Has the public changed its mind about immigration? Sunder Katwala investigates

A casual observer could be forgiven for struggling to understand British public opinion on immigration. How could the same voters who backed the United Kingdom Independence party in the 2014 European elections, and ranked immigration consistently in their top three issues facing the country before the election, have ended up pressuring the prime minister three months later to accept more refugees from Syria? How could David Cameron sweep to victory in a general election while barely mentioning immigration at all? Yet public attitudes on this issue have in fact remained broadly consistent – and more moderate and nuanced than many think.

Immigration did not decide who won and lost the 2015 general election, as some thought it could. But the campaign offered important and sometimes surprising lessons about an issue that could well dominate this parliament as much as the last, perhaps even more.

The Conservatives certainly did not win the election on immigration. They won an unanticipated majority despite their record and reputation on the issue. Trust in the party to manage immigration had collapsed, with the Tories falling behind Labour, as well as Ukip, as the best party on the issue, having led Labour by 38 per cent at the same point in 2010.

With Cameron’s flagship policy of reducing net migration in tatters, Conservative strategist Lynton Crosby took the view that the party should seek to reduce the salience of immigration, fearing that it would give oxygen to Ukip. He focused instead on economic recovery, leadership and security in uncertain times, leading immigration to have a much lower profile in the national campaign and the media than had been widely anticipated. In the short term, trying not to talk about immigration proved somewhat successful, as the Conservatives won the votes they needed exactly where they needed them. This still leaves the government with the longer-term headache, however, of what to do about its failed net migration target, even if this has now been downgraded to an ‘ambition’.

Labour did not lose the 2015 election on immigration. It lost on political leadership, economic credibility and having too narrow a pitch to persuade voters in either Scotland or England that they would stand up for their interests fairly amid competing demands in a United Kingdom in flux. The party worried about what it should and should not say about immigration. Public disagreement among the shadow cabinet, over who would or would not drink from a coffee mug with Labour’s ‘controls on immigration’ message on it, epitomised a party agonising over how to find its voice, and whether or how it could seek to appeal to both ‘left behind’ voters and to cosmopolitan voters in big cities and university towns who might be attracted by the Green party.

Survation’s post-election polling for British Future shows that almost half of voters (46 per cent) thought that Labour talked too little about immigration in the election campaign, while a similar proportion thought it got the balance about right. Only one in 10 thought that Labour put too much focus on immigration. This proportion was similarly low among ethnic minority voters, who were four times more likely to say that Labour had talked too little about the issue as that it had said too much about it.

Labour candidates felt more confident talking about how fair rules in the workplace could prevent exploitation and undercutting, which worked well enough for Labour loyalists. But the party remains much less confident on the more important drivers of public concern such as cultural questions of identity and integration. Too often, Labour voices sound as if they hope to change the subject, back to jobs or housing, whenever issues of immigration, identity or Europe come up.

By contrast, most voters (51 per cent) felt that Ukip talked too much about immigration. A third of the electorate thought it got the balance right, and immigration certainly helped Ukip to win nearly four million votes. But the party was disappointed to go into the election with two seats and to come out of it with one. Ukip provided a voice that many of its supporters thought had been missing for too long from mainstream politics – but it also put most voters off, even those who were sceptical about the pace and scale of immigration.

The party’s difficulty in turning votes into seats reflected the public’s doubts about Ukip’s tone of voice on immigration. Survation’s poll for British Future shows that a majority of voters at the end of the campaign felt that Ukip was both too loud and too divisive; that the party was not firm enough on keeping extreme voices out; and that it talked too much about immigration and too little about the economy.

Few would have predicted, a year earlier, that the party to gain most seats in 2015 would not be the most anti-immigration party but the most welcoming. The Scottish National party surge had immensely more to do with the fallout from the independence referendum than nationalists’ inclusive and (moderately) liberal approach to managed migration. But being pro-immigration proved no barrier to a historic landslide in a country where public attitudes are only moderately less sceptical than across the rest of the UK.

If immigration featured less heavily in the campaign than many had anticipated, it quickly hit the headlines again afterwards. The quarterly net migration figures rose in May, and again to record levels in August, putting the government under pressure over its failure to cut the numbers. Yet by September Cameron found himself conducting an unanticipated U-turn under public pressure to take more Syrian refugees. This again demonstrated that public attitudes to immigration are more nuanced than is often realised.

Most people want Britain to maintain its tradition of refugee protection, yet they also remain wary about levels of immigration. What changed this summer was a rebalancing of the usual asymmetry of immigration debates, where those with the strongest anti-migration views give the issue more salience than the liberal minority who are comfortable with immigration. On the refugee issue, this was reversed, with an unprecedented mobilisation of liberal sentiment.

With pictures in the media of refugees in Calais, desperately trying to make it into the UK, the general public struggles to accept the argument that other countries are doing more to help refugees. But it became impossible for the government to claim that we were ‘doing our bit’ and upholding that proud tradition without making a clearer commitment to take more refugees. It is now important to show that there are good local plans for integration, in order to avoid the negative consequences for public attitudes of poorly designed schemes to distribute asylum seekers.

Following the election, Labour leadership candidates struggled to get to grips with the politics of immigration. Early acknowledgements that Labour had ‘lost touch’ with the public gave way to a realisation that the immediate audience of party members and supporters were strongly pro-immigration. New leader Jeremy Corbyn has shown scant interest in engaging with public anxiety on immigration, suggesting that the party should talk about the economic and cultural benefits of immigration, and duck questions about numbers and the scale of immigration.

Unusually, the party’s modernising flank tends to agree. Immigration, globalisation and Europe often seem to fall into a ‘no compromise with the electorate’ category on that wing too. The desire of right and left to defend the gains of immigration is noble. But this should not be done in a way that fails the ‘what works’ test. Stressing the net contribution of migrants to the exchequer preaches to the converted; it is a demonstrably ineffective way to persuade those who do not already agree. People simply do not believe the statistics when trust in the government’s handling of immigration is so low.

The need for effective arguments on immigration will become all the more important as we approach the European Union referendum. If the referendum is lost, it will be lost on immigration, as this is the main way in which the public thinks the EU affects their lives. Ukip risks toxifying the ‘Out’ campaign if it is too strident; but existing pro-European arguments – about Britons being able to work abroad, and net contributions to the economy – work primarily for the confident, the educated and the mobile, who are voting ‘In’ anyway. To other voters they seem like a dismissal of their concerns, as likely to push persuadable sceptics into the ‘Out’ camp as to win them over.

Once the referendum campaign begins in earnest, both sides will need to stop scoring own goals on the issue of immigration – and reach out beyond their existing support to the anxious middle of British public opinion.

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Sunder Katwala is director of British Future

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Photo: Josh McKible