Politicians haven’t been honest with the public about immigration. They still aren’t
The populist surge that helped propel Brexit isn’t going to help the UK take control of its borders, writes Tim Bale. Neither Labour nor the Conservatives have been honest with voters about immigration policy, and that shows little signs of changing after a hard Brexit. The gap between rhetoric and reality has given politicians the opportunity to indulge in populist promises. People sense they are not being told the whole truth – but do they want to hear it?
At the March for Europe rally in London on 2 July 2016. Photo: Laura Morgan via a CC-BY 2.0 licence
We are living in a world where it’s no longer ‘the economy, stupid’. That’s not to say real wages, the cost of living, and tax-and-spend don’t matter to people anymore. Clearly, they still do. But they no longer trump nearly everything else when voters make up their minds. Politics has always been multidimensional, of course. It’s that analysts of voting behaviour and public opinion used to be able to conveniently collapse most of these dimensions into the left-right spectrum. Nowadays, that’s becoming harder and harder to do.
In the United Kingdom, as in many European countries, that familiar horizontal axis is now being intersected by another, vertical one. Call it what you will – GAL-TAN (Green, Alternative, Libertarian – Tradition, Authoritarian, Nationalist), demarcation-integration, communitarian-cosmopolitan or simply open-closed – this dimension suddenly seems to matter much more than it used to. Certainly, it helps explain why 52 per cent of those voting in last year’s European Union referendum plumped for Leave rather than Remain. It also gives us an insight into why nearly four million Brits chose the populist radical right UK Independence Party (UKIP) at the 2015 general election, despite the fact the country’s first-past-the-post electoral system meant most of them were ‘wasting’ their votes on candidates without a cat’s chance in hell of winning.
Just as political scientists had begun to take it for granted we had moved from an era of ‘position politics’ (the clash of big ideas between two tribes) to an era of ‘valence politics’ (where competence and credibility counts most), culture and identity came back with a bang, made all the more explosive by a pervasive feeling – especially among voters dispossessed and disoriented by the dizzying pace of social and economic change – of ‘disconnect’ with mainstream politicians.
Migration, and the multiculturalism that inevitably comes with it, is not the only contentious issue in all this. But it is, as opinion polls and media coverage attest, by far the biggest.
The UK has experienced waves of immigration before, most notably in the 1950s, 60s and 70s when Afro-Caribbean and South Asian citizens of its former colonies journeyed to the mother country to fill labour shortages created by the post-war boom. But it had never previously experienced the sheer volume and intensity of the wave of migrants that arrived after Tony Blair’s Labour government decided not to restrict the rights of EU citizens to live and work in the UK.
The arrival of millions of foreigners from Central and Eastern Europe was bound to spell trouble. After all, the post-war, postcolonial wave of immigrants was not absorbed without considerable political conflict. Those who thought similar problems could be avoided simply because the people pouring in after 2004 were white rather than black or Asian were forgetting xenophobia can be just as powerful as racism. They were also far too complacent about the willingness and the ability of the UK’s political class to engage honestly and responsibly with its citizens.
On the centre-left, Labour politicians failed to fess up to massively underestimating the number of Eastern Europeans who would flock to take up job opportunities provided by a booming economy. And given that migrants benefited that economy, they decided not to do anything practical to address it. This inaction was clearly at odds with the government’s rhetorical response, which culminated in then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown promising ‘British jobs for British workers’, either revealing himself to be a hypocrite, or creating expectations he couldn’t possibly fulfil.
The centre-right, however, proved just as unable of treating the public like grown-ups. Casting around for anything that might put it on side with voters, it tried just about every trick in the populist playbook: then-leader of the Conservative Party William Hague claimed the people had been betrayed by a ‘liberal elite’ wilfully deaf to their concerns about ‘bogus asylum-seekers’ and the threat the single currency and the EU posed to sovereignty. If nothing was done, he claimed, Britain would soon become ‘a foreign land’.
Hague’s successors, Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard, did more of the same, with the latter commissioning the infamous It’s not racist to talk about immigration. Are you thinking what we’re thinking? billboard posters in the run-up to the 2005 general election. For a while, David Cameron turned down the volume on migration and the EU, but it wasn’t long before he was bashing ‘Brussels’ and helping push through increasingly draconian measures designed to fulfil a pledge – possibly one of the craziest on record – to reduce net migration into the country ‘from the hundreds to the tens of thousands’.
