Frank Field, MP for Birkenhead.

Brexit would help us control immigration: like me, many Labour voters want out

By Frank Field, The Guardian, Tuesday 14 June 2016

We have learned that the Remain campaign’s attempt to prevent a flood of Labour voters backing Brexit will have new faces. The relaunch began on Monday on Radio 4’s Today programme, when Gordon Brown was interviewed by John Humphrys. It did not go well – and not just because Brown became irritated with the way most of the questions were about immigration. It didn’t go well because immigration is the issue that explains why a third or more of Labour voters might back Brexit.

The Labour party finds itself in the very dangerous position of having only 4% of its MPs supporting leave but, in one opinion poll, 44% of its members doing so. My pro-EU colleagues in the parliamentary party should not expect to have any material effect on this huge gap if the messenger changes but the message stays the same.

People who already have wealth, own a home of their own and have a secure job may not worry about immigration, but Labour’s heartland supporters do worry about it. If present trends continue, two-thirds of the projected increase in population over the next 25 years is expected to come from immigration. Ten to 16 million extra people will move to Britain, suggests Migration Watch [1], and place huge demands on our schools, hospitals, roads and housing stock. That increase might be manageable in good economic times but it could become very socially divisive when, inevitably, the economy hits bumpier times.

It’s not racist to worry about this, as some of my colleagues seem to think, and there’s broad support for more control of immigration among all Britain’s ethnic minority communities.

Leaving the EU doesn’t mean an end to immigration but it does mean that we will be able to decide who comes here and how they come. We must still welcome the dedicated medical professionals who help keep our NHS on track. We can still admit the entrepreneurial and highly qualified individuals who will help build prosperity. If immigration is controlled and people begin to have faith in the system again, I also hope we might be open to taking more refugees from the world’s trouble spots. In other words a post-EU immigration regime can support our public services, expand our economy and also deliver humanitarian objectives; but because it will be under our control there won’t be unexpected and excessive pressures on our schools, hospitals and public infrastructure.

And as Barbara Castle, that great Labour campaigner of yesteryear once argued, outside the EU we will no longer be discriminating in favour of Germans, Spaniards or Belgians and against Indians, Australians and Canadians as is required by our membership of the EU. Britain can become a proper citizen of the whole world again through a colour-blind immigration policy, and not one that serves a “little Europe” and only our closest geographical neighbours.

With youth unemployment still close to 50% in many of our continent’s southern neighbours – notably in Greece, Spain, Italy and Portugal – it is obvious that Europe isn’t working for workers any more. Millions of Labour’s voters have noticed and are voting to leave the EU as a result. They’ve heard politicians say that Brussels is about to change for the better if only we are all patient once more, and they know it never does change.

Our voters are wiser on this big question than Labour’s leaders, and I hope if Brexit does occur on 23 June a “freedom flame” will start to burn across the continent and social democratic parties, trade unionists and social justice campaigners will rise up against the existing EU model. It’s a model that suits Goldman Sachs and big businesses who want cheap labour. It suits agricultural industries rather than the families shopping for groceries. It’s not a social Europe. It’s not a workers’ Europe. It’s not a modern Europe. It’s time to leave.

Frank Field is a British Labour Party politician who has been the MP for Birkenhead since 1979.

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Notes on the consequences of the Brexit vote on the Labour Party’s immigration policy

The Brexit vote has opened a period of great political instability for the UK as a whole, but its impact on the Labour Party has been particularly complex, especially because of the hiatus between the Party’s official support to the Remain vote, the fact that a vast majority of the Labour MPs did so actively (some 222 out of 232), and the relatively strong share of Labour voters who eventually voted Leave (37%, according to most estimates). The vote sparked off months of fratricidal conflicts, a majority of MPs – who already tended to contest his authority – blaming Jeremy Corbyn for what they deemed to be his lacklustre, underwhelming leadership during the referendum campaign. Corbyn’s leadership was eventually challenged by the end of the summer, but he easily  defeated his opponent, Owen Smith, by 62 to 38% in September 2016.

