Labour must not fuel fears and insecurities over immigration

By Owen Jones / @jonesythered

After its second worst defeat in post-war Britain, Labour has two options for winning back the largely working-class voters who deserted it at the ballot box. Either it provides answers to their fears and insecurities, or it fuels them. Depressingly, Rob Williams plumps for the latter.

Let’s get one thing straight: the anti-immigration backlash in this country is real. Polls consistently show that a majority of people think there is too much immigration. We face the disturbing apparent contradiction of the most successful racist party in British history flourishing even when all the evidence shows that racist attitudes are weaker and less widespread than ever. But the reasons are far more complex than Rob would have us believe.

I’m sure it’s a story familiar to every Labour activist. On one chilly day canvassing in North West London earlier this year, I encountered a middle-aged woman with a lot on her mind. “My son can’t get a job,” she said angrily. “But there are all these immigrants coming in and they’re getting all the jobs. There are too many immigrants!” But there was a twist. I had to listen carefully to what she was saying – because she had a thick Bengali accent.

The great 21st century anti-immigrant backlash was, above all, born from New Labour’s refusal to address working-class frustrations at the consequences of unfettered free market fundamentalism. There aren’t enough affordable homes to go round – with or without immigrants – because the Tories and New Labour refused to replace council housing stock depleted by Thatcher’s right-to-buy policies. The result? Five million people languishing on social housing waiting lists. Housing shortages are caused by the failure to build – not foreign-born people (who make up just one in twenty social tenants) taking the diminishing stock. At the same time, successive governments allowed millions of skilled manufacturing jobs to vanish. In much of the old industrial heartland they were replaced by fewer, poorer quality, and badly paid jobs.

As the battle for ever scarcer resources intensified, politicians and media commentators who aimed fire at immigrants enjoyed more of a hearing. Because the far-reaching social reforms necessary to increase good jobs and affordable homes were kept off the agenda, demands to prioritise what little there was ‘for people like us’ seemed to many to be little more than commonsense.

A few months ago, I interviewed a range of people in the former BNP stronghold of Barking and Dagenham. Thousands of skilled jobs at the old Ford plant have gone, the housing crisis is acute, and there has been a bigger influx of immigrants than anywhere else in the capital. With no other explanations on offer, all local issues were seen through a racial prism. “They’re getting the houses, and our people, our children can’t get the houses,” one retired care worker told me. “Foreigners come in here and get places… I never got that. My children never got it.” As one local trade union official told me: “I think if Labour would have carried on building houses in this area, you wouldn’t have half the trouble with the BNP.”

This is not to deny that immigration has not had an impact on jobs and wages. One 2008 study by economists from Oxford University and the Bank of England found that it was those in the semi-skilled and unskilled service sector who felt the squeeze. According to their estimates, a 10% rise in the proportion of immigrants would take their wages down by 5%. But rather than sealing our borders, we can deal with this by introducing a living wage and preventing foreign workers being hired on poorer terms and conditions.

Politicians and the media have used immigration-bashing as a smokescreen. In the years before the recession hit, corporate profits were booming but wages were already stagnating for the bottom half of workers. In the case of the bottom third, wage packets were actually shrinking. The lack of trade union rights and the consequences of globalisation were far bigger explanations than immigration – but mainstream politicians did not want to ask questions that challenged some of the most basic assumptions of neo-liberalism. Instead, they focused attention on an issue that has a much smaller impact but has the advantage of appealing to people’s prejudices, as well as enjoying the vociferous backing of the right-wing tabloids.

Sure, it’s not all economics. If you’ve lived in a homogenously white community all of your life and have had little interaction with other cultures, a sudden influx of immigrants can be disorientating or even alarming. But history shows that this hostility dissipates as mixing takes place. Take Hackney, where I live: it was a stomping ground for the National Front in the 1970s, but the far-right barely exist today in one of the country’s most diverse boroughs.

Rob Williams claims that the left has failed to take a stand against the cultural practices of some immigrants. I have to say that I am unaware of anyone on the left who has made a defence of “honour killings”. Of course brutality must be opposed regardless of its source. But the left is quite right to challenge the arguments made by many bigoted right-wingers that horrors such as “honour killings” are representative of wider communities. Take a 2007 Gallup poll that revealed that 49 out of every 50 British Muslims surveyed opposed the barbarous practice. Similarly, the left should support women of all backgrounds fighting for their rights, but not in ways that are counterproductive and make people defensive. When Jack Straw railed against the veil as a “visible statement of separation” he not only triggered an outpouring of tabloid Islamophobia – sales of the veil in his constituency shot up.

Rob also questions multiculturalism, and there are certainly progressive objections that can be made to how it has been implemented. Faith schools, for instance, represent an appalling attempt to segregate children. And, while it has been fashionable to understand inequality in racial terms, class has been tossed to one side. This has encouraged white working-class people to develop notions of ethnic pride similar to minority groups, encouraging some to build an identity based on race to gain recognition in multicultural society. The BNP has tapped into this disastrous redefining of white working-class people as, effectively, another marginalised ethnic minority.

But while Rob Williams is right that we must take the threat of the far-right seriously, we cannot fight them by capitulating to their agenda or by allowing them to define the terms of the debate. By doing so, we simply legitimise what they say and end up boosting their support.

Because of the failure of New Labour to give answers to market-driven housing shortages and a lack of good jobs, immigrant-bashing has filled the vacuum. We need to talk about building council housing; providing skilled jobs through an industrial strategy; introducing a living wage; strengthening workers’ rights – all things that will take the intensity out of the anti-immigration backlash. Let’s focus our fire at tax evasion by the wealthy which costs our country £70 billion; at companies upping sticks to exploit cheaper workers in poor countries; and at the fact this year the top 1,000 richest Britons saw their wealth rise by a third while everyone else was facing pay freezes and job cuts. Let’s not turn the victims of neo-liberalism against each other.

After all, we’ve already seen public sector workers and benefit recipients scapegoated for an economic crisis caused by the greed of the bankers. Are we really suggesting adding immigrants to the list?