I am very grateful to Progress for the chance to open this new series of lectures about some of the challenges we need to answer to win a historic fourth term of office.

I remember editing the first editions of Progress some 11 years ago now in a back-office on Carteret Street.

Then, as now, Progress has always put itself at the leading edge of the debate about modernisation.

Although I am glad to say the quality of its work today is far superior to anything we achieved a decade ago.

Tonight I want to make the case for how the right reform of our immigration and border security system can benefit not just the wealthy, but the whole of Britain. The many and not the few to coin a phrase.

Tonight I want to argue three points;

First, that the benefits case for migration is as clear today as the moral case for asylum has always been, but only with the right checks and balances.

Second, that Labour can win a public debate on migration and on progressive terms only if we both celebrate the benefits that newcomers bring but only if also bind a contract with newcomers, characterised by the fairness and firmness that is a great British tradition.

And, third I want to argue that the debate about migration is telling us something else about the direction of politics in Britain today.

I want to draw lessons from the migration debate for our wider political renewal, eleven years after we came to office.

THE BENEFITS CASE

But let me start with why I say migration can benefit the whole of Britain.

Ian Lucas, who is a fantastic MP for Wrexham and my Parliamentary Private Secretary, often tells me that I get trapped in making out just the economic case for migration.

He is right.

As the grandson of immigrants I feel pretty qualified to talk about the giant social and cultural value that migrants have brought to Britain.

I like living in Birmingham in large part because I have the unique privilege to represent a constituency that is 50% non-white, and my children can go to schools that are so diverse.

I believe, as Robert Kennedy, said, that GDP can measures lots of things – except all the things that are important in life.

But, I think a well-made argument on the hard numbers about benefits to Britain of migration is important and winnable.

And soon I will have another crack at winning that argument again

Shortly, the government will hand in its response to a report by the House of Lords Economic Committee on the economic benefits of migration.

A report that combined conclusions that were over-spun with analysis that was under-done.

The House of Lords committee was wrong. Because no matter which way you look at it, there is a good economic case for carefully controlled migration.

Now I believe that the ultimate test of policy is often whether it makes us all richer.

Carefully controlled migration can and does.

Indeed, over the last decade against the background of higher migration, the UK has clocked the highest average growth in wealth per head of any G7 economies, bar none.

And migration helped.

Why?

Because migrants put up, not down, our average employment rate.

Because migrants put up, not down, average wages.

And because migrants put up, not down, productivity, to the benefit of all British workers.

78% of foreign born people in the UK are of working age compared to 61% of Brits.

In 1991, only half of foreign nationals here were working or studying. Now, that figure is nearly three quarters.

Last year, the average foreign-born worker earned £446 per week in 2007, compared with £409 for the UK-born.

Indeed, the key study in this field for the Low Pay Commission found that a 1% increase in migrants as a share of the working age population led to a 0.4% increase in average native wages.

Now at this point in the argument, the the critics will cry “Ah! You say the effect is positive. But we say the effect is small”

But, this frankly is a statement of the obvious.

The impact is small because the number of migrants each year is small as a fraction of the UK labour force. Nearly 90% of our labour market is made up of local workers.

And though the effect may be small, migration may be worth as much as half of the effect of our training and skills programme on raising average wealth per head. The effect for each of us may be small. But it feels like a prize worth having.

And so, is the overall good for the economy – for its size and its ability to generate wealth more efficiently.

Migration now adds as much if not slightly more than the entire economic output of British agriculture and fishing.

Over the last ten years, migration has helped deliver what Mervyn King called the NICE decade for the British economy where wages have gone up; employment has gone up; productivity has gone up, yet inflation has stayed low.

So, even if you agree with Kennedy’s aphorism that GDP measures everything in life except the things that are most important, I think the case can be made that carefully controlled migration has helped Labour’s mission to create a more prosperous and fairer Britain.

WINNING THE ARGUMENT

Now this is a logical argument.

It is also rather dry.

And Labour will not win what is often emotive debate with dry answers. We need to do better than that. And we can.

Over the last two years, I’ve talked to people all over Britain about Labour’s reform of the immigration and border security system.

What people have said to me has convinced me that we can win the progressive case for carefully controlled migration.

I have to say that if you’re ever in doubt whether British people are still interested in big issues, start a debate about immigration.

You can pick your venue – a pub, down the shops, or at the school gate. You will find that your audience does need much warming up.

Most people I talk to – or who talk to me – are not asking for anything unreasonable.

They want big changes to protect Britain’s borders and to prevent illegal immigration. We want to hold newcomers to account if they break the rules, deporting rule breakers where necessary.