If all this was designed to shoot the fox belonging to UKIP – a Eurosceptic, anti-immigration party led by consummate populist Nigel Farage – it proved completely counterproductive. By talking up clashes with the EU and the need to get a grip on immigration, the Tories (aided and abetted by their friends in Britain’s notoriously partisan media) both turbocharged UKIP’s signature issues and normalised ‘us vs them’. The genie was out of the bottle, released not by the extreme but by the mainstream.
And so it was that, driven by a fatal combination of panic and complacency, Cameron called the EU referendum. And so it was that he lost it, with defiant, nativist nationalism overcoming the latent fear of economic consequences.
Cowed by the evidence that hostility to immigration played a huge part in Leave’s win, and by the equally irrefutable logic that access to the EU’s single market and the customs union are irreconcilable with permanent limitations on the free movement of its citizens, Cameron’s successor as PM, Theresa May, seems to be preparing the country for the hardest of Brexits.
The irony – as bitter as it is delicious – is that Brexit, however hard, will not see the UK ‘take back control’ of its borders, let alone fulfil May’s aspiration to reduce annual net migration to the tens of thousands. Unless, that is, the government is prepared to crash the economy as well as crash out of the EU. Without the counterbalance of immigrants, the UK’s ageing population will lead to an unsustainable dependency ratio. More pressingly, the country’s health, construction, and social care systems will begin visibly to collapse without continuing inward migration. So will much of its fruit and vegetable sector, unless farmers are suddenly prepared to pay premium wages to persuade Brits who think such work is beneath them to consider returning to the fields.
Employers across a range of businesses have made this crystal clear to May, and she and her colleagues have admitted that freer movement will probably need to be part and parcel of any post-Brexit free trade deals they manage to strike with non-European countries.
The contradictions of this are as obvious as they are ridiculous. If the referendum was won in part because of the lie that tens of millions of Turks were about to descend on Britain unless it left the EU, then it is hard to see how Brits are going to welcome a deal with Ankara that will mean exactly that. Similarly, while they might cope with a few thousand New Zealanders making their way to London, they are bound to baulk at vast numbers of Indians and Chinese.
Quite how those contradictions can possibly be resolved is difficult to see. Indeed, there is no sign whatsoever that Conservative politicians will eventually level with the public on the immigration issue. And if they don’t, their Labour counterparts won’t dare to either. All of which means the continuation of the glaring gap between rhetoric and reality that has provided politicians, whether mainstream or more extreme, with the opportunity to appeal in predictably populist fashion to voters who sense they’re not being told the whole truth. Whether, of course, they are capable of handling that truth, should they ever be presented with it, is another matter entirely.
This post represents the views of the author and not those of Democratic Audit. It originally appeared at the New Zealand website Newsroom.
Tim Bale (@ProfTimBale) is Professor of Politics at Queen Mary University of London. His books include The Conservative Party: From Thatcher to Cameron and Five Year Mission: The Labour Party under Ed Miliband. He is one of the international academics who took part in the panel discussion Migration and Populism in the 21st Century on February 23 as part of Victoria University of Wellington’s Capital Cities Universities Initiative.
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Noted the bit about partisan media.
Where would you say the elephant in the room of UK media sits?
Very firmly in the Guardian camp in my book, so easily making the left of centre view the predominant media view in the UK
Despite spending some time in recent weeks reading to try and understand the currently much used term populism I have clearly failed. I would have thought a populist political movement must be in tune with a significant proportion if not a majority of public opinion yet you call UKIP a populist (a radical populist to less) party and Nigel Farage a consummate populist politician. You flatter them. UKIP will never have more than 10-15% support amongst the electorate and Farage’s attempts to articulate what he sees as public concerns have failed to the extent that he has now given up. Clearly he alienates far more people than he appeals to.
Perhaps you attribute popular appeal to a policy some would associate with UKIP that of being anti-migration or anti-immigrant. The overwhelming majority of British people are neither. Our whole history, including recent events, demonstrate how welcoming the British have been of many immigrant from many parts of the world, more so than most countries or cultures that I am familiar with. Hence the limited support for UKIP and the almost total lack of support for parties such as the BNP or EDL.
