Goodhart has a point though ‘mass immigration’ feels like pretty combustible rhetoric. I’m speaking as someone whose natural inclination is liberal and sees diversity- within the parameters of common shared values, laws, culture and language- as a positive social and economic force. Just to be clear, here is the pattern (source ONS) of immigration since 1999:

So the evidence does show that we have had historically high levels of net immigration. It appears to now be declining- partly due to recession, e.g. 50,000 people went to Poland in 2009 and it’s not a great leap of imagination to say that they were Polish, and partly due to shifts in policy, not least the introduction of the points based immigration system. However, the levels of net immigration upturned significantly from 1997 which suggests that was as a result of policy- significantly so.

Now, there are both costs and benefits of immigration on the levels we seen in recent years. On the benefit side, there is little doubt that we would not as a country have been able to expand the NHS in the way that we did without hiring healthcare workers from abroad. The workers were young and less likely to use the service and beneficiaries were considerably older on average. However, on the cost side, wages and terms and conditions would have been impacted negatively for some. This was most keenly felt at the lower end of the wage scale. So the distribution of costs and benefits would not have been even with the costs falling on workers in some of the most precarious situations.

During the European election campaign, I blogged on a long conversation I had with a BNP voter in Birmingham Erdington constituency. It became quite clear to me that he wasn’t racist- in fact, he acknowledged that his black and Asian colleagues were experiencing exactly the same insecurities that he was facing. However, nonetheless, it was difficult not to have a degree of sensitivity to his position. This a point that David Blunkett acknowledged during the Goodhart programme. While he didn’t regret the policy changes, he did regret that there was not more of a response to compensate certain communities for major change.

And this for me is the key point. The rhetoric of globalisation and policy responses to the rhetoric meant that many communities- often the most vulnerable and not just white working class communities- felt that they were in midst of convulsive change. For that roofer in Bimingham that change was real- his economic circumstances had worsened. For others, it was more imagined. Nonetheless, and we constantly see this with lost Labour voters, there are people who were not comfortable with many changes they were either experiencing or felt they were experiencing.

So the distribution of costs and benefits were uneven and many felt a sense of powerlessness. It should be stated this doesn’t just apply to immigration; it also applies to change- mainly economic- in many dimensions, e.g. when an industry closes or downsizes.

Further down the line, we may as a community see enormous benefits from the immigration that occurred during the noughties- much as America has seen from its experience of immigration. There are also risks that we can not perhaps forsee. The clear lesson though for change of any kind is that it must happen with consent and be managed effectively. The state weakened in the face of global market forces and this came to be seen almost as virtue at times in New Labour thinking. Yet again, we are seeing global market forces assert themselves with no apparent benefit for local communities. The Kraft takeover of Cadbury is a prime example (see my analysis on LabourList last week.) We and the local community and workforce are powerless to stop it.

Ironically, the major lessons from this are for those who instinctively favour liberal responses to the global economy. Without an awareness of the social parameters of change, a degree of state counter-balance to market forces, and the encouragement of democratic discussion and legitimacy for change, liberal attitudes come under threat. The architects of the immediate post-war paradigm of embedded liberalism knew this. Market liberals forgot that. The consequences were predictable.

The results were Labour 670, BNP 478, Conservatives 273. Ian Lloyd was elected for the Labour Party.

The by-election was triggered by the resignation of former BNP Councillor Darren Haywood, who had failed to attend council in over four months. Says its all really…..

The other was in Areley King ward, Wyre Forest and it was a gain from the Tories who were beaten back into third place.

The results were Labour 544, Health Concern 421, Conservative 394 and UKIP 63. Jamie Shaw was elected for the Labour Party.

A Labour source in the region told me, “In one sense these wins didn’t come as a surprise- we’ve been picking up a hardening of Labour’s vote across the region for a few weeks now. However, it does show that we’ve got on-the-ground resilience- and credit to the hard work of our campaigners in Nuneaton and Wyre Forest. As the election becomes less a referendum on the Government and more of a straight choice, we expect a further hardening of Labour’s support.”

Post script: Iain Dale expresses concern at the poor performance of Conservatives in these local by-elections.

