The canny European Union lock which Ed Miliband announced today is an important step forward for Labour.
It will allow us to stop avoiding the question of the referendum and offer a clear and compelling vision for Britain within Europe, under Labour – music to the ears of the vast majority of British businesses.
But Labour needs to go further and follow through the logic of saying the Europe is not fundamentally broken.
For when Eurosceptics talk about exit, it is not due to the iniquity of voting arrangements or the location of the parliament. It is a cypher to talk about immigration, and how it should stop.
We all know the Tories, are at sixes and sevens on immigration. Every so often you have to pinch yourself that we are not living in a political Wonderland, peering through the looking-glass at a world where the government is hellbent on pursuing an immigration policy it knows it cannot deliver, and which would be ruinous for the economy.
It is good that Labour is being robust about the need to work within Europe, rather than walk away or promise some illusory change which could never be negotiated.
But for that argument to be sustainable, we need to start being equally robust on the benefits of immigration. We have the tools to do so.
Last week’s Labour Market Displacement Report demolishes the ‘they come over here and take our jobs’ argument. It concludes:
There is relatively little evidence that migration has caused statistically significant displacement of UK natives from the labour market in periods when the economy is strong.
In fact, the latest labour market statistics show that 87 per cent of the 425,000 new jobs in the UK economy in the past year went to British workers; only 13 per cent, went to foreign nationals.
The OECD has debunked myths about benefits tourism, ranking Britain fourth out of OECD countries in terms of the net contribution made by immigrants to public finances.
And a study from UCL last November found that people from European countries over the last decade were 45 per cent less likely to receive benefits or tax credits than UK natives. In fact these European Economic Area immigrants contributed 34 per cent more in taxes than they received in benefits, while immigrants from outside the EEA contributed two per cent more in taxes than they received in the same period.
Over the same period, British people paid 11 per cent less in tax than they received.
This is the nub of the argument. Here is why the pro side must win the immigration debate, and it is as ages-old itself as the doughty traditions that the United Kingdom Independence party and many Tories fear are now at threat.
We need migrants. They fuel our economy, from engineering graduates to office cleaners. It is what has made London’s economy so successful over the last century; and in turn the country relies on London’s expansion to fuel the recovery elsewhere. No immigrants equals reduced prosperity.
This is not the myopia of James Brokenshire’s ‘metropolitan elite’. The answer to regional imbalances is not to halt immigration and make London less prosperous – it is having a proper manufacturing policy and real commitment to devolution.
Progressives need to check themselves here. Falling in behind the Daily Mail’s xenophobic klaxons and letting rip against migration must be tempting for some but it is economically wrong-headed.
We are a party born of fighting fascism and intolerance, for whom equality is a touchstone – and we naturally make our case on that basis. And, as Hopi Sen argues, there are excellent, if intangible sociocultural benefits of welcoming new workers.
But let’s not short-change our arguments. The case for immigration is wholly rational, entirely economic, and Labour must get behind it, completely.
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Mike Katz is a Labour councillor who chaired Camden council’s community cohesion panel and is on the Jewish Labour Movement’s executive committee. He tweets @MikeKatz
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