There are just 72 weeks between now and the next election. Do you think we might go just one without talking about immigration?

This week’s offender is Roger Daltrey, formerly of the Who and once a Labour supporter, but – he says – after the rampant immigration of the New Labour years, he certainly won’t get fooled again.  

I’ve known for some time that I am part of a small and highly eccentric political tribe but I’m always forcefully reminded of it whenever immigration comes up. I thought that Labour lost power because it followed an unpopular war with an even more unpopular leader, and then there was a recession. Imagine my surprise at the first of the leadership hustings, when it swiftly emerged that it was all the fault of the Poles.

At the time, I thought that the whole thing was a little suspicious. As neither of the Milibands – the obvious frontrunners – could be credibly accused of being anti-immigrant, it felt to me that the immigration debate was a convenient sideshow from the real problem: namely that we just had presided over a three-year rolling catastrophe. Yes, yes, of course, on the way we might just have saved capitalism, but try telling someone on the minimum wage that Labour rescued the economy sometime: you may find their response uncongenial.

It wasn’t just the leadership contenders, though: the disease was far more widespread. There was blue Labour, an impulse – wouldn’t it be nice if everyone was nice? – in search of a genuine idea, but what little real policy meat it appeared to offer was anti-immigrant.  ‘Labour used immigration as a prices and incomes policy,’ Lord Glasman opined, neglecting to mention just how badly Labour’s previous prices and incomes policy had worked out for the poor and the vulnerable.

Fast forward three years, and nothing much has changed. Yes, of course, you can dig out all number of polls and focus groups that show that ‘immigration’ was at the front of people’s minds when they kicked us out in 2010, and even in the nominal heartlands of liberal England, you will still find some pretty toxic views on immigration. But immigration to Britain peaked in 2004 and cratered in 2008. If Britons hate immigration so much, why did they re-elect Labour when immigration appeared to be rising and turf them out when it was falling?

Scratch beneath the surface of any complaint about immigration, and they’re mostly talking about other things: about not being able to get on the housing ladder, or not having enough money. Immigrants are the scapegoats, but they’re not a symptom of the problem. The trouble is, they’re a convenient scapegoat for Labour, too, and bashing immigration is all too often Labour’s way out of a difficult situation, because – as with blue Labour – the bashing is only rhetorical. The next Labour government won’t leave – or even hold a referendum on leaving – the European Union, because we’re not ridiculous. So that’s the majority of immigration locked in place. So we might make it a bit more difficult for skilled immigrants to come to Britain, but I don’t think that the jobs people are worried about are professorships at Warwick and Durham or executive posts in the City.

So, what should Labour do? Thankfully, Ed Miliband has largely avoided ‘reframing the debate’ or ‘educating the public’: both sophisticated-sounding ways of making yourself unpopular and telling people that they’re wrong.

Instead, he should simply change the subject, because it’s easy to feel people’s pain in opposition and to worry about relieving it later. But ‘later’ is now only 73 weeks away, and it’s what happens after 2015 that should worry us as far as immigration is concerned. There’s still time left for Labour to have a reasonable stance as far as immigration is concerned, even if it does mean doing without the vote of Roger Daltrey.