Labour can no longer afford to match Tory rhetoric on immigration

In the heat of the 2010 election, worried that their candidate was going to lose, election agent Joseph Fitzpatrick wrote in an email:

“We need… to explain to the white community how the Asians will take him [Labour MP Phil Woolas] out… If we don’t get the white vote angry he’s gone.”

The white vote was made sufficiently angry, using inflammatory leaflets, that Phil Woolas won re-election, even though he was later found guilty of making false statements about his rival.

Its worth dredging up that quote again because it illustrates much about the Labour’s party attempt to neutralise immigration as an issue before 2010. When Woolas first took up his post, he even loosely floated the idea of a cap on the number of migrants coming to Britain – a policy later implemented by the coalition.

If there was ever a reason for the Labour party to repudiate its Phil Woolas strategy on immigration, yesterday the think-tank Policy Exchange provided one. Its report, a Portrait of Modern Britain, doesn’t just raise uncomfortable questions for Tories it also served as a warning to Labour on its rhetoric on immigration.

The report made three important points:

            1) Ethnic minorities account for 80% of the UK’s population growth.

            2) They overwhelmingly live in urban areas, where Labour is strongest.

            3) 68% of them voted Labour 2010, 16% for the Tories and 14% for the Lib Dems.

But more importantly it refutes “many of the darker claims about the impact of immigration on England,” as Alex Massie at the Spectator put it. The fact that Indian voters are slowly reverting to the British average shows it cannot take the BAME vote for granted.

This means only one thing: being the anti-immigration party is a losing strategy. Sure, the likes of UKIP or the Tories will continue to play to that ever-shrinking base, but the younger generation is overwhelmingly more at ease with a multicultural Britain. And sooner or later you’ll have to choose between those sets of voters.

But what happens if Labour, in an attempt to deal with the Tories and UKIP, match their rhetoric on immigration? Why would ethnic minorities, and their friends, maintain their allegiance then?

Yesterday, Labour unveiled its UKIP attack leaflet with the pledge that it would “take tough action on immigration”. As Mark Ferguson pointed out, this “crude rhetoric” is out of touch with what Labour has been saying elsewhere on immigration.

This sort of double-speak isn’t just disingenuous but counter-productive. Labour cannot pretend to have one message for the media and party members, and a different one just for UKIP sympathisers. Phil Woolas tried the same trick: telling liberal audiences there needed to be more nuance on immigration, and then putting out leaflets designed to “get the white vote angry”. People can spot the double-speak and don’t trust politicians for exactly that reason.

Labour has to talk about immigration – there is little choice in that. It has to confront people’s economic and cultural fears about immigration (though both are overstated in the media), and it must offer some solutions. There’s a positive case to make about immigration and the party can make it. Admittedly, Ed Miliband has tried this, but it’s sporadic and rarely makes headlines. If the centre-right can admit that many of our worries about immigration are overstated, then the centre-left can too.

But what the Labour Party cannot electorally afford to do is imitate the Tories on immigration, let alone UKIP. It also cannot say different things to different audiences in the hope no one notices. That was the Phil Woolas way of doing politics and its time to consign that, like his political career, to the dustbin of history.