To think of the vote to leave the EU so firmly in terms of migration is to misunderstand or ignore the many serious concerns of the British public that found a voice in the Referendum. One aspect of which I totally agree with you on is that people recognise there are more important things than the economy. Lets hope the leave vote has seriously punctured the narrow, inequitable focus of politics on economic gain.
I think if the UK had a long term plan to deliver a sustainable population where new arrivals were integrated effectively the government could publically make the argument for needing mass migration in the short to medium term. Instead we have ruling elite with an apparent sense of self-entitlement who appear to prefer to refer to anyone who doesn’t share their world view as ‘isolationist’ or ‘bigoted’ and then wonder why they lose referendums.
The problem of course is that an article like this that dresses up political campaigning as truths about immigration – eg …”given that migrants benefited the economy they (the Blair government) did nothing to address it”. Firstly it is a matter of opinion whether migrants benefit the economy, not just a throwaway line as if it were a fact (it is as fake a fact as suggesting that ever higher tax ‘must’ yield ever higher revenues), and wrecks the argument because it makes clear what the political intention of it is – secondly the Blair government DID do something – it lied to the people about the figures, lied knowing there would not be just ‘13,000’ and covered up the figures approaching a million for a long time. Why did it need to lie and cover up? it needed to lie because it knew the people would not like it, specially seeing the resulting problems in many areas of the country in schools, surgeries etc. All of which were apparent through the lies and fake news about the numbers. Lie and then accuse anyone who dares comment of being ‘racist’ and try to arrest them on fake charges to silence them. That is not nothing. It appeared clear to most average people that immigration did not benefit their ‘economy’, even if it benefited the rich friends of New Labour with cheap labour.
The article is on sounder ground when it addresses the fact that it was the mainstream parties which ramped up the issues surrounding immigration (once the elite’s total failure on the matter had been spread out endlessly after investigation on the part of what the piece calls inaccurately the ‘populist radical right UK Independence Party’). The elite could dissemble no longer so decided itself to ramp up the language with the specific intention of doing nothing – as I pointed out 3 years ago, https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/damian-hockney/bulgaria-and-romania-debate-is-mired-in-cynical-fantasy Tories AND Labour used incendiary language to throw fuel on the issue – David Blunkett of Labour talking about ‘explosions’ and former Home Secretary Jack Straw about “spectacular mistakes”. But used inflammatory ‘go home’ words with the specific intention of doing nothing – possibly the most irresponsible thing the elite has done since the war.
Having created this mess, the elite now has to accept that the UK will leave the EU and that the issue of control over immigration has to be actioned – as a former vice chair of UKIP who favoured immigration (as I put on record repeatedly, and was not alone), it is to me a shame that the political class has effectively sabotaged a nuanced approach by refusal to listen, accusations of racism and extremism against those who raised even a polite and warning word, thus alienating many reasonable people, and then patronising and then panicking once its lies caught up with it. Doomsday scenarios for the fruit picking industry are really not enough to warrant a volte face now. It needs to be got on with, and no doubt once again the hysterical in extremis predictions of the Remainers in mourning (recession ‘guaranteed’ by the end of the first quarter if the voters disobey the elte’) will be proved wrong.
This is the kind of scare-story nonsense which switched off the voters in the referendum campaign. Some examples:
“More pressingly, the country’s health, construction, and social care systems will begin visibly to collapse without continuing inward migration. So will much of its fruit and vegetable sector, unless farmers are suddenly prepared to pay premium wages to persuade Brits who think such work is beneath them to consider returning to the fields.”
Eh? Net immigration in the 1980s and 1990s was in the tens of thousands and economic growth was robust – certainly more than it has been in the past decade, and also driving improvements in median earnings.
The real problem here is that Prof Bale has fallen for the lump of labour fallacy. There is no fixed demand for work — just as immigrants don’t “take” jobs, then jobs won’t go unfilled without immigrant supply. Even if there was a cliff-edge drop in immigration, then Prof Bale’s hypothesised catastrophe would be avoided by shifts in investment and shifts in wages. Certainly, the fruit and vegetable sector would be expected to seek out more capital-intensive production methods. The health and social care sector would probably have to increase pay (how awful) to attract the necessary workforce.
