Labour must speak to its heartlands without bending to Ukip’s will, writes Jade Azim
The post-Brexit world poses one particular threat to the Labour party to trump all others: a potential United Kingdom Independence party insurgency which could see us usurped in our heartlands, as part of a war of attrition over freedom of movement.
This is, paradoxically, thanks to Boris Johnson and Michael Gove. As the Leave campaign abandoned economic arguments for a focus on immigration, it gave the impression that it would be able to, having won freedom outside of the European Union, exempt us from the freedom of movement that has come to define it.
While no actual plan exists, the debate that has dominated after the vote has been whittled down to a question of the Norway model versus the Canada model. The likelihood rests upon the former. Despite Johnson promising otherwise, before Macbeth stole his thunder, the probability is that, unless we truly want to shut ourselves off from an inevitably more globalised world, and destroy the economy, we will have to accept free movement of labour. Without immigration, our economy would simply cease to function.
This is all the more the case because, unless some miracle happens, or Paris strikes up a self-interested deal where we trade City passporting for blocking free movement, the EU will not allow us access to a single market without its labour. Angela Merkel, François Hollande, Donald Tusk and Jean-Claude Juncker have already confirmed this. The Leave campaign’s promises will prove as hollow as we knew they were, with the only result being a toxic legacy of ramped-up xenophobia and a bitter taste in the mouth of Leave voters.
As such, it will be Ukip that benefits. It can claim ‘betrayal’, as Nigel Farage already has done, and can lay the path to a populist, protest vote for itself, electing maybe dozens of Ukip members of parliament, almost all likely at the expense of the Labour heartlands, particularly here in the north-east.
So what to do? We cannot oppose free movement of labour. There are to be no mugs in our future that brandish our credentials as the ones to out-Ukip Ukip.
But it is undeniable that a substantive constituency within our base opposes such a concept. Most, though sadly not all, who voted Leave on these grounds did not do so on the basis of nativism. Nor should we ever pander, Farageist-style, to such a sentiment in a race to the bottom. On the contrary, we must challenge it at every turn, and particularly challenge the xenophobic and racist abuse that has blighted Blighty.
Rather, many people voted Leave on a pragmatic basis; many who are – like exploited migrants themselves – the left behinds of globalisation. It is that pragmatic majority to whom we must reach out. It is to that pragmatism we must offer a Labour and a socialist countenance. Now, without EU funding, offering subsidies and investment to deprived areas with services under pressure will be more difficult, but it must be the Labour party to offer this.
A Conservative government will not. Local authorities may turn to Westminster – as is already being vocalised in Cornwall and Yorkshire – to replace funds lost, and to demand the £350m promised to them by the Leave campaign, but the likes of Theresa May or Michael Gove are nothing more than devout followers of austerian practice.
An active government could, in this scenario, be hugely popular. If we divert the debate to struggling services, we can also divert rhetoric away from the nativism upon which Ukip is founded to a pragmatic case for anti-austerity politics. More housing, and council housing in particular, cash injections for the NHS, infrastructure spending, and a focus on education to rival the 1997 manifesto, could make for a successful recipe.
It is not like other failed Labour campaigns have not argued on pro-investment manifestos, of course: Ed Balls was an exemplary Brownite figure on this front. But never has the time been so ripe for such a manifesto.
The opportunity has arisen, as it did with Black Wednesday, to expose the Conservatives’ hard fought-for economic credentials as the folly they are, and to build a new case for higher local spending to kickstart a withering economy and to inject new life into distraught communities. Mark Carney himself has proposed stimulus. Unlike in 2015, when the deficit was all the rage, 2016 calls for a pro-investment argument and government, to help communities with struggling services calling out for help, and to navigate the stormy seas of a post-Brexit economy.
What is more, the demographics support the assumption that such a move may prove popular. Following values modes analysis, these voters are ‘settlers’. And ‘settlers’, while espousing small ‘c’ conservatism, also espouse leftwing economics: they believe in bigger government, a hark back to the postwar consensus that would have sheltered them, a consensus replaced by the cold winds of Thatcherism. An exposure to labour does not have to mean an exposure to worse conditions. We can be a bulwark that has not existed for quite some time.
This leads on to another dimension: devolution. The north-east is the exact place that would support a party that champions greater power at a regional level. Hartlepool and Hull have seen manufacturing and capital flight which was unknown before the recent speeding-up of globalisation, something which exacerbates tensions and fuels hostility toward new workers. A new mayor and a new devolution package could empower the region’s people, and could ensure their voice in Westminster in getting the best deal for stimulus and investment.
Of course, the economics of immigration, and fighting on that front, is not the be-all and end-all. There will be some who cannot bear freedom of movement at all. But nativist and ethno-nationalist politics only feeds Farageism. We were built to help labour, and it is with Labourism that we must respond to this challenge.
We respond to this challenge by being Labour, and making it an opportunity for hope.
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Jade Azim is editor of Open Labour and a writer for LabourList and the New Statesman