Labour’s Immigration Policy

Irecently came across​ a Labour Party pamphlet from 2010. ‘Every one of us needs to roll up our sleeves and get to work to build strong and tolerant communities,’ it reads, ‘arguing the case for the politics of solidarity and hope, as opposed to the politics of division and defeat.’ It was among the papers I’d gathered while working on a book about the British National Party. The pamphlet was aimed at Labour activists and contained a series of recommendations on countering a challenge from the far right, particularly on immigration. Its lead author was Morgan McSweeney, then an adviser on local government, now Keir Starmer’s chief of staff.

I thought of it again when the Home Office published a report celebrating its ‘UK-wide blitz on illegal working to strengthen border security’ as part of a publicity drive designed to coincide with the first reading of the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill on 30 January. For the first time, the department published images of people being escorted onto a deportation charter flight, along with footage of raids on nail bars, car washes and restaurants. The message was reinforced by Facebook advertisements decked out in the colour scheme of Reform UK, which in February out-polled both Labour and the Tories for the first time.

This looked desperate, and it was, but there was a logic to it. McSweeney gained his reputation as a strategist from his work in local government. In 2008, he was made a political assistant at Barking and Dagenham council in East London, where the BNP was the main opposition to the Labour-run administration. In the 2000s, the BNP won scores of council seats (and eventually sent two representatives to the European Parliament) by campaigning in deindustrialised communities where Labour had once dominated, linking the grievances of white residents to immigration. Labour had made a hash of its initial response, first ignoring the problem, then pandering to the BNP by making vague anti-immigration statements.

McSweeney’s pamphlet shows how the party turned things round. It advises Labour councillors not to dismiss the complaints of voters tempted by the BNP but to fix whatever is within their power to fix and to communicate those achievements clearly. In Barking and Dagenham – or more properly, the giant Becontree estate that occupies much of the borough – that meant front gardens. Becontree is largely composed of semi-detached houses built by the London County Council between the wars to rehouse families from East End slums. It used to be more like a Northern industrial town than a London suburb: for decades the main employer was the Ford Motor plant at Dagenham, which at its peak in the 1950s employed forty thousand people. Becontree even had a brass band. By the end of the century, however, the Ford plant was much diminished, the old structures of community life had fallen away and many local residents felt that Labour, which had run the council since its creation, no longer listened to them.

One of the main points of complaint was rubbish. As people who had bought their council houses died or moved away, the properties were taken over by private landlords who converted them into multi-occupancy dwellings, leaving litter and construction debris in the formerly neat front gardens. The BNP profited by linking this mess to immigration, since many of the private tenants came from ethnic minority backgrounds, and Becontree’s demographic make-up was changing rapidly. ‘We’re the Labour Party your parents voted for,’ they told white residents, falsely claiming that the council was unfairly handing out housing to African immigrants.

McSweeney’s pamphlet recognises that some Becontree residents – like those in other areas where the BNP did well, such as Burnley and Stoke-on-Trent – were ready to believe racist rumours because of a wider feeling, influenced by faltering social mobility, that New Labour had abandoned traditional working-class communities. ‘Factories or mines that were once the centre of economic, social and community life,’ the pamphlet reads, ‘are long gone … As these shared identities move out of reach, remaining ones such as nationality, race and class take on new importance.’ The council aimed to defuse the situation by focusing on everyday issues. It launched an ‘eyesore gardens’ hotline and a public campaign to remind landlords of their responsibilities. This, according to the pamphlet, ‘actively demonstrated that the council was listening and cared about the look of the area’; it also shifted the focus to landlords, helping to undermine the BNP. At the 2010 local elections, the BNP was wiped out.

The same ‘be seen fixing things’ attitude is evident in Labour’s immigration policy. This time, however, the party hasn’t changed the focus so much as acquiesced to it. The Conservatives promised lower overall immigration after Brexit, but were content to let numbers rise while the issue was no longer at the front of people’s minds. As Channel crossings began to increase, the Tories inflamed public feeling – Suella Braverman called it an ‘invasion’ – while continuing to institute policies that brought the asylum system to the brink of collapse. They failed to fund the processing of claims adequately, allowing a backlog to mount, or to provide proper accommodation for asylum seekers, relying instead on hotels. The 2023 Illegal Migration Act, which banned refugees who arrive by small boats from ever claiming asylum, left tens of thousands of people in limbo, many of them stuck indefinitely in hotels.

