he didn't mean your Bob Diamonds and Fred the Shreds. The Milibands, to their credit, have been much quieter on this stuff, though Ed saw fit to leaven his first leadership bid speech with the obligatory mention of an unidentified working-class voter who thought his benefit-claiming neighbours were swinging the lead. "We have hard thinking to do," he concluded, ominously.
Elsewhere, plenty of Labour people are truly ablaze. At a meeting of the parliamentary party at the end of last week, voices who last had their chance when Hazel Blears made her doomed bid for the deputy leadership reportedly piped up, talking about benefit claimants getting "something for nothing" and the need to sound strong notes on immigration controls. One myth is already doing the rounds: that Margaret Hodge's victory over the BNP in Barking was down to her strident line on somehow putting "indigenous" people ahead of new arrivals in the queue for public services, whereas Jon Cruddas's failure to romp home in Dagenham and Rainham came from his refusal to do anything similar. In fact, Cruddas's narrow margin of victory was down to boundary changes. Moreover, Cruddas's is actually the whiter of the two seats, which makes his achievement all the more remarkable.
Whatever, all this ugliness has a long and lamentable Labour pedigree. For a flavour of how the party responds to defeat, think back to the Crewe byelection, its witless class warfare and its maligning of the Tory victor as someone who opposed "making foreign nationals carry an ID card". Now, with Clegg and Cameron looking like the embodiment of bourgeois bleeding-hearts – all "Big Society" promises and strong talk on civil liberties – some Labour people seem to have come to a truly stupid conclusion: that the Con-Dem coalition has to be outflanked on the right, because the proles demand it. This takes us to what might prove the biggest problem of all: that four ex-wonks with limited life experience may not be the best people to divine what exactly it is that the fabled white working class is after.
This much is clear. After so many years of ever tightening welfare entitlements, and with the City elite seemingly as untouchable as ever, to focus any argument about distributional justice on welfare claimants is borderline obscene. And before any former minister starts to hold forth about the damaging effects of immigration on the social fabric, we could do with contrition that goes deeper than a new drive to "listen", or fuzzy matters of philosophy.
Immigration and welfare have become hot-button issues largely because of the insecurities made worse by New Labour's recurrent refusal to depart from the usual neoliberal script. What of the Blair and Brown governments' long history of resisting European moves on the white-hot issue of agency workers? To securely propel the workless back into employment, what about some meaningful moves on low pay? Why did Labour fail so miserably on social housing? To be fair, some of this may be stirring in the debate: Ed Miliband's claim that "immigration is a class issue" demands real follow-through, as does Burnham's claim that Labour was "in denial" about the impact of immigration on wages and housing. Unfortunately, the latter has also seen fit to talk up immigration's effect on antisocial behaviour: more dog-whistle stuff, and all the more miserable for it.
Yesterday, one more leadership candidate came up with a no-brainer quote, though this one cut to the heart of this week's unpleasantness. "One of the things that made me run was hearing candidate after candidate saying that immigration lost us the election," said Diane Abbott, who is starting to take on a very unlikely air of saintliness. "Rather than wringing our hands about the white working class and immigration, we need to deal with the underlying issues that make white and black people hostile to immigration: things like housing and job security. We need to be careful about scapegoating immigrants in a recession. We know where that leads."
We certainly do. And on these most fundamental of issues, Labour's danger is not that long-imagined lurch to the left, but an ugly and reactionary step in the opposite direction.
Labour's new motto: immigration, immigration, immigration | John Harris | Comment is free | The Guardian
Labour's new motto: immigration, immigration, immigration
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