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Let my people come: Gordon Brown, New Labour and the non-mystery of immigration

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Immigration’s sorted then. Phew, that was easy. “Just say ‘No’” was the effective Tory policy at the election (though following yesterday’s government equivocations on “capping”, “Just say ‘Maybe’” is more accurate). The Tory immigration campaign won a lot of Labour voters over for pretty obvious reasons to anyone save tree huggers and the denizens of N1.

While for the middle classes migration means cheaper plumbers and nannies, for the working and not working class, immigration is more or less a zero sum game. We can argue over how “essential” many of the migrants are from an economic point of view. We can agree that we need more workers as our society ages to support the aged and the incapacitated – through their tax contributions to the welfare state. But there’s little argument that migrants have taken jobs which would otherwise have gone to what I remember Mr Brown called “British workers”: More than three-quarters of all jobs created in the UK economy under the last government went to migrants, a truly sobering figure – at a time, remember, when the numbers of the domestic workless grew relentlessly, with Neets now at a not-so-cool total of a million.

Blue collar wage rates have also been held back by the influx as migrants, certainly in their first few years, will do the proverbial “more for less”. When you add the impact on house prices and demand – where an increasing population has been competing for a constrained supply, particularly of affordable housing – the down-side of immigration to the UK for those who do not own their own house, do not have a job or only have a low-paid job, is clear.

Yes, migrants add to the variety of a nation and one couldn’t imagine a decent meal or coffee anywhere in the UK without them. But the legacy has been at best divided. And those who lost out were the most in need of economic uplift. How a Labour government brought this about is a mystery. Or maybe not. I suspect the answer is that Mr Brown was a lot more New Labour than his supporters have ever realised.

This was revealed in his infamous response to Mrs Duffy in the campaign. The media thought it showed his “nasty” side. It actually showed his contempt for the traditional British working class whose core identity had been at the heart of the old Labour tradition. So what was New Labour about this response? I believe two things: one, its unquestioning support for the market and neo-liberal thinking on the benefits of the mobility of labour; and two, perhaps more interesting, its slavish embrace of multiculturalism with its linked abhorrence of anything that asserts a British identity, which it readily denounces as “racist”.

Mrs Duffy, from this perspective, by raising concerns about the economic and cultural impact of immigration, was committing the ultimate New Labour heresy: opposing the inevitability of the market and the desirability of creating a post-national rainbow nation in this sceptered isle. Mr Brown used to go on at some length about “Britishness”. In reality, that bit of it he understood, he didn’t like. Nothing he did reinforced that identity and much that he did undermined it.

The neoliberal bit about Brown is often missed. The free marketeers fixated on his petty interferences whilst missing the big picture and the Labour culture deluded itself partly because minor things were done around poverty and a lot of noise was uttered about “values” and “moral compass”.

In fact, Brown did everything asked of him by the City, including massive and dangerous de-regulation and lax corporate taxation rules and the almost total abandonment of restrictions on the movement of labour. Alan Greenspan was Brown’s real hero after all – with just a dash of Rawlsian distributivism to persuade simple folk that Brown remained part of the British centre-left.

Despite those articles and a book he has written (“silly rhymes for simple folk”, as the poet Hugh MacDiarmid said in a similar context) about the Red Clydesiders, he is in fact an American-style centrist with a Scottish predigree which includes Adam Smith, albeit in an idiosyncratic reading. Smith after all thought that the free market’s invisible helping hand applied to all enterprise apart from banking which because of its inherent tendency to corruption and importance to the nation, had to be centrally and strongly controlled by government. Brown seems to have missed that bit.

The multicultural bit about Brown is also missed partly because he seldom talked about it, prefering self-servicing blather about Britishness as a cover for an increasingly diverse multi-national – and not just multi-cultural -reality. By their works know them. As for Englishness, I don’t think I ever heard him say anything, respectful or otherwise, about the senior partner (and, still, most Labour voters) in the Union.

A son of the Scottish Enlightenment and of the Washington Consensus really has very little to say about it. But then he was not alone. It was always clear that Blair’s Cool Britannia was in effect a rejection of historic Britishness and a passionate embrace of a post-national identity for the UK. We forget that New Labour emerged from the collapsed, university-educated Marxist left of the Labour Party and not from its traditional, socially conservative, patriotic, working class right-wing.

The former rejected class politics in favour of “identity politics”, which respected others’ identities far more than that working class on which the party had been built. So much so that when that class started losing out to other groups and indeed migrants in terms of social mobility and access to welfare spending and public services and as a consequence started kicking off about their new out group status, New Labour denounced them as racists. Deprived of leadership and support from their traditional allies that working class was prey to offers of support from the right. The BNP and the Tories have been the beneficiaries.

So deep was all this in Brown’s psyche that he couldn’t share Mrs Duffy’s pain, let alone hear her actually say that despite the pressures from migration locally she remained a Labour voter. He didn’t want her vote unless she bought the whole Brown ideology. The added difficulty he posed for Mrs Duffy of course was that he omitted ever to make his own ideology transparent in what he said. You had to work it out from what he did.

I’d have had more respect for his philosophy and his open door policy on immigration if he’d actually stood up for both and told us why his true objectives for the country were right and necessary. I was willing to hear an articulated view on migration that said, “We cannot get millions back to work as they are lost in multigenerational worklessness and will never emerge. We will really try to transform them but in the meanwhile we need millions to take their place in the economy to support growth and the welfare state. There will be pressures on housing and welfare but bear with us, this is vital. And we will ensure that the migrants really become rooted and indeed British in culture over time – and we will need your help in reaching out to them in this process. This is a planned excercise involving all parts of government and indeed our people”. Instead, nothing. Not even a recognition that a mass movement of people was under way and that de facto it had official support.

The problems to which Mrs Duffy directed Brown him were real. Millions out of work while the country imports millions of workers. Housing and public services creaking at the seams. Tensions between communities experienced more by the working class who live in the stretched northern cities than intellectuals in small town Scotland or bankers in Canary Wharf. I know which side I’m on. Anti-racist but proud of my inheritance. Worried about global inequalities but more concerned about poverty and deprivation in working class communities here. A socialist who believes the market always needs to be directed and constrained and an advocate of an interventionist industrial policy to enure the country makes things to sell (and do R+D around)whilst ensuring jobs for hard pressed communities in the UK. Above all, I’m someone who thinks having 5 million people on benefits whilst jobs were available is a waste of human potential which should have shamed any government claiming to be social democratic .But then, there’s your answer. It wasn’t. He wasn’t.

So what are the Tories and the Push-me Pull-me Lib Dems doing ? Fudging it of course.But then their supporters are not in competition for resources,income and in effect power. The left in power had a responsibility to sort this and didn’t. The right has already buckled under City pressure. Plus ca change.


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