What Blue Labour should say about immigration

By David Barclay

It has been a frustrating week. Just as Ed Miliband reaches a new level of gravitas and Cameron’s credibility is rocking, Blue Labour – the only intellectual show in town in the party’s much-needed search for renewal – has been seriously tainted by Lord Glasman’s hugely controversial remarks to the Telegraph on immigration.

As a party member desperate for some new ideas on the Left and with lots of time for Blue Labour’s core message, this has been an infuriating turn of events, not least because a Blue Labour mindset has a number of really significant and sensible things to say about immigration which Glasman spectacularly failed to articulate amidst one-liners about England not being ‘an outpost of the UN’.

Blue Labour has until now been focussed on creating a politics of the Common Good, and seeing immigration in this light would have a number of significant consequences.

Firstly it would allow Labour to acknowledge that the quantity of migration to the UK is a genuine problem. Uncontrolled migration is not fair to anyone. It’s not fair to the communities up and down the country who feel themselves to have been swamped, but it’s also not fair to the migrants for whom there are not enough resources to allow them to settle here and find a meaningful place in their new community. On this we should challenge the coalition’s shameful cutting of resources to teach English as a second language, but we should also acknowledge that in a time of global economic crisis it takes huge investment to stop mass immigration from leading to a breakdown in community cohesion.

But focussing on the Common Good would allow Labour to go beyond the nonsense numbers game with which the right-wing press is obsessed and who’s only conclusion is the frankly mad policy of the current Government to try to enforce a hard cap on migrant numbers. Immigration shouldn’t be about how many people come here but about what happens when they do. In that respect it’s right for the UK to have high expectations of those who migrate here, for example in making efforts to learn English, because without the ability to communicate there can be no successful forging of a Common Good and no shared public space in which all can contribute and be valued.

Integration, however, is a two-way street. Community organising of the type practiced by London Citizens is all about building relationships of genuine reciprocity, and the UK should view migrants in exactly the same way. Our national identity throughout history has been built on the contributions of diverse people groups and the assimilation of many traditions. If Labour needs any reminder the contribution of migrants and their families to our national life, it just needs to look to it’s leader and his family’s history of fleeing to the UK from the Nazis. To paraphrase Kennedy, it’s not about what our country can do for migrants, its about what migrants can do for us – not just economically but socially and culturally too.

If Glasman had said that he could have challenged both the New Labour zealots desperately trying to justify the last government, and the right-wing press who’s only concern is to create scapegoats and generate social division.

Instead he made himself toxic by seeming to pander to the Right. It is vital now for all those who believe New Labour lost a vision of the Common Good which we desperately need to recapture to step up to the plate and prove that this is not just a one-man band.