Most of all, a rising number of senior Labour members, Brexiteers and Remainers alike, have pressured the Party’s leadership to learn the lessons from the Brexit vote, understand that it was not just a vote of defiance towards the EU but that it also showed that a majority of the population now believed that levels of immigration had become too high, including immigration from Europe. The most vocal Labour MPs among them have been those with seats in the less prosperous north of England where pressures on the labour market and social services are higher, but also where there is a growing UKIP presence. For instance, in September 2016, the Leeds West MP, Rachel Reeves declared that her constituency – which includes the largely white and economically deprived areas of Armley Bramley (in Yorkshire) – was like a “tinder box” and that the « bubbling tensions » caused by concerns about immigration could “explode” on to the streets if they remain unaddressed. Reeves there had already been three racist incidents since the referendum and she feared there could be more, the most serious of which came in September when a Polish man ended up in hospital after being assaulted by a group of 20 youths in Armley.

In December 2016, the Party’s leadership was further criticized by Carwyn Jones, the Labour first minister of Wales, who deemed this positions on immigration and Europe too “London-centric”, and warned it risked driving Labour supporters into the arms of UKIP: “The danger is that [Corbyn’s] is a very London-centric position. That is not the way people see it outside London. London is very different: it is a cosmopolitan city and has high levels of immigration. It has that history. It is not the way many other parts of the UK are. People see it very differently in Labour-supporting areas of the north of England, for example. We have to be very careful that we don’t drive our supporters into the arms of Ukip. When I was on the doorstep in June, a lot of people said: ‘We’re voting out, Mr Jones, but, don’t worry, we’re still Labour.’ What I don’t want is for those people to jump to voting Ukip.”

Again, on January 7, 2017, two prominent backbenchers, Stephen Kinnock and Emma Reynolds, supported by several other senior figures, renewed their call on Jeremy Corbyn to reform the party’s position in an Op-Ed in The Observer, create a “progressive, fair and managed” migration system, and press Theresa May to put a two-tier system of controls at the heart of Brexit negotiations:

• tier one visas would apply to highly skilled EU nationals such as doctors, teachers and engineers, who would be admitted to take on specific jobs, as well as EU students who have been offered a place at a British university;
• tier two would apply to low-skilled and semi-skilled EU workers, whose numbers would be limited by sector-based quotas, negotiated between government, industry and trade unions.

The plan was supported by Caroline Flint, an MP for Don Valley (Yorkshire) and former minister for Europe, who said: “For years, Labour sidestepped public concern about immigration under successive leaders. It was just too uncomfortable. Now Labour has to get real. It is ridiculous that Labour, a party that has supported regulation of businesses and markets, would want no limits on an open-door EU labour market. Backing fair controls on immigration is entirely in keeping with Labour values. Labour has an opportunity to put forward a case for a preferential labour migration scheme – or risk being ignored during these crucial Brexit negotiations.”

However, the Labour leader and his close ally, the shadow home secretary Diane Abbott, have stuck to his progressive position, refusing to formally endorse restrictive immigration policies in general or any kind of restriction on freedom of movement from and to Europe, even after the UK leaves the EU. He has however added that he would seek to mitigate the effects of immigration on low-paid workers by reintroducing a “migrant impact fund”, i.e., a fund to ease the pressure of immigration on public services which had been first introduced by the Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown in 2008 and which was scrapped two years later by his successor, David Cameron. [2]

Paradoxically, if not ironically, given how they otherwise disagree on every policy, it is from the right of the party that  Jeremy Corbyn and the leadership have tended to receive support, for instance from the Labour peer Spencer Livermore, who, in December 2016, used a strongly worded article in Prospect magazine (the publication aimed at centrist Labour members) to warn his colleagues against colluding in the “dangerous fantasy” that Britain could limit immigration without damaging the economy and against the temptation to emulate right-wing policies on the subject. He said he believed Labour should be arguing strongly that Britain must remain in the single market – which will mean accepting free movement. “During the referendum campaign, the Labour party made it clear that simultaneously having cake and eating it was merely another Boris Johnson fantasy. Yet now, I regret to say, there are leading figures in our own party who are willing to collude in this fantasy. People who should – and I suspect do – know better, have become complicit in creating a fiction that our economy can remain within the single market, while at the same time cutting immigration and ending freedom of movement.” Livermore added that accepting anti-immigration arguments would be bad for the economy: “As a party we have had far too little to say to Labour voters for far too long. Our challenge is a crisis of relevance, not a race to the extremes. We must find an agenda relevant to the voters we need to convince, not imitate solutions that will make the country worse off. The truth is, if Labour becomes an anti-immigration party it will be the far right that benefits, not us.”

[1] Migration Watch is an anti-immigration think tank that leans markedly to the right.

