Let’s talk about immigration – on Blunkett and Glasman

David Blunkett’s stark warning that the Labour Party needs to take care not to pander to xenophobia in its approach to immigration offers the latest expression of concern about how Labour has struggled to work out what to think, say or do about immigration since losing office last year.

As Blunkett warns the party of “swinging from one extreme to another” by flirting with a populist message that “Britain is full”, the first instinct of some liberal-left voices has been to question whether the former Home Secretary can be an authentic advocate of this message.

“This from a man who, as education secretary, accused asylum seeker children of ‘swamping’ our schools” was the quickfire twitter response of New Statesman political editor Mehdi Hasan last week, following the RSA debate on immigration organized by the Migration Museum project last week at which Blunkett first expressed his concern about the increasingly restrictionist Labour discussion of immigration. (The discussion, which I chaired, can be heard at the RSA website).

Indeed, Blunkett anticipates that reaction in a Guardian commentary expanding his point:’Physician, heal thyself’, I can hear some say. Blunkett’s account of his own time in office is that he was seeking to balance a need to acknowledge public concerns and offer reassurance about the need for control with a positive case for the benefits of managed migration as being in Britain’s interests. His critics might respond that, if that was the intention, the nuances often got lost in the heat of public debate about immigration and asylum.

But it surely makes no strategic or political sense now for liberal voices to reject an opportunity to broaden their alliances, unless the priority is to contest the battles of a decade ago. Surely, Blunkett’s history of being willing to ruffle feathers by talking tough, and his non-metropolitan roots in working-class Sheffield, make his warning against the temptation to outflank the Conservatives to the right on migration rather more effective precisely because it comes from an unusual suspect. Once David Blunkett fears the party’s discourse on immigration is losing a sense of balance, then people might sit up and listen.

Blunkett is careful to differentiate his charge of xenophobia from one of racism:

This is not racism. That is why I use the term xenophobia. It has moved from a perfectly reasonable desire to ensure that we have tough border controls – sensible and rigorous policies that don’t allow individuals or families to exploit immigration rules – into a situation where some people seem to be saying that Britain is full.

That is important. The very last thing we need, from any quarter, would be another debate which gets stuck around the absurd proposition that any discussion of immigration at all risks lapsing into racism.

However, a potential danger with the xenophobia warning is that it could reopen a stale and futile discussion about whether the party can talk about immigration or not. This is now habitually called the “Mrs Duffy problem”. Blunkett is very clear that this is not his intention – and that immigration must be a legitimate theme of public and political debate and challenge:

by all means let’s hear and respond to the cries for help of people whose livelihoods are threatened and whose way of life seems to be undermined by both change and the emergence of difference in lifestyle, in language and, yes, in faith.

This willingness to address both the positive and negative features was indeed a feature of last week’s RSA/Migration Museum debate on the changing nature of migration. David Blunkett was not the only speaker to challenge his audience’s preconceptions of his position. While the former Home Secretary Blunkett warned against the scale of the restrictionist shift in public debate, it was liberal Guardian columnist Sarfraz Manzoor who was expressed most anxiety about the need to take integration more seriously, demonstrating that liberal voices are capable of engaging with both the positive contribution of migration and the difficult challenges it can present to policy-makers and society.

In one sense, Blunkett could be said to be now fighting a phantom enemy. The most high-profile remarks on immigration were Maurice Glasman’s apparent advocacy of a ban on all immigration, temporarily at least, last summer.

Those comments were quickly retracted after they generated rather more attention than their author seemed to have anticipated. Glasman said “I overstated the position. I was not talking about what should happen”. Nor have any other centre-left advocates of an immigration “pause” ever explained what they mean or how this could possibly work in practice.

The other thinkers most closely associated with Blue Labour, such as Jon Cruddas, Marc Stears, Jonathan Rutherford and others, were as hard-hitting as Blunkett in their public and private reactions to Glasman’s immigration advocacy is set out in chapter and verse in Rowenna Davis’ new book ‘Tangled up in blue’ on the rise of the blue Labour phenomenon

There were multiple and overlapping reasons for the depth of these concerns: a fear of the social as well as political consequences of embarking on what Jon Cruddas feared would become a ‘race to the bottom’ on immigration; the damage done to Blue Labour’s own political prospects were it to narrow itself into a reactionary caricature of its own platform, not least that its central economic messages were crowded out of public discourse; and concerns about the relationships within a project which defined itself as primarily relational, if the personal reputations of Glasman’s allies were publicly associated with views they strongly rejected.