But they want a compassionate system too, which honours the promises we must keep to those who need our protection.

And they are happy – indeed they are interested – in welcoming those who share our standards; who are happy to work hard; play by the rules, and get on and up in life.

Britain is not anti-foreigner. We are not a nation of Alf Garnetts. And in our heart, we know that Britain is richer and more interesting because of the contribution that migration brings.

But to preserve that tolerance and interest and welcome we have to make changes.

It helps to remember that this debate is not unique to us.

Global migration has doubled since the 1960s. All prosperous countries have experienced a step up in patterns of movement – internationally and regionally.

That’s why migration was a key issue in the French presidential elections. It’s why migration was a key issue in the Republican primaries this year. It is why migration is a big issue in South Africa today.

Everywhere you see governments making changes – and we are no exception

Our reform agenda is to create a system that is functional and above all, fair. That means three changes;

1. Changing the way we judge who can come
2. Changing the way we decide who can stay
3. Changing the way we police the system

Strong borders in the UK and Europe must be the foundation stone on which our wider policy rests.

Sometimes people forget the scale of this operation today.

Some numbers give you a flavour of the ambit of the new UK Border Agency.

We have already checked nearly 50 million passenger movements against police, customs and immigration databases.

It screened 3.5 million vehicles for radiological material, searched 1 million lorries and cars in northern France.

It turned back 18,000 people in France and 50,000 from airports round the world and seized 1 billion cigarettes, 2,300 kgs of cocaine and 500 kgs of heroin.

This year fingerprint visas, new systems for counting people in and out of Britain and a strong new force at the border all fall into place.

The new agency combines 25,000 staff, including over 9,000 warranted officers – the second largest force of warranted officers after the Metropolitan police, with a presence in local communities, at the border and in over 130 countries worldwide.

We will this year propose new, stronger powers for our front-line staff who we ask to help keep this country safe.

Inside Britain by November we will introduce compulsory id cards for foreign nationals to attack the causes of illegal immigration – which we know is illegal working.

Second, to control migration, we will this year introduce a points system like that which has worked so well in Australia.

Over 80 different routes to come and work and study in Britain will be swept away and replaced by a simple five tier system.

Three key changes are our way of helping ensure that migration does not jeopardise those at the lower end of the income scale or those who live in parts of Britain where population change has been rapid;

We are this year, ending low skilled migration from outside Europe.

We are ensuring that no-skilled and low-skilled cannot come in through the points system.

And when we decide how many points a migrant needs to come and work or study, we will not just listen to the needs of business, we will look at the wider impact of migration on Britain as well. That’s the best way we can strike a balance that’s in the national interest.

Third, we propose radical changes to the way newcomers are able to earn their stay in Britain.

Our Earned Citizenship Green Paper sets out proposals to balance the rights and benefits of British citizenship with the responsibilities and contributions we expect of newcomers to the UK.

Fourth, we need change to make sure that our system is firm but fair.

That means organisational changes to make sure that we honour our asylum obligations and make – and enforce – decisions much faster, and with a more sensitive treatment for children and victims of trafficking.

So, by Christmas we have set a target of deciding and implementing 60% of asylum decisions in 6 months or less (in 1997, it took over 20 months just to make an initial decision).

But, change has to deliver a tougher deal for newcomers who break the rules.

We have to ensure that our contract with newcomers is not optional but binding.

Britain does welcome those who work hard and offer something. But we cannot abide rule-breakers.

That is why we have reorganised UKBA operations inside our UK to focus on this question;

We have agreed new targets with the Treasury to put this work centre-stage.

We increased by ten-fold the resources we now devote deporting newcomers to our country who have the rules; it is a step-change in how we spend our budget – and it has delivered a step-change in the number of foreign nationals who commit crimes who have been deported.

This year, our target is to deport 5,000; double that of two years ago, and to help this year, we will introduce powers to automatically deport foreign nationals.

Further, by the end of this year we will have in place new crime-fighting partnerships between UKBA and the police in a new alliance that will stretch to every street in the country. Already 80% of forces are involved.

Putting the UKBA at the service of the police, using immigration powers and resources to help make communities safer.

And for those who encourage illegal immigration by offering the reward of illegal work, we will come down much harder, with big on the spot civil penalties of up to £10,000 for employers who don’t make the right checks

SHARED VALUES

I know that in some quarters this presentation will be criticised as negative. As chauvinist perhaps. Perhaps a bit reactionary.

