Disclaimer: Politics is a universally sensitive and potentially incendiary subject, and one that is almost impossible to write about completely objectively. That said, my blog posts will never endorse or criticise a particular political party or ideology, but rather will offer an opinion (and hopefully a little insight) into the themes and stories that have personally resonated with me. I will try to be as neutral and as scholastic as I can in my analysis and encourage anyone who reads the following to absorb and react to it in a similar spirit.
Phew, here we go. When I decided that I wanted to write about politics on this blog, I knew that I’d be potentially stepping into some difficult, dangerous territory. And immigration may well top the list of issues that divides, and enrages, the British public. However, that means that far too often we avoid discussing it openly and honestly, and thus it has become an almost taboo subject, which only fuels the volatility and is what is currently propelling the populist far-right to unparalleled levels of popularity, simply because they are the only ones who actually address the issue head-on.
Kier Starmer made headlines in the last couple of weeks with his “island of strangers” remark during a speech announcing his government’s new plans for tackling the immigration issue. It drew criticism and outrage from his supporters and from within his own party, amidst accusations that Labour are shifting their messaging to try and appeal to Reform supporters, and subsequently alienating their traditional left-leaning audience.
Starmer, in my view, came across as a man who didn’t quite believe in what he was saying during the speech. As a former distinguished Human Rights lawyer, it is very poor casting for him to portray a hardline, anti-immigration figure. And this mixed messaging and awkward rhetoric is symptomatic of the issues that have dogged left-wing politics for decades.
The BBC’s Allan Little wrote a fascinating piece this week, tracing this issue back to one seismic point: Enoch Powell’s infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech, given in 1968. The anti-immigration, violently xenophobic speech simultaneously cost Powell his seat in Parliament and made him both a figurehead of racism and ridicule and also something of a martyr, depending on which side of the argument you fell on.
It also sparked a momentous change in voting patterns in Britain as Little explains: “Many white working-class voters would, in time, abandon Labour and move to parties of the right, whilst Labour would become aligned with the pursuit of progressive causes… It has been a slow tectonic shift in which class-based party allegiances gradually gave way to what we now recognise as identity politics and the rise of populist anti-elite sentiment.”
This ‘slow tectonic shift’ isn’t slow anymore. Just like many other countries, Britain is experiencing an unprecedented rise of the populist far-right, once again demonstrated by Reform’s recent dominant performance in the local elections. That rise is almost entirely founded on Nigel Farage’s promise to freeze all non-essential immigration and “stop the boats”- his slogan for a zero-tolerance policy towards any illegal immigrants entering the country.
Farage, whatever you think of his policies and suitability to govern, is undoubtedly a skilled communicator, with his rhetoric straight out of the Trumpian playbook. And he is tapping into an ever-growing sense of disillusionment amongst Britain’s working class, who feel abandoned by Labour and other left-wing parties.
So, why has this happened? How has immigration become such a chink in the left’s political armour? The answer lies in an often-overlooked, fundamental difference in the philosophies of the two dominant left-wing political ideologies: Liberalism and Socialism. In the most basic terms, Liberalism is concerned with the individual; it promotes personal freedom and therefore strongly champions tolerance and diversity. Socialism, in contrast, is more interested in the collective; it stands for equality and fair distribution of state resources.
The two often overlap in terms of typical policies, but they are in no way the same thing. And this is perhaps most obvious in approaches to immigration: liberals would traditionally be in favour, due to the core belief that anyone is welcome to come and make a life for themselves wherever they so choose. It’s far less of a natural fit for socialists, as when viewed as a general issue, rather than individual cases, there is no guarantee that increased immigration is a positive for the state as a whole, and certainly not for the typical, working-class socialist worker.
This has led to a confused, neither-one-thing-nor-the-other stance towards immigration by leftist parties, which the current government are continuing to follow, by first toughening visa rules and then agreeing to a ‘youth mobility scheme’ with the EU a week later. Just as net migration has been confirmed as coming down by half, there are concerns it’s about to go straight back up again. And there is one social group that this issue affects most:
Little quotes Stephen Webb, Head of the Policy Exchange think tank, who says “[poorer, working-class people] have been ahead of the political, media class on this, because it was their areas that saw the most dramatic change, far sooner than the rest of us really realised what was happening. That’s where the migrants went.”