The piece looks at particular issues concerning race and alienation. Just to be clear about my overall position:

- As a nation we have made huge strides in eliminating overt racism but in a sense that is the easy bit. If someone describes a black tennis player as a ‘froggy golliwog guy’ then that is clearly unacceptable and it wasn’t four decades ago.
- Like the United States, there is a burgeoning ethnic minority middle class and minorities proliferate our media, culture, and sport. That is progress.
- However, just as in the United States, there is a large proportion of minorities who have been left behind- and that is distinct from immigration. In a sense, this is tied in with wider socio-economic change and the growth of inequality. Thirty years ago the ship of opportunity left the port and those who were left behind were disproportionately minorities.
- That is why when you listen to alienated white, working class communities and the same alienated voices in minority communities you often hear similar voices. Class is a major part of this (see the piece for some observations.)
- However, there are alienating experiences that are significantly down to race. The ‘stop and search’ resentment, job discrimination, etc. There are other types of discrimination too- social class, sexuality, gender- but this does not invalidate the claim that there is a great deal of hidden racial discrimination in the UK.
- Finally, we do not have an honest public discussion about these issues. What do we teach at our schools? Why would we need a Black History Month if history properly reflected the diversity of the British people? Why does so much discrimination persist? Why do our public institutions- particularly the criminal justice system- operate in a way that alienates and condemns so many minority groups?

I’m afraid all these issues are not answered adequately by the retort ‘the white/ working class have it bad too.’ We must seek a more equal, more mobile, less discriminatory society. We must talk more openly about these issues (in a way that the BNP does not.) We have an enormous distance to travel. If we start to talk about these issues in a more open way then many people who are suspicious of each other might find themselves with rather more in common than they think.

Anyway, I discuss my reasons for objecting to the BNP appearing on Question Time in the piece. Mainly, it is because they are a party that seeks to deny human rights to millions so beyond what is the legal requisite, their voice should not be amplified or legitimised. That is what the appearance on Question Time and the precedent it sets will achieve, whatever happens on Thursday night.

Philip Stephens in the Financial Times sees the left’s travails as a series of tactical defeats but also cautions against a naive adoption of command and control economics. He is right that the leadership of Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy have moved smartly onto ground opened up by the financial crisis. What this has meant in practice is that there has been very little wriggle room for the PS in France and the SPD in Germany- even if they wanted it. However, I don’t see a new wave of statism in Europe’s mainstream leftist parties as Stephens seems to suggest. They have simply been outmanoeuvred.

In the case of the British Labour party, as the party of government they have been left carrying the can. Labour’s message and identity had become woven into neo-liberal globalisation. That is partly down to London’s position as leading global financial centre- a cash cow that Labour just didn’t want to scare. So when the whole thing came crashing down with the consequence that the British taxpayer has been left to shoulder a monumental burden for global collapse, it was inevitable that the government would suffer politically. There are other well established local factors- expenses etc- for the collapse in the government’s support.

However, there does seem to be one common factor behind the left’s decline across Europe. Its social foundation is melting beneath its feet making it ever more difficult to sustain winning coalitions. Martin Kettle in the Guardian points to the same factors mentioned by Eric Hobsbawm in the Guardian on Tuesday. I also mentioned the same thing in my LabourList piece earlier this week. Here is Hobsbawm on this:

The European left relied on a working class that no longer exists in its old form, and in order to recover it will need to find a new constituency.

Kettle’s conclusion is:

Labour is behaving in the same historically demoralised way as most centre-left parties across Europe. Blair’s solutions to this fatalism belonged to a different conjuncture from ours. He produced no eternal programmatic template. But in the end, New Labour was far more right than wrong. The centre-left will have few days in the sun over the next decade unless and until it rediscovers the instinct for creative adaptation that Blair taught it.

This is exactly right and I argued on Wednesday that:

A political project that combines social democracy with environmentalism and liberalism seems to be the best hope. It would seek to reach, for want of better descriptions, both the working class and liberal professionals. It is not about the Labour Party alone. It has to be based around a broad movement for social and environmental justice and rooted in the bonding institutions of civil society: trade unions, churches, community and environmental groups. Democratic reform will be essential to the emergence of such a force.

Of course, there is more than an element of guesswork in this. I don’t know anymore than the next person whether such a programme can work to build a sufficient coalition for the left. Instinctively, it feels right and such a programme and approach worked for Obama when disseminated using the force of a movement based party. What I do know, as Kettle argues, is that the Labour party has reached a point where fundamental renewal is now a necessity. From the broadest tent imaginable in 1997, it has been reduced to a rump. Like the rest of Europe there not is an easy demographic for it to reignite and lean on- the error made by those who argue for a ‘core vote’ strategy. The traditional working class has shrunk and become fragmented.

And as Philip Stephens argues, the parties of the right in Europe are becoming pretty adept at consuming the oxygen of the mainstream left- in Sweden, France, Germany, and, yes, the UK’s ‘progressive conservative’ Cameron Tories. The New Labour coalition doesn’t provide the answer either strategically or politically- the point of this is to combat climate change, economic volatility, and social inequality and alienation. So a new politics based around a new coalition has to be constructed. Ground can not be conceded to the right. This is a New Labour insight but the answer is not New Labour.

