In the early days of Covid, people lost it. Not a few people; most people. I remember an anarchist friend telling me we should do what the Spanish were doing, and send tanks on to the street to police our house arrest. Within a few months, he was breaking the law to attend illegal raves. A few years on, and almost nobody is willing to own up to the authoritarian spasm that seized us in those first febrile weeks.
I believe support for recent governments’ immigration policy was another such spasm. Sensible people are quickly forgetting that they ever thought the arrival of nearly a million people (as the recently released net migration figures show occurred last year) was anything other than a peculiarly Tory form of free-market insanity. As with Covid, there will be a few final maskers, still disinfecting their shopping bags years after the world has moved on, like Michel Houellebecq’s soixante-huitards, “those progressive mummified corpses – extinct in the wider world – who managed to hang on in the citadels of the media, still cursing the evils of the times and the toxic atmosphere of the country”. But the mood has shifted.
Keir Starmer’s speech yesterday (5 December) showed that the Labour Party may be recovering from its own such spasm. Starmer reiterated his commitment to reducing immigration “legal and illegal” because “that is what working people want”. This comes a week after, in a rare memorable turn, he described Britain under the Conservatives as a “one-nation open borders experiment”. Starmer will not be the last; I expect all manner of unlikely weather vanes to follow suit. People will forget their own role as cheerleaders for a policy that added six Oxfords to the population last year alone – the overwhelming majority of it falling on England, the most densely populated major country in Europe after the Netherlands. So be it: the immigration policy of Boris Johnson was madder, and stranger, than the prospect of tanks on the street, and late is better than never.
There was a time when the usual back-and-forth arguments about immigration made some sense. Declining birth rates, a shortage of workers in the care sector – and who’s going to pick our strawberries? That time no longer exists. Both the qualitative and quantitative nature of immigration has changed much too much and much too quickly since then. The scale of the arrivals has produced a hydra of competing social problems: the repression of wages in social care thanks to the care-worker visa; the transformation of British higher education into a Ponzi racket; the sheer numerical demand placed upon housing and public services.
Like Australia and Canada, other countries that have broken records for levels of immigration in recent years, our spasm has coincided with a trend of declining GDP per capita. Starmer is right that the borders were opened to “cover up the extent of economic stagnation”, but the cover-up just piled misery upon misery. People are beginning to realise that their diminishing quality of life has something to do with introducing an extraordinary number of people to the population in a short period of time. Already the whispering – among young liberals and left-wingers both inside and outside of politics – has started, and legitimising this observation.
Over the summer, I met a young couple who’d left Britain for Copenhagen. They were so relieved to live somewhere civilised, where nasty conversations about immigration didn’t dominate the media. Labour’s path to the sunlit uplands is via Denmark, following the example of their Social Democrats in enforcing sensible immigration controls. If Labour can do what every government since 1992 – including this one – has been elected to do, and subsequently failed to do, we can be a normal country again.
None of this requires a compromise with Labour principles. Left-wing scepticism about mass immigration stretches back through the Labour left all the way to Marx. And while Tony Blair inaugurated the first wave of mass immigration, it is only in the past few years that restrictions have been recast as authoritarian or right wing. The House of Commons’ all-party parliamentary group on balanced migration, which was functioning until at least 2014, advocated an approach in which the number of immigrants and emigrants in any given year was roughly equal – net zero, in other words. Frank Field was the secretary, and it included those traditionally associated with the liberal wing of both main parties, such as Labour’s Tristram Hunt and Conservatives Nicholas Soames and Tobias Ellwood. This should be no surprise; near-open borders is a libertarian stance that is incompatible with social democracy or liberalism.
Starmer’s speech, then, was a start, if a little threadbare. In typical fashion, it began with a reiteration of the government’s five “missions”, before outlining the three “strong foundations” necessary for achieving six “milestones” (distinct, crucially, from the six “first steps”). Governance is prose, after all. Immigration was relegated (or promoted?) to one of the three strong foundations, and Starmer repeatedly pushed back on “gimmicks” like numerical targets. Immigration is likely to decline next year, largely due to changes introduced by the last government: making it harder to bring “dependants” on a student visa, and raising the income threshold for the work visa (a process that the Home Secretary Yvette Cooper misguidedly paused after Labour’s election). The fear is that Labour will rest on its laurels, and herald a return to immigration in the mid-hundreds of thousands as a return to normalcy. This would be a mistake.
Instead, Starmer must be prepared to go further, and to do so will have to face down entrenched interests: Treasury orthodoxy, a recalcitrant civil service, businesses lobbying for cheap labour, and a few misguided activists, those last soixante-huitards. Some of those around him know what lies ahead, and the Prime Minister last week was right to warn of the “obstacles and blockers – maybe even protests” – to come. But there are some ostensibly left-wing things only a right-wing government can do – think of the previous government’s stealth nationalisation of certain railway lines, or of Britain becoming the first major country to introduce net zero laws under Theresa May. And there are some ostensibly right-wing things only a left-wing government can do. If Starmer follows through with this, he will have a battle on his hands – but the country will be with him.
[See also: Staff react with fury to the Observer sale]
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