Davis’ account shows that this existential crisis of Blue Labour was as much about method as the content of the immigration argument. It became clear to its champions that the meteoric rise of blue Labour would fizzle out all too predictably if it remained so heavily a guru-led brand, developed through media provocations, and could not deepen into a more substantive political project seeking to broaden its coalitions of support while turning gut instincts into an agenda for change.

So it is good that Blue Labour has now survived its media storm and relational crisis. Whatever flag it sails under, most thinking observers will agree that Labour needs a politics of belonging and identity, which seeks to make an authentic connection with the emotional as well as the rational parts of our political brains. Glasman, after a reflective summer of silence, was back on form at the launch of the Davis book in Peckham Library last Wednesday. (Glasman took a characteristic swipe at Labour’s Oxford PPE tendency, despite that including both the author of the new Blue Labour chronicle and the Labour Party leader, in what might seem to many a narcissism of small differences since Glasman is a Cambridge history graduate himself).

Anybody who knows Maurice Glasman must surely know that he does not have a racist bone in his body. His work with London Citizens is testimony to that too, given Glasman’s leading role in promoting living wage campaigns, and indeed his support of the publicly unpopular proposal to create routes to legality for long-standing residents who live in the shadow economy.

But “xenophobia” is still a pretty tough charge.

Fear of the foreign is probably over-doing it. But fear of difference and particularly “fear of change” might be closer to the mark. For the reason that Glasman, despite the furore of last summer, has immediately returned to the question of immigration this Autumn is because he does have a profound and deeply held concern that the scale and pace of population change presents an existential threat to society and the possibility of democracy.

This is a recurring theme of Glasman’s public advocacy. He told the Guardian in a summer interview that:

“We’ve got enormous diversity, enormous pluralism, it’s time to renew our common life, our common law. Businesses should be able to bring in people that they need, but by invitation only. My theory is about renewing solidarity and vocation, and if there’s this endless churn of people then we’re all at sea and there is no possibility of real politics.”

This strikes me as far too pessimistic. It could become a counsel of despair, and so slip into a politics which risks articulating the grievances of those who fear being left behind by change, but combining this with a fatalism about whether anything could really be done.

Of course, Glasman accepts that the diversity of modern Britain is an ineradicable fact. If he is to have a constructive contemporary project in the Britain of 2011, then this would have to reject an existential fear that the levels of diversity of London today are incompatible with his politics of a common good. To argue that would be to suggest that the greatest achievements of the politics of association, such as the London Citizens’ campaigns for a Living Wage, should have been impossible, because they took root and generated new solidarities in the most diverse communities in Britain, and not in those which are most settled and which have experienced least flux.

Our history suggests that should not have been a surprise. The strongest local, urban identities forged in the era of industrialization were created not in those areas which were most settled but in those, like Manchester, which saw most flux. These sites of urban migration were the places where there were identity gaps to fill, and new identities were forged to fill them. This will not, in our times, happen by magic. It is the task of politics. But to argue that the scale of diversity undermines the possibility of politics is to give up in advance.

It is clear that Blue Labour is going to need to engage with immigration, but that it is struggling to find the language and agenda which enables it to offer a constructive engagement and response to the real world economic and cultural anxieties which motivate its interest in the issue. It would be an extremely unsatisfactory outcome if the lesson was for blue Labour to simply keep views on immigration unspoken, rather playing into the mythology that the subject is taboo in public and political debate.

The central question to work through is how to effectively address economic insecurity, particularly at the toughest part of the labour market. Blunkett also flags up a forthcoming Centre for Social Justice report on the nature of the modern sub-economy. The centre-right’s engagement with these social justice themes demonstrates an opportunity to build broad alliances over issues of dignity at work on the type of common good platform.

The need to tackle the exploitation of the undocumented which facilitates the undercutting of honest employers, and so risks facilitating a race to the bottom, has also been a central theme of the TUC’s research and advocacy.

Here is an issue which could bring Blunkett and the advocates of blue Labour together as part of a broader coalition. Out of disagreement, there could be an opportunity to build relationships and new alliances. Those seeking a politics of the common good should surely at least make the attempt.

*Sunder Katwala is Director of British Future, a new organisation which will launch in the new year, addressing issues of identity, migration, integration and opportunity.