Sound like an enormous task? Yes, it is. Who has the answers? Nobody at this stage. I would be very suspicious indeed about anyone who claimed to have the answers. We are at the very beginning of the discussion but we must adopt the attitude that the left has to fundamentally reconfigure itself. If it does not then the future will be conceded to the tactically lithe right. That just won’t be enough to confront the massive issues that we as a society are facing. Time for change? You betcha.

Out of date, out of touch: British politics in turmoil

I am writing a weekly column for LabourList. The website has moved beyond the Derek Draper ‘smeargate’ fiasco and is rapidly establishing itself as a credible and independent site for Labour and ‘progressive’ politics. If you are Labour or left inclined I’d recommend giving the site another go if you were turned off a couple of months ago. This week’s column is below:

How we can learn the lessons of defeat and build a new movement of the left

Finally, I meant to reference the fascinating piece by Anthony Wells on the nature of the BNP vote yesterday. It would seem that BNP voters are not natural Labour voters at all. Rather, they are what used to be called the Tory working class. This suggests that any strategy to ‘win them back for Labour’ is doomed to failure. A better strategy is to prevent voters falling into their hands in the first place. This involves both the dam building tactics that the Hope not Hate campaign has been pursuing. But Labour spectacularly failed to motivate its vote last Thursday. That is the major issue and that is why the BNP now have two seats. Sorry to be so blunt but that’s the reality. The key analysis from Anthony Wells is in the following paragraph:

If BNP supporters are traditional Labour, male working class voters therefore, the natural conclusion that it’s Labour they are taking support from. This falls down, however, on some other questions – asked if they’d rather have Cameron or Brown as PM, BNP voters opt for Cameron by 59% to 17%. Asked to place themselves on the political spectrum they put themselves right of centre, in roughly the same place as they do the Tories. 22% of them think the Tories care about people like themselves, only 6% say the same about Labour. In short, the people the BNP seem to appeal to are actually “working class Tories” – the sort of traditional working class voters who under other circumstances might shift over to the Conservatives.

The full analysis which I’d highly recommend is available here.

Electoral reform in this manner is a good thing because it increases popular sovereignty. Proportional representation is a bad thing for the same reason. It actually diminishes popular sovereignty as it hands power to political elites who distribute the spoils in accordance with an elite bargaining game. Danny Alexander of the Lib Dems laments that the current system is ‘unfair.’ Yes, from the perspective of his party- self-interest always weighs heavily in this debate- it is. But fairness to the Liberal Democrats or the Greens or UKIP or the BNP is not the overriding concern. Popular sovereignty is.

What the expenses scandal has shown is that there is dangerous distance between MPs and their constituents and this is partly caused by the excessive stability of first past the post. If you lose, it is because your party has lost. It is very rarely because of your performance as an MP. This is unacceptable. If AV facilitates more independence amongst MPs then even better. That would be one of the means of increasing the independence of Parliament and holding the executive to account. All these things are a thoroughly good idea. So let’s not have a discussion Prime Minister- these things have been debated in infinite detail. Let’s get on with it for goodness sake.

Now, you’ll notice the BNP creeping into this post above. There is a misconception that electoral reform means that the BNP will find their way into Parliament. I would be surprised if they could get into Parliament needing more than 50 per cent of the vote in any single constituency. In fact, I would say that the safeguards against BNP representation are even greater in AV than in the current system. It is very important to differentiate AV and PR in this debate.

But there is a broader issue here. Yes, the BNP wouldn’t have 2 MEPs if there had not been a system of PR in these European elections. But they wouldn’t had the Labour vote not collapsed either- both staying at home and going to a whole host of other parties. That is a bigger issue which I’ve addressed in my LabourList column which I’ll link to later.

So, AV yes. PR no. And AV will keep the BNP at bay.

18-34s split: 32-26-22-7-6-2 Tory-Lab-Lib Dem-Green-UKIP-BNP. What is particularly warming about this data is the small levels of support for UKIP and the BNP. Like the youngest demographics in the US it would seem that the youngest generations are more liberal than their older peers. They are also less inclined to be extremely anti-european. This is hardly surprising- the experience of Europe is greater for younger generations; they are less inclined to see it as some foreign power sent to crush mighty Albion. Strangely, they seem more inclined to vote Conservative as well. Answers on a postcard to that one.

