Who wrote this:
“There was a ‘big rupture of trust’ between Labour and voters over immigration. ‘Under New Labour, immigration was used as a de facto wages policy — it kept wages down at the bottom end. Labour went for a big multicultural agenda when I think I think it should have gone for a much more robust, common-good agenda.’Does he back an immigration cap? ‘We’ve got to engage with a very serious discussion with the EU on the free movement of Labour and why that is not a positive good.’ The country will have to have a ‘regularisation of immigrants’. ‘I don’t think we should be in the mass deportation business. But we’ve now got to say “We’ve got the people. We’re fine with diversity but we have to broker solidarity.’”
I suppose you could tell it was a Labour grandee from the first paragraph, but it does not sound like one. It actually sounds like good sense, which is why the Tories should be worried.
The Conservative Party has always been wary of talking about immigration for two reasons, they don’t want to sound nasty and that as most politicians are from the upper middle class they – as with the upper ranks of other parties – personally benefit from immigration. If a Polish builder comes in he is not going to be competing for a job as a company director or for a detached house with access to a private park on Corder Road.
However this can’t last. The Labour Party, and the quote was from a man who has the ear of Ed Miliband, is recognising the pivotal role that immigration played in thwarting an almost succesful fightback at the last General Election. In fact if David Cameron had actually made some tough promises on immigration the Conservatives would have almost certainly got a small majority. A local Tory put it this way to me, recalling an Ipswich leaflet on immigration that went out despite Conservat Central Office disapproval, “if only David Cameron had been as right wing as, well, as right wing as Ben Gummer, he’d have won”.
The Conservatives have to step up their game on this, and have to look at an immigration policy that is in the interests of their constituents not the rarefied upper middle class where most politicians of all parties come from. So looking at the quote above we need a policy that:
- Recognises that unchecked unskilled and semi-skilled immigration is an economic detriment to the working class in relation to wages, house prices and the availability of services;
- Robustly challenges the EU’s free movement of labour in the same way that France has, promising (and delivering on) unilateral action if the EU does not see sense;
- Moving beyond multiculturalism and trying to bring all the people who live here into a common culture and experience. Perhaps we don’t need to use the word “solidarity”, but being a common culture is a conservative theme
Labour may make audacious moves on immigration in the next year but there is one advantage that they will never have – they put us in this mess. As long as we can show that we are representing the interests of the people that we talk to on the doorstep on this issue we should always be able to be ahead on Labour on this.
It’s a shame that the Notting Hill tories around Cameron don’t really show that they have got it.
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