New Times,
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27 January 2014updated 28 Jun 2021 4:46am

Yes, Labour “got it wrong” about immigration, but not in the way its frontbenchers seem to think

The Labour leader, it seems, is willing to apologise only for being too soft on immigration and immigrants, not for being too tough.

By Mehdi Hasan

Enough with the apologies. Week after week, senior Labour figures queue up to express regret over the party’s record on immigration. Ed Miliband thinks “low-skill migration has been too high and we need to bring it down”. Jon Cruddas, Labour’s policy review co-ordinator, claims the party “got things wrong” on immigration. The former foreign secretary Jack Straw believes opening the UK’s borders to eastern European migrants was a “spectacular mistake” that he “deeply regrets”.

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