As expected, the issue of immigration has now been fully weaponised by the Brexiters. It is a missile that Labour Remainers find difficult to defend against when talking to our traditional voters. Arguing that migration has brought demonstrable economic benefits runs up against the problem that the supporting logic is convoluted, slightly counter-intuitive and the evidence is brought to you by the same sorts of people who failed to predict the global financial crash of 2008. We can point out that the housing crisis and overstretched public services are failures of the current government rather the fault of immigrants. But this implies that the answer to these problems will only materialise in a distant and uncertain future. Reducing immigration by leaving the European Union seems a more immediate and trustworthy solution.

But scratch beneath all the lurid migrant-related lies about 76m Turks being about to descend on our shores, and the Leave campaign has its own problems with immigration. There are two main species of Brexiteers, those who want to leave principally because of immigration and those who want to leave because ‘they don’t like being told what to do by Brussels’. The de facto leaders of the official Vote Leave campaign, Michael Gove and Boris Johnson are of the latter variety. These are people who are at ease with decisions being taken by the Federal Reserve Bank in Washington, the Politburo in Beijing and in boardrooms in Mumbai, which can have a huge impact on our country (for example by potentially devastating the steel-making industry in South Wales). Yet European laws which can only be passed with the consent of institutions into which the British people have had a democratic input, appear to them as an affront to the sovereignty of our nation. Crucially this variety of Brexiter does not particularly care about immigration, or at least not levels of immigration – they only care that Brussels has nothing to do with it.

This is at odds with what most Brexit-inclined voters will tell you on the doorstep. They are more worried about the impact of absolute numbers of migrants on their lives rather than abstract issues of sovereignty. This is an important discrepancy that offers the Remain campaign an opportunity – for much of the appeal of leaving the EU disappears if voters do not believe that it will significantly reduce migration.

So it is worth pointing out that only a few years ago Boris Johnson was proudly claiming to be the only politician brave enough to declare that he was pro-immigration, going as far as proposing an amnesty for illegal migrants. Even more telling than pronouncements from a man who struggles to hang onto a principle for more than a day at a time, is the fact the Australian points system that Vote Leave advocates as a model, has led to much higher levels of immigration into Australia (relative to the population) than current levels in the United Kingdom. The whole purpose of the Australian system is not to reduce migration, but to give businesses greater control over who they bring into the country – which will generally be the cheapest workers available anywhere in the world.

Labour needs to be stressing to our traditional supporters that voting to leave the EU on 23 June will not deliver what many of them hope for. The immediate result of Brexit will be that an even more rightwing government than we already have will be in charge of negotiating our future relationship with Europe and the world beyond. These are fundamentalist supporters of the free market, who have no ideological problem with wages being suppressed by competition from foreign workers. There will be no certainty that numbers of migrants will fall, yet at the same time it will be more likely that workers rights currently guaranteed by membership of the EU, will be scrapped. We need to be telling voters that the TUC and every major trade union is in favour of remaining and ask whether they believe whether it is the unions, or the most rightwing part of a rightwing party, which really want to see improvements in the lives of ordinary workers.

In the end the Tories on both the Leave and the Remain side have no answers to the questions over immigration that trouble the electorate. David Cameron’s only significant policy innovation was to introduce a migration cap, which is regularly exceeded by a laughable margin. The Tory completely free market approach to immigration and globalisation in general, will always end up saying to workers ‘well, you’ll just have to live with it’. But the Ukip answer of leaving the EU and significantly reducing immigration is an act of economic self-harm that ordinary people will end up paying the price for.

British workers are right to worry about low wages and insecure employment, about the impact of a rising population on public services and housing, and about the loss of a sense of identity and community. But it takes a left of centre party that grasps the fact that we need significant intervention – economic, social, perhaps even cultural – to properly deal with these issues. In the next few weeks we need to bring home the specific message that Brexit is no solution. In the next few years Labour needs to address itself to the difficult and complex task of working out how we give the electorate a genuine and durable answer to their concerns.

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Christabel Cooper is a member of the Labour party and writes for Progress here

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