No trouble, Nuthatch, he we are -
It is now or never for Labour and the working class
by Jonathan Hinder
Can you hear that familiar sound? The engines of the liberal establishment are revving up to explain why Reform’s success is definitely not down to the one thing we know it definitely is: immigration.
More in Common, a polling company, recently asked Reform UK voters why they would vote for them, and 81 per cent said immigration, with the next most popular reason being “I like their leader”, down at 31 per cent.
The primary reason for Reform’s rise is staring us all in the face, but from the moment the declaration was made at Runcorn, one of Labour’s safest seats just ten months ago, the cognitive gymnastics began to explain why this was down to anything but politicians’ unwillingness to listen to voters on immigration.
Of course, it is clear that our economy is not working as it should for ordinary people in the small towns like those I represent in Pendle & Clitheroe.
I want profiteering multi-nationals to pay their fair share of tax, public services run for the common good, not for private profit, and much greater investment in our crumbling infrastructure. On this, I find agreement with those who refuse to acknowledge the immigration issue.
But the voters know instinctively what the Left often refuses to acknowledge – immigration is fundamentally an economic issue as much as it is anything else, and working-class people are generally the losers.
Imagine for a moment, hard as it may be, that Labour pivoted sharply on immigration. A goal of roughly balanced migration – equal numbers emigrating as immigrating – was communicated and steadily delivered by the end of this Parliament. This would return us to the more or less balanced net migration levels we had for decades until the mid-1990s.
Imagine too that every legal obstacle to tackling the small boats crisis was systematically removed, so that there was no incentive for migrants to make the dangerous channel crossing in the first place, all asylum hotels could be shut, and instead a set number of refugees could be accepted from abroad in a controlled manner each year.
What would Reform have left if the immigration issue were resolved in this way? Their domestic policy programme is utterly incoherent, not that it matters because few voters know or care what it is. They would have nothing left to say if one of the two main parties finally listened to what the voters have been telling them at every opportunity for the last twenty years.
Dame Andrea Jenkyns recently called for migrants to be put in tents instead of hotels in her Lincolnshire victory speech
Meanwhile, what could the Conservatives do in response but hang their heads in shame?
With freedom of movement gone, they had the opportunity to deliver the low levels of immigration sought by the vast majority of the electorate. Instead, they stuck two fingers up at their new voter coalition in the most spectacular way, unleashing the “Boriswave” of non-European migration, with net migration peaking at nearly one million in a single year.
In 2019, it looked like Labour as a party of the working class may be gone forever, but the Conservatives’ implosion under Boris Johnson and then Liz Truss gave us one last chance.
Many voters were so keen to rid the country of the chaotic Conservatives that we squeaked home in hundreds of constituencies across the country, with a very efficiently spread vote share of 33.7 per cent, just a smidge higher than we had scored in the drubbing of 2019 (32.1 per cent).
So, this week’s results should be the wake-up call we need. But Labour has morphed into a hyper-liberal party more than a socialist party, such that secure borders and low immigration are seen as “Right-wing” within its ecosystem of city-based activists, think tanks and associated organisations. No matter that high immigration is, of course, the capitalist’s dream.
This is existential for the Labour Party now. Our drift away from our working-class base has been decades in the making, and goes far deeper than the tenure of any one leader.
Platitudes about “listening” and “learning” will not do. It is now or never for Labour and the working class.