Immigration and the leadership debate: Time for a reality check

By Declan Gaffney

An open discussion of migration is one thing. Allowing it to dominate the most important debate on Labour’s future since 1994 is quite another.

All of the main leadership candidates have placed immigration at the centre of their pitches to the party membership, and while they have framed the subject in slightly different ways, all seem to agree on two points: that Eastern European migration from 2004 had negative effects on employment and earnings for lower income resident workers; and that failing to respond convincingly to anxieties about immigration among middle and lower income groups made a major contribution to Labour’s defeat.

This is not the place for another rehearsal of the economic arguments about the labour market impact of migration, which have been well covered elsewhere. The problem is not so much that Labour’s main leadership candidates are showing a poor grasp of economics, if that is the case. It is that they are concentrating on migration at the expense of longstanding negative features of the UK labour market which merit no less open and frank discussion.

Even those who feel that economists tend to look at migration through rose-tinted spectacles don’t think that immigration by Eastern European workers has a dominant role in explaining the problems of low pay, labour market exclusion, precarious employment and income poverty, which were familiar long before the summer of 2004. These issues are, or should be, of central importance for Labour, but apart from warm words about Living Wage campaigns, they have featured in the leadership debate mainly as supporting material for arguments on migration – surely an inversion of the priorities this debate requires.

Similarly, however badly immigration may have played ‘on the doorstep’ in May 2010 – and there are dissenting views on this – Labour’s problem with its vote share among lower income groups precedes the major increases in migration of recent years.

This chart shows how Labour’s vote share has shifted over time among different socio-economic groups, using estimates from Ipsos-MORI. After 1997 Labour shed the votes of the low income DE demographic in three consecutive elections. On MORI’s figures, by 2005, its share was already lower than it had been in 1992: Eastern European migration won’t do as an explanation here. Among C2 voters, the position is no better, although the decline in Labour’s share only became serious in 2005. Significant shifts by C2’s to the LibDems in both 2005 and 2010 indicate that this was not a simple a lurch to the right.

By May 2010 Labour had not only lost all the gains it made among these groups in 1997: it had lost all the gains it had made since 1983. And in May 2010 Labour was not losing votes to a breakaway party, or tearing itself apart internally.

The main reason Labour didn’t do even worse in terms of the popular vote in May 2010 is that the Conservatives failed yet again to make a breakthrough among more affluent demographics. It is worth reminding ourselves of how catastrophic 1997 was for the Tories’ relationship with what had previously been the bedrock of their support. In 1992, they held 54% of votes in the ABC1 demographics; in 1997 this was down to 39%, which is also the share they won in 2010. The Conservatives have never recovered from their loss of better-off voters in 1997. But they have regained the share of low income voters they held in 1992.

These figures point to two major challenges Labour faces over the next few years. It needs to understand how it managed to hand so much of its electoral support among lower income voters back to the Tories during its period in government and take action to redress these losses; and it needs to retain and build on its support among better off voters, where it will be competing with the LibDems far more than the Conservatives. Continuing to adopt an exaggerated focus on migration will distract attention from these tasks. Migration may have its place in the debate on Labour’s future. But the debate on Labour’s future can not be a debate on migration.

Chart data from Ipsos-MORI