But I want to explain why in fact, a clear assertion of our determination to see the rules followed is such a vital ingredient in winning the case for a progressive immigration policy.

And I want to go further and argue that the debate about immigration has some wider lessons for debate about the agenda we offer the country for Labour’s fourth term.

Quite simply, the secret to preserving harmony in a more diverse society is stronger shared standards.

Why? Because when the rules of the road are clear, people relax about where their neighbours plan to travel.

Every fraternal society has its code of conduct. Every happy family has good ground-rules.

Britain today is no different. It is in fact an insight that has been at the centre of progressive thinking since at least JS Mill.

The key is to keep those shared standards to a core. To avoid pickling them in traditional institutions that never change or in dogma or discriminatory tendencies.

This is one of the reasons why the debate about Britishness is so important and so relevant today; Britishness is quite simply one of the most important associations that we have; it is a code, shaped by our history that defines so much of who we look at the world.

And as Vron Ware puts it;

‘I think British is easier [than English] – it’s clearly a bit more plural as it includes the Celtic fringe: Northern Ireland, Wales, Scotland. It seems to accommodate the regional difference.’

And the reason I am an optimistic about winning the debate on shared standards is because after four months on the road, travelling all over Britain, talking to people about what those standards look like, I am convinced that in essence people want no more of newcomers than four commitments;

To learn English

To work hard and pay taxes

To follow the law

To make an effort to integrate

That to me does not sound over the top, chauvinist or reactionary.

This appetite for shared standards is however acute in Britain today, and this is the lesson of the immigration debate for Labour’s wider agenda.

My warning is that unless Labour takes this argument seriously the Tories will seek to take this ground.

Already in the work of writers like Danny Kruger and others we see an ambition to seize the language, the agenda, the policies of fraternity from us.

Kruger points to a coming ‘passionate disagreement about who owns the ground of fraternity, and whether the state or the individual will lift their banner there’.

Of course, the Tory pretence is ludicrous. Perhaps that is why Danny Kruger has I understand left Mr Cameron. He offers no more than a clarion call to traditional institutions.

But for Labour this is vital argument.

The forces at work in the modern world are powerful, they are always on, and they put the ways in which shared standards and happy habits are formed under pressure.

New Labour’s great insight was that individuals do better in strong communities. That truth has not changed.

So alongside new measures to empower individuals, we need new measures to strengthen what ties individuals together.

What David Miliband has insightly called ‘the I-can generation’ needs roots; and we must act now to make sure those roots are stronger.

This is the behaviour of mutual regard. It is the habit of reciprocity. It is the ‘strength’ in ‘by the strength of our common endeavour we achieve more than we achieve alone.’

And it is deeply rooted in our political heritage.

In America, Robert Putnam identified at least 11 different forces that put traditional forms of solidarity under pressure.

I’m sure that at least that number are at work in Britain.

But like Putnam I do not believe the answer is some kind of return to the days and ways of the past.

In my own constituency – a diverse place – and in my job as Minister for Borders and Immigration, I have become more and more convinced that the political argument about shared standards, renewing the rules of mutual respect for a 21st century British society, what we must do politically, culturally, civically to reaffirm what one of my party members calls ‘the unity in the community’, will be amongst the most important political agendas in the years to come.

Living in a country without ‘shared standards’ is impossible.

Shared standards are the glue that keeps diverse societies together; they are something much more akin to Oliver Wendell Homes idea of the law; ‘those wise constraints that make us free.’

And we have of course been here before. And we have once before mastered this challenge.

At the end of the 19th century we felt in this country the industrialisation that sucked people out of the country-side into new associations in the city.

As Lawrie Lee put it.

‘Fragmentation, free thought and new excitements came now to intrigue and perplex us’.

Our national response was not reactionary; it was inventive.

Take Birmingham.

As the city grew, a new generation of politicians like Chamberlain extolled a new civic gospel that delivered new services – like gas and water and arts – and created a new city.

From 1879, philanthropists like the Cadbury’s pioneered, in Bournville, new designs for communities.

Political movements – like the National Education League, headquartered in the city, were founded to conduct national campaigns for new goods like free education.

In 1902, the Birmingham district labour representation council brought together a huge constellation of working class organisations.

In civic life too, we invented things; Aston Villa FC was founded in 1874. Birmingham City a year later and within two decades Warwickshire County Cricket Club entered first class cricket.

In 1889, the Boy’s Brigade was started, followed by the Birmingham Association of Boy Scouts in 1909. The Girl’s Union founded in 1919.

By 1914, Asa Briggs estimates some 19,000 young people were attached to youth bodies.