It is encouraging to look at these data. We just have to hope that as they get homes and cars they don’t suddenly become dull Thatcherite materialistic little Englanders. All we have to do is get them to actually vote now!

There’s a lot of guff in the leaflet but it basically comes down to the fact that they were sixth in the GLA elections. Put aside the fact that this is a different set of elections so their vote might not translate, how does the claim stack up?

Now, in the last european elections, a party would have needed 155,528 votes for a seat. The CPA or whatever they called themselves then won 45,038. That increased to 65,357 in the London Assembly elections last year. The leaflet states:

“The joint Christian Party/ Christian Peoples Alliance [no apostrophe] came sixth in last year’s Greater London Assembly election”

There are eight seats so they are the chosen ones, right? No, because it doesn’t matter what rank you are. The determinant is the number of votes that you receive. In the last euros they were about 110,000 short of a seat. We don’t know how the votes are going to distribute in these elections in London. What we do know, is that the bar will again be around 150,000. There is no way that these guys are going to get anywhere near that.

So what of their claims? Well, they are either self-servingly ignorant or they are deliberately mendacious and self-serving in the process. Does that sound particularly Christian to you? Of course it’s not. What’s worse is that if it serves to divert votes away from the four parties who do have a chance of stopping the BNP- Labour, Conservative, Lib Dem, or Green- then it could actually help the BNP. The BNP stands in direct opposition to the values of any Christian hence the brave and articulate statement from Rowan Williams and John Sentamu yesterday (and the silly separation of church and religion point from Nick Clegg in criticism of them.)

I would say unforgivable but Christianity believes in forgiveness. So the disgracefully misleading nature of this flyer should be confessed. But what penance should be served? Well, instead of spending their money on expensive and pointless billboards, they should send leaflets round to every household they have misled. Moreover, their party should go door to door to fight the BNP either by working on the Hope not Hate campaign or by encouraging people to vote Labour, Conservative, Lib Dem, or Green.

Shame on you.

Unfortunately, with conditions as they are in the construction industry, his firm laid him off recently. He said that he had been experiencing increasing competition from easternEuropean and east African workers. They were willing to work more, be flexible, without demanding the type of income that he required. He had applied for mortgage relief to no avail though he does have another four months of mortgage holiday left.

I asked him whether any of his colleagues were black or Asian and didn’t they face similar challenges to him. He said they did and that a lot of them felt the same way. He wouldn’t turn on them as working men facing the same challenges as him, so why did he begin voting BNP?

One of his colleagues was a BNP activist and had been explaining to him about the reality of the party- not racist as The Mirror and Sun claim at all. It was just concerned about a fair deal for British people. He worked hard, paid his taxes and national insurance, and for what? Immigrants were coming in getting housing, pushing him back in the queue for health services, and now they had a job and he was on the dole. It just wasn’t right. What’s more, with the rights culture as it is, all the wrong people were protected while honest people like himself suffered.

I explained that the BNP was racist. We talked about his black and Asian colleagues and did he feel it was right that they be denied citizenship and told that they weren’t really British? He thought about it and then acknowledged that, no, he didn’t think that was right. Though he did think that whenever Nick Griffin says something ‘out of order, people come down on him like a tonne of bricks.’ I explained that he is always saying things that are ‘out of order.’ These are tough times and surely the last thing we want is people turning on each other. Besides, isn’t picking on people just because of the colour of their skin actually extremely anti-British?

What was the upshot? There was nothing I could say to lessen the feeling of grievance at his situation. Listening and understanding was the only sensible response. We shook hands at the end of the conversation, smiled, and he promised that he would give it some more thought. Will he still vote BNP? I would be surprised if he didn’t to be honest. He displayed a toxic mix of genuine grievance and an articulated position as a result of having been got to by the BNP in a one-on-one situation with one of his former colleagues.

A number of common features emerge: this familiar wage competition and stagnation, amplified through difficult economic times, and the community/ workplace activity of the BNP, albeit highly misleading; hiding their true racist nature. It can be turned round. Once the blanket racism of the BNP is understood it makes people who are inclined to vote for them think twice and persuades others to do what it takes to stop them.

Their view of the world does not accord with the vast majority of the nation. However, they use issues and image in a manipulative way. The lesson is actually a big one. One person can make the case against the BNP but it takes some minutes. It needs thousands more in local communities making the case in similar ways if this poison is to be beaten back. But that sort of community/ workplace presence needs organisation (though it should be noted that Searchlight are doing a valiant job.) It will have other major political benefits on top of defeating the BNP. The next politics has to conduct this deep engagement if voters are to be reconnected to the political system that is there to serve them.