Thoughts after Beckett – Part 3: immigration & welfare

Following on from the release of the Beckett Report into Labour’s 2015 election defeat, I’ve already blogged this week on two of the most commented-on issues (leadership and economic trust). Today, I move onto valence issues, specifically Labour’s disconnect with the public on widely-held anxieties around immigration and welfare.

Labour is used to thinking of itself as the natural people’s party on all manner of day-to-day concerns, but both the public in general and Labour’s natural working-class base have a strong small c-conservative streak in their attitudes to immigration and benefits. Immigration in particular has been a key driver of Labour’s loss of support to UKIP, while both were among the issues that led to the unexpected direct loss of 2010 Labour voters to the Conservatives in 2015. Meanwhile, Labour’s disproportionately young and middle-class urbanite membership tends to be significantly more left-liberal in its attitudes and has a tendency to dismiss public concern over these matters, a dynamic that the current changes in our membership and the related election of Jeremy Corbyn is now entrenching. Ed Miliband did make efforts to bridge the gap between party and public opinion, but these were inconsistent and failed to cut through with the voters they targeted (as well as alienating more liberal voices). 

On welfare, stressing the living wage and controls on rents as a way to cut the benefits bill has become part of Labour’s language, a step in the right direction, but this does not get to the crux of the issue, which is to do with a fundamental disconnect in attitudes to perceived abuses. It is true that research shows that the public tends to significantly overestimate the amount of recorded abuse in the system and the amount spent on Jobseekers’ Allowance, but this only gives rise to a liberal itch to seek to correct the public with statistics that will seem dissonant from what they feel are their experiences. Some on the left argue we should fight back by instead focusing on populist outrage against abuses at the top like bankers’ bonuses, but this is a false dichotomy – the public are generally angry about both anyway. Others have suggested using emotive stories that put a left-wing perspective across, something Yvette Cooper attempted during the leadership election with a very engaging personal story about time she spent on incapacity benefit in her youth due to ill-health. However, in practice this tactic is not new, and is regularly utilised by Labour frontbenchers in their conference speeches - it’s just that most other attempts at it fall flat (‘Gareth on Hampstead Heath’ etc).

Instead, Labour should consider accepting public concern at face value and simply addressing it, as it cannot be denied that there is still some dysfunction in the welfare system. The type of left-liberal preoccupation with the Overton window that classifies all concerns as playing into the ‘Tory narrative’ in practice simply cedes the issue to the Tories, and allows them to use it as a smokescreen to cut the safety net that Labour built and that the British public are genuinely happy to pay for. Conversely, adopting a narrative in favour of a renewed contributory link (described frankly by the Guardian’s John Harris as an “undeveloped idea” that is “probably the only way out of the mess”) will align us with the public’s innate feeling that rights must sometimes matched with responsibilities, and allow them to once again trust the welfare state they pay into.

Further, while the Tories also badly need to be held to account on welfare, Labour must prosecute their record in a way that does maximal damage to them. While it is morally right that we hold IDS to account for barbaric cuts to disability benefit and suspected deaths linked to benefits sanctions, I fear that aspects of the Tories’ record here are so extreme that frontal attacks on this alone may not work. In 2012, Democratic focus groups discovered that Mitt Romney’s actual right-wing policies were surprisingly hard to exploit, because swing voters perceived him to be moderate and found objective statements about the scale of his planned tax concessions to the wealthiest and cuts to public programmes implausible – the same may be true here. Meanwhile, it is the false perception that the Tories are effective that gives them their political strength – here, we could’ve hit them by pointing out that their £5bn Work Programme reforms were criticised as “worse than doing nothing”. If we can convince voters that the Tories are neither competent nor compassionate, overseeing a system failing to help those that could work and those that cannot alike, there is no case for them.

Something similar is again true on immigration. The British left is not alone in struggling to defend our immigration system – it is an issue in every Western nation. As much as anything, this comes down to the fact that the human instinct to feel unsettled by new arrivals and cultural changes is fairly hard-wired. In the face of this, we must seek to acknowledge both the prize and price of immigration. 

At our best, Britain is a world-facing country and there is a strong case to be made that immigration is a net positive for Britain as whole - young migration balances out our ageing population, migrants contribute to our economy and public services like the NHS have long been strengthened by them. EU free movement is difficult, but Britons can be made to recognise the benefits in terms of trade and their own rights to work and travel elsewhere. We must always speak up on all of this.

However, this does not give Labour carte blanche to ignore anxiety and the genuine trade-offs that many communities experience. Labourites in London and other metropolitan areas need to remember the different conditions in the rest of country, as it benefits no one when loudmouthed liberal absolutism in the national media stifles local parties elsewhere in their attempts to engage people (and I say that as a member of Islington South CLP). And it is not just the Labour left to whom this advice applies, but many Blairites too – Labour pollster James Morris was right when he said that the need to genuinely empathise with concerns is “a challenge to the economic right of the party that sees people worried about immigration as Luddites; and a challenge to the liberal left who see them as morally degenerate”.

We should be pragmatic on overall numbers and firm about border security and initial benefit entitlements (the latter being another part of the contributory principle, which reassures those already here). We were right to pledge wage enforcement to stop British workers being undercut, not least because this isn’t fair to hard-working immigrants either. We should highlight more often (or ever, to be honest) that Labour introduced Britain’s Australian-style Points-based System in 2008, and we should make clear that integration and a common language benefits both society as a whole and the migrants themselves (it benefits no one to be cut off from skilled employment and services).

Running through all of this is a dose of straight-talking honest politics, really. The public’s suspicions about some of the things wrong with welfare and immigration aren’t completely off, and so the liberal left simply has to stop nit-picking about stats and the Overton window and avoid getting wrapped up in pretentions to enlightenment as excuses to be above engaging (not least because we end up getting defeated electorally when we do). And overall, on both issues the public are fundamentally reasonable – they will give the left a fair hearing, so long as we acknowledge their concerns first.