A vision for the future of Britain is better than a strategy for tomorrow’s polls

“It would be much better if the foreigners be kept out.”

So said Keir Hardie.

This came as Hardie vented his complaints about Lithuanian workers who had come to Scotland in the late 1800s to take up work in the mines of Lanarkshire and West Lothian.

I have no problem admitting Hardie is one of my political idols, but he was wrong about many things. This was one of them.

“Their habits are very filthy,” he added, “six or seven males occupying a one-bedroom house.”

Hardie was making the same arguments that many are making today. From our party, and others.

He was eventually proven wrong. Wrong about migrant workers having a negative impact on employment. Wrong about their inability to integrate into local communities. Wrong, of course, about their “filthy” habits.

And the irony was that he was proven wrong in large part thanks to the thing he held so dear: our movement.

Because once the new arrivals began settling, it was our movement that reached out to them. Trade unions began taking the Lithuanian workers into membership. And, through their membership, the people began to be accepted. They were then able to send their children to school. Churches made provision for them. And Scots helped print newspapers that communicated to the new community.

War interrupted this archetypally British flow of acceptance and integration. But the remnants of it continued to enrich the nation. Two of Scotland’s most famous sons are descendants of those migrants, and there is poetic beauty in their achievements. Sir Matt Busby single-mindedly insisted that his Manchester United team enter the European Cup, despite English football looking upon it unenthusiastically. And the year before Busby’s 1968 triumph in the competition, Billy McNeill captained Celtic’s “Lisbon Lions” to the title of European champions, becoming the first Brit to lift the trophy.

Both men descended from Lithuanian migrants to Scotland. Both refused to adhere to the spirit of isolation that was so prominent in their trade at the time.

Aside from those footballing feats, what is most striking about how the Lithuanians became accepted and then integrated is that the process revolved around work.

And so we come to today. Where European immigrants are being scapegoated as Britain picks itself up from financial collapse.

Let’s be frank: our response has been disappointing. We’ve had senior party figures in the press apologising for immigrants. We’ve had our past record trashed for apparently being detrimental to British workers – a record, as John Hutton and Alan Milburn recently noted, that saw the employment rate for British-born adults astonishingly exceed 73% in every quarter for an entire decade until 2008. And we’ve heard migrant workers seemingly blamed for being paid badly by exploitative employers.

I joined this party because of its vision for Britain’s future and every person who wanted to play their part in the creation of that future. People like the eastern European immigrants who contribute 37% more in taxes than the public services they consume. People like the Somalis in my home city of Cardiff, who work unsociable hours in the night and enrich the community with their social ties in the day. Or people like my Slovakian friend who came to Cardiff to work as a bar back collecting glasses in the bar I supervised. She worked harder than anyone else in the building, and ended up climbing the ranks to run a bar of her own in Soho 5 years later.

Whatever way you look at it – on a macro level, a local community level, or an individual level – you will find overwhelmingly that immigrants contribute positively to this country, and the foundation of their acceptance and integration to this day, like with the Lithuanians in 19th century Scotland, is labour.

Turning our backs on this history would be perilous.

Morally, it is wrong for us to pander to the scapegoating. The dog-whistle politics propagated by Ukip is not for us. In Britain, we welcome the stranger. And politically, it will bite us in the backside. As we’ve seen in America, when you ignore the realities of demographic change in politics, you die. Much has been made of the “red island” of London, but even the astonishing efficiency of local London organising will be unable to stop the backlash if we pander to the rhetoric of the right on immigration.

It’s time for Labour to lead. Reactionary conservatism is not going to work, and nor should we want it to. Not if we want a vision for the future of Britain, rather than just a strategy for tomorrow’s polls. The rhetoric has to change.

We should be proud of the Britain we have helped to create with our management of immigration. We should be proud of the people who have prospered and helped Britain prosper thanks to that management.

And if we don’t change, the world will move on without us. Sadly for those trying to ride waves of social conservatism, the waves of human endeavour and progress always come crashing down from a greater height eventually.