Labour is right to talk about immigration but must avoid charges of cynicism and opportunism

The politics of immigration form rather neat bookends around Gordon Brown’s premiership. In the speech to Labour party conference in September 2007 in which he was widely expected to call a snap general election, the new prime minister promised ‘British jobs for British workers’. Two and half years later, staring defeat in the face at the impending general election, Brown infamously dismissed a Rochdale pensioner he encountered on the campaign trail as a ‘bigoted woman’ after she had questioned him about immigration from eastern Europe.

Since then, Ed Miliband has said repeatedly that ‘Labour got it wrong on immigration.’ Last month, for the first time ever, it devoted a party political broadcast to the subject, fronted by Miliband himself. It was followed the next day by a major speech on the issue by shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper. From being the subject that dare not speak its name, Labour now appears at times as though it wishes to talk of little else.

There are, of course, sound political and policy reasons for this approach. In office, Labour was slow to tackle the backlog of applications inherited from John Major’s government; it came too late to the points-based system that it finally introduced in its third term; and the issuing of vouchers to asylum-seekers was morally suspect and administratively flawed. To this day the inability of the Home Office and UK Border Agency to administer the immigration system competently has severely undermined public confidence in it.

Most importantly, as Cooper suggested, Labour failed to ‘tackle the unequal impact of immigration on Britain’, not recognising that pressures on housing and public services too often fell on those communities least able to bear it. And Labour failed to understand the potentially negative effects of immigration on low-skilled and low-paid work, many of which stem from the abuse of migrants by unscrupulous employers and landlords. That is why Miliband and Cooper are right to argue for stronger enforcement of the minimum wage, including allowing local authorities to take action, and for tougher penalties for those who fail to pay it.

Miliband is right, too, to want to tackle the perceptions – by then deep-seated – embodied by Brown’s response to Gillian Duffy: the notion that Labour views anyone with genuine concerns about immigration as a bigot. However, there is a thin line between this and the disreputable politics of ‘British jobs for British workers’.

As with any area of public policy, Labour’s approach to immigration must be evidence-based, realistic and driven by progressive values. ‘British jobs for British workers’ patently failed that test and the public saw it for the cynical and unprincipled gambit it was. But on three fronts in particular the gap between Labour’s rhetoric and the evidence is now becoming worryingly wide.

First, Labour routinely claims that it should have imposed the ‘maximum transitional controls’ on those coming to the UK from new European Union member states. While there was a case – given the economic downturn – for these to be imposed on Romania and Bulgaria, it does not follow that the wrong decision was taken for the 2004 enlargement during the economic boom. Research by the University of Leicester shows that these workers did not take jobs from Britons either overall or specifically from the young or low-skilled. The fact that they were able, at the outset, to work in the UK legally also meant that they paid their taxes and were less open to the kind of abuse that Miliband and Cooper have pledged to clamp down on.

Second, in last month’s party political broadcast Miliband promised ‘a very simple rule, which says if you work in the public sector, in a job face to face with the public, you need to be able to speak English’. This rule is, self-evidently, common sense. There is a strong case for saying that the ability to speak English should be a requirement of citizenship; this is not only good for social cohesion but for migrants themselves who might otherwise find themselves cut off from the social and economic mainstream. But let’s also be clear: Miliband’s ‘simple rule’ is an answer to a problem which barely exists.  As Jonathan Portes of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research has argued, ‘the bottom line is that only 134,000 people – 0.3 per cent of the population – don’t speak English at all.’

Finally, with Iain Duncan Smith falsely claiming that the number of EU citizens coming to Britain to claim benefits is a ‘crisis’, Labour now says that ‘the government is right to be looking at this area’. However, as research by University College London has shown, migrants from the new EU member states paid in via taxes about 30 per cent more than they cost the UK’s public services. Employment rates for EU citizens in Britain are higher, and the rate at which they claim benefits considerably lower, than for the UK-born.

This aside, the reality is that the difference between Britain and most other EU states is not so much the level at which benefits are paid, but the basis upon which they are: the UK operates a means-tested, needs-based approach, while most of the continent has a social insurance system. We have long argued that welfare in Britain should be more closely related to contribution, but such a shift should apply to migrant and native alike. Miliband has previously indicated some sympathy with such an approach. Perhaps this, rather than immigration, should form the basis of Labour’s next party political broadcast.

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Photo: Martin Deutsch