Whatever your own approach to immigration is, it is a fact that if immigrants had been coming into the country and taking jobs from top executives, lawyers and bankers, the issue would have been addressed a long time ago. Instead, because typically immigrants tended to be (and I know this is a huge generalisation) rivalling British workers for less well-paid, manual jobs, it became an issue that the ‘political class’ could conveniently ignore.
Or at least they could until 2016, when people who had felt marginalised by rising immigration used the Brexit vote as their opportunity to ‘take back control’, sending shockwaves through the political system and bringing the immigration issue to the forefront of the national consciousness, where it has remained ever since.
I appreciate there is an elephant in the room here. It’s impossible to talk about immigration without being pulled into a more uncomfortable discussion around racism. And let’s not ignore the fact that a lot of those people who are staunchly anti-immigration feel that way because of some unfair, deeply ingrained prejudices. Our job as rational, open-minded people is to try and interrogate these arguments, and attempt to distinguish between the shameless, blatant bigotry and the fair, insightful viewpoints, of which there are plenty. Dismissing all cautionary approaches to immigration as racist is unhelpful, and only provokes further division.
The left’s immigration blind-spot has been further explored by David Leonhardt, Editorial Director at the New York Times, who says “Over the last half-century or so, the political left in both Europe and the United States has become much less class-based. It has become more elite, it’s become more intellectual, and it has become more based on racial groups. And so as part of these changes, the left has just become much, much more favourable to immigration.”
It doesn’t have to be this way. There is a prime example of a leftist party currently governing a progressive, democratic country in Europe who have a very stringent policy on immigration: the Social Democrats in Denmark. After the latest in a string of election defeats in 2015, the party led by Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen changed its strategy towards immigration and pursued one of the strictest approaches within Europe, with key policies including family reunification rules being tightened, deportation practices being increased, and social benefit payments for asylum seekers being lowered. They have now been in government since 2019, and have otherwise maintained an extremely liberal mandate, with free education, increased abortion access and aggressive pro-climate change policies being just a few examples.
The policy hasn’t been without controversy (but then what government policy is…) but the rationale behind it is, as Frederiksen herself has said is: “High levels of immigration hurts lower income workers in our society. And we, as social democrats, define ourselves as defending the interests of lower income, working class people in Denmark.”
Frederiksen continued to say something even more interesting and pertinent: “Being a traditional social democratic thinker means you cannot allow everyone who wants to join your society to come. It’s impossible to have a sustainable society, especially if you are a welfare society as we are.”
Data from Denmark backs up this stance, with Webb agreeing that “many recent migrants to [Denmark] are a ‘fiscal drain’ – meaning they receive more money via public services than they contribute in taxes.” He adds: “If you assume that the position is probably the same in the UK, and it’s hard to see why it will be different, and you look at the kind of migration we’ve been getting, it seems likely that we’ve been importing people who are indeed going to be a very, very major net cost.”
For balance, a study by the University of Oxford’s Migration Observatory concludes that “a migrant arriving at age 25 and earning the UK average earnings has a more positive lifetime fiscal contribution than a UK-born worker on the same salary, because the UK does not pay the cost of education and other public services they received during childhood.” This essentially indicates that higher-skilled immigrants actually boost the UK economically, but lower-skilled immigrants actively drain it.
We should never ignore or downplay the benefits of immigration; migrants play essential roles in crucial industries such as healthcare and technology, helping to sustain services and driving innovation, bringing in new perspectives and ideas. Adopting the kind of extreme, ‘freeze-all’ approach that Reform advocates is not the answer: all evidence suggests that would actually harm the economy and British society in the long run, to say nothing of how they would actually be able to enforce this without creating some fairly abhorrent, apocalyptic images in the process.
However, if the left doesn’t wake up and attempt to re-align and clarify its position on immigration, those policies are going to be exactly what we get. And whilst Starmer and Labour’s latest attempts might seem like a move in that direction, they need to develop some clear, logical messaging to support it. And they should look to positive examples like Denmark on how to do it. Otherwise, they will forever be trapped in the political no man’s land of trying to please everyone whilst only managing to please no-one at all.
Immigration should no longer be the issue that continually undermines and hinders the political left, but should instead serve as a perfect opportunity for them to implement and evidence their progressive, collectivist aims. If they do, it will go from clipping their wings to allowing them to soar to new heights.
George F Brown 