Labour believes that convincing voters it has regained control over illegal immigration is the only way to build support for a more generous system in future. ‘We have to earn consent by restoring faith in enforcement,’ an ally of Yvette Cooper told the Sunday Times. Since the election, according to Home Office figures, deportations have reached their highest level in five years, while raids to uncover illegal employment have increased too. But if the point of all this is to show voters you’re doing something, you’ve got to shout about it. ‘It’s not about trying to ape Farage,’ Jonathan Ashworth, former MP and now head of the think tank Labour Together, said. ‘But where we have a story to tell, like on the returns figures, Labour MPs should be talking a lot about that.’

The Home Office has long been called on to play bad cop by governments trying to resolve a paradox of immigration policy. Most decisions on immigration are made at the macro level, based on national economic and social requirements. (A recent example: the UK has been recruiting secondary school teachers from Jamaica to fill empty posts.) But the effects of immigration are often felt at a local or personal level. We notice changes in our neighbourhoods, or see news footage of particular events – Channel crossings, for instance – that come to represent immigration as a whole. The Home Office responds by making a show of cracking down on unauthorised immigration, often in collaboration with media outlets that have commercial and ideological interests in encouraging xenophobia. It’s not clear that this approach has any effect. Releasing images of immigration raids has been a Home Office practice since at least 2006, but it hasn’t made voters any happier.

The government could quite reasonably respond by pointing out that it is bringing in new legislation to tackle Channel crossings, the focus of much of the conversation about unauthorised immigration. But the policy appears to follow the PR in focusing almost entirely on border security. Although Labour dropped the Conservative government’s Rwanda deportation plans, and has allowed people arriving by boat to claim asylum again, the legislation currently before Parliament, which introduces counterterrorism-style powers to disrupt people-smuggling gangs, does not offer refugees safe alternative routes to asylum. Perhaps, over time, the legislation will make it harder for smugglers to operate. But security measures that do not address underlying needs – in this case, a legal route through which to claim asylum – often exacerbate the problems they purport to solve. Indeed, increased security in northern France is largely responsible for the shift from the less visible practice of stowing away in lorries to the highly visible (and politically explosive) small boat journeys.

According to the University of Oxford’s Migration Observatory, there are four main ways someone can become an unauthorised migrant in the UK: overstay a visa, enter the country without permission, remain after an asylum application has been refused, or be born to parents without immigration status. One recent estimate places the total number of unauthorised migrants in the UK at somewhere between 800,000 and 1.2 million, though such figures vary greatly. It’s easier to establish, and fixate on, the number of people who are detected on entering the country without permission, a number which, though relatively small, has risen sharply in the last decade as a result of small boat journeys. This has become a totemic issue for the right not because of the numbers involved, but because – to them – it represents a loss of national sovereignty. In response to Labour’s announcement that it had increased deportations, Reform raised the stakes, demanding that we abolish the asylum system.

McSweeney’s pamphlet has some words of warning: ‘A managerial response won’t do. People who are disaffected … need to be connected with on a political level.’ Since the election, Labour’s support has fallen among all parts of the population. But the biggest drop, according to the polling organisation More in Common, has been among voters it defines as socially conservative but economically statist. Broadly speaking, this group includes people who fit the profile of voters once attracted by the BNP, as well as many who would never have considered supporting such an extreme party. It has been mobilised to far greater effect since 2016: first in support of Brexit, then by Boris Johnson and now by Reform.

Reform is a different kind of party from the now defunct BNP – it doesn’t share the BNP’s neo-Nazi hinterland – but it plays on similar far-right populist themes and it exploits the same disaffection with the political establishment. In 2010, McSweeney argued that Labour could coax voters away from the far right by ensuring that the party remained ‘the beating heart of our communities … we need to create more bonds of common identity than just nationality, skin colour and residual class solidarity.’ But it’s not clear what message of common endeavour, if any, Starmer’s government is trying to broadcast. A commitment to growth above all else is inconsistent with slashing immigration – most of which, after all, is legal and economically valuable. The government has pledged in the long term to reduce net migration and to invest in skills training so that migrant labour becomes less attractive to employers. But for now, it’s unclear what it’s offering the public. Having ruled out any large-scale redistribution of wealth, Labour should be putting its changes to workers’ rights, including entitlement to protections from ‘day one’, an end to zero-hours contracts and new obstacles to fire and rehire practices, at the forefront of government messaging. Instead it talks tough on immigration control.

There is another story from 2010 worth remembering. Shortly after the general election, the former immigration minister Phil Woolas was stripped of his seat by court order, after issuing a campaign leaflet that claimed Muslims were trying to oust him and linked his Lib Dem opponent to Islamist extremists. ‘They want you to vote Lib Dem to punish Phil for being strong on immigration,’ it read. Labour has a history of turning nasty when it gets desperate. If it does so again, under renewed pressure from the far right, would anyone be surprised if voters decide they prefer the original to the copy, and choose Reform?