Today we live in a country where we are quite capable of organising our way through change.

But it requires the political imagination of all of us.

The Statement, or Bill, of British Rights and Duties is perhaps the most constitutionally prominent opportunity to set out a picture of the contract that binds us together.

The Olympics will be an extraordinary stage of which the UK will have the chance to set out our national story and traditions.

Renewed investment in our history and the sites, landmarks, monuments and markers of our shared heritage provides not just a way of enticing tourists to Britain, but a focus for local interest and pride.

Many in the UK would like to see greater honour accorded to our veterans and leaders like the Chief Rabbi have argued for greater attention for inter-generational exposure to the sacrifice of others.

In our schools, the citizenship curriculum has come on miles since 1997.

I believe a defence of the Union is absolutely central.

And the Labour party must renew itself locally to become that focus for the kind of mutual organisation that delivers change through collective action.

In Hodge Hill, I came to see that alongside my work on regeneration through my Hodge Hill 2020 programme, I had to find different cultural, civic, faith-based ways of getting residents out of the streets they live in and into the streets of others.

So, I am bringing together local and oral history projects; exploring how inter-faith groups can grow; backing young entrepreneurs who are using sports and street games to bring different groups of young people together.

The Labour party needs to lead this re-newal of civic pride and a renaissance of de Tocquville called ‘the art of association’, but we should start and act local.

I have one further practical idea to suggest.

Last year, wherever I went in Britain talking about immigration, I got a sense that Britain was today a country that was comfortable with difference.

As one lady said to me in Edgbaston; ‘we can learn to live together, if we only put our minds to it’.

In this remark you here captured the strong sense that the time is right for Britain as a country to do more to celebrate the things that we do have in common.

And one way into this is a day or two of celebration of what we like and love about living in this country.

This is a debate that Ruth Kelly and I explored last May.

Since then I have asked people all over the country what they thought.

In places, there is a rejection of the idea. A sense of fatality. That it is all too late. That celebrating ‘British’ was too hard. A traditionally British suspicion for ‘authority’ sponsored celebrations of anything and a concern for who would pick up the bill.

But in the groups I listened to, the majority was in a different place.

I think a clear majority of people in support the idea of a national day of celebration.

And when asked they say, ‘it’s just a good way to celebrate being British’.

There is no national blueprint for that people want.

Some – perhaps many – will want to reserve the right to opt out. As one man said to me:

‘I would drink at the pub – it’s my right to do what I want on the day’.

But others said:

‘Celebrating Britain would help people appreciate it and learn more about it and previous generations’

‘A national day would bring together more people, opportunity to mix’.

In my discussions, people suggested twenty seven different elements of what they would like to see:

History, the royal family, a queen’s speech, Remembrance, young people, schools, singing, street parties, carnivals, music, concerts, dance, food, drinking, art, sports, discussions, ceremonies were all mentioned as good ways to celebrate both traditional British culture and to recognise the diverse cultures from other countries that now make up the UK population.

My own constituency party, who I forced to discuss this with me last year stressed the opportunity to showcase all the “colours of the British tapestry”.

This diversity is great. And part of Britain’s comfort level with diversity is simply a reflection of the persistent strength of Britain’s local identities.

Time and again, when asked how to celebrate a national idea, people pointed me to a celebration of what they liked locally – whether it was something reminiscent of Trafalgar Day (mentioned in Portsmouth but which I am told originates in Norfolk) or the St Paul’s carnival (mentioned in Bristol).

What people wanted was something with both local and national aspects.

But what people wanted above all was a space – permission if you like – to celebrate what they like about living in this country.

There was of course no consensus on the date. The Queen’s birthday, May Day, All Saints Day, St George’s Day, Hastings, Trafalgar, Magna Carta, Empire day all got a mention. As did Pancake Day, Whitsunday, and Easter

I myself, have become convinced that the August bank holiday weekend – what some-one has called ‘the Great British weekend’ – has the virtue of being in the summer, and already being a bank holiday; there are other arguments for linking something to Remembrance Sunday or another apposite date in the Autumn.

CONCLUSION

Here then are some first thoughts about new Labour’s renewal and how Labour can lead a debate and lead change about how we strengthen shared standards in Britain.

About how we put alongside new arguments for empowerment, an agenda for refreshing fraternity in modern Britain.

It is a debate that is national and local; that is political and civic; that forms an agenda for Labour in government and for Labour parties in local communities.

The Tories have no philosophy of value here; and even less detail to offer.

We can and we should seek to dominate this battle of ideas.