Diane Abbott: ‘Labour must do more to change our toxic migration debate’

The debate on migration and asylum in British mainstream politics has never been more toxic. Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick’s recent comments suggesting the grooming scandal started with ‘importing hundreds of thousands of people from alien cultures’ are a case in point.

Sadly, the new Labour government led by Prime Minister Keir Starmer is offering little or nothing to counter the anti-migrant drift in worldwide public discussion.

Internationally the pressures are emphatically from the right. In Europe far-right, anti-migrant and anti-Islamic political parties are having an unprecedented electoral surge. They include: the National Front in France; the AfD in Germany: the Freedom Party in Austria and Italy’s Brothers of Italy which was until recently an openly neo-fascist party.

Notably Starmer’s first meeting with a foreign leader was with the far-right Italian PM Giorgia Meloni of the Brothers of Italy. Afterwards she said that she is “in tune with many issues with Keir Starmer” notably asylum.

If what she says is true it is alarming.

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But the foreign leader with more influence than any other on the international debate on migration is the incoming American president, Donald Trump. His political programme is very largely built on anti-immigrant sentiment and has been for decades. He has promised the American electorate that on day one of his presidency there will be: mass deportations, the building of a border wall and the scrapping of humanitarian policies allowing legal entry.

Whether he does all this remains to be seen. He never actually built the wall on America’s southern border he made so much fuss about in his last presidential campaign. But the concept served its purpose, which was to whip up fear and hostility to migration in America, a country which was built by migrants and historically was positive about migration.

This side of the Atlantic, instead of countering Trump’s anti-immigrant diatribes, Starmer prefers to talk about “skills shortages across the country which have left our economy hopelessly reliant on immigration”.

But the independent Migration Advisory Committee queries whether labour market shortages might not in reality be due to poor pay. Further it points out that improving the level of skills in the domestic labour pool does not guarantee a reduction in the reliance on the immigration system because “migrant and domestic workers are not perfect substitutes and employers will often want the best possible match for their vacancy, which may be an international recruit”.

Starmer also makes the strange assertion that the Conservative governments (of Brexit, Windrush, hostile environment and “Rwanda” policy fame) had run an “open borders” policy.

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Last summer we saw all over the country – British streets literally on fire because of race riots. In at least one case racist rioters tried to burn down hotels with sanctuary seekers trapped inside.

In the current rightward shift in the international discussion on migration it has never been more important that British political leadership makes the case for immigration policy based on fairness and the facts rather than fear and scapegoating. It is not too late for the Labour government to take that path.

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