“Employers across a range of businesses have made this crystal clear to May, and she and her colleagues have admitted that freer movement will probably need to be part and parcel of any post-Brexit free trade deals they manage to strike with non-European countries.”
Employers may represent their vested interests, but what’s convenient for their existing business model may not benefit the British public. But what’s really irksome here are the weasel words “freer movement”. Prof Bale is seeking to suggest “oh, silly Brexiters, free movement is inevitable otherwise there’ll be no trade deal”, and he’ll point to the migration provisions in recent trade deals such as CETA. But provisions for intra-company transfers (which is what CETA contain) represent a small share of immigration, typically used for highly-skilled managers and professionals employed by multinational companies. The numbers concerned and earnings profile are in no way comparable with the mass movement into low-skilled work experienced from free movement.
“If the referendum was won in part because of the lie that tens of millions of Turks were about to descend on Britain unless it left the EU, then it is hard to see how Brits are going to welcome a deal with Ankara that will mean exactly that. Similarly, while they might cope with a few thousand New Zealanders making their way to London, they are bound to baulk at vast numbers of Indians and Chinese.”
Once again, I’d challenge Prof Bale to name a single existing trade deal between a major advanced economy and India, China or Turkey that includes free movement of people allowing “vast numbers”. He won’t find one, because there are none. “Freer movement” and “vast numbers” are pure sophistry.
I imagine Prof Bale would lament the decline of respect for expertise, and would suggest these criticisms are part of that – what would a mere internet commentator know that he wouldn’t? But this post illustrates two important reasons why respect for expertise is in decline. First, Prof Bale has pretty nakedly twisted the truth into a scare story to pursue his own fairly obvious perspective; he presents himself as an independent, technocratic witness but he is in fact a partisan. Second, the only defence he has for the problems in the post — his failure to understand that the lump of labour cuts both ways, or his mistaken suggestion that modern trade deals incorporate anything resembling EU free movement — is that he is a Professor of Politics talking about economics and trade, and in those he is not an expert, and so would anyway deserve no special status.
Anonymous, you really said it all far far better than I did in my own posting. Your last point about ‘respect for expertise’ is vital and chimes in to why the voters simply will not trust ‘experts’ any more: they are told half stories and deeply loaded points by partisan apologists for a particular cause, very often simply hired hands: as if these claims, told by a supposed expert, are not contestable and are fact.
One simply has to remember what these ‘experts’ endlessly cited by the Remain camp said only 10 months ago – that the UK economy would go into recession in the very next quarter ‘guaranteed’ in the event that the voters disobeyed the elite and said Leave. In neither of the subsequent ‘very next quarters’ did that ‘guarantee’ come true, quite the reverse…neither did their additional guarantee/threat of the ‘urgent need’ for a punishment budget to slash pensions and massively increase taxation “required the very next day” if the voters dared to disobey. We are still waiting.
Why should anyone listen now to half stories from the same crowd about the alleged impending chaos if future migration law is fully controlled by the UK government? Again, as with the ‘experts’ 10 months ago, half the story, distorted through a slanting light and made into a panic scare story. Shocking.
“Without the counterbalance of immigrants, the UK’s ageing population will lead to an unsustainable dependency ratio”.
What happens when those immigrants get old?
Ever heard of a pyramid scheme?
So what is the answer Andy?
Increase immigration, which increases the pressure on housing, and encourages employers to pay less than the minimum wage?
How about actually having more children?
We seemed to have managed in the past.
Well quite. The piece makes a number of 1066 and All That style claims about immigration – “..therefore it was a good thing” – without really addressing for whom or how. If it was indeed so good, why did they need to fabricate so many falsehoods about it and cover it up and then accuse anyone who dared comment of being ‘racist’? A claim designed to shut people down.
It can not be solved by immigration. It can only be solved by productivity improvements. Get some of those 35 million who are sitting on their backsides doing nothing to do useful work. Give free childcare, release millions of mothers back into the workplace. Scrap the retirement age, let people work until they can’t.
To expect a politician to be honest is to be unrealistic also
Honesty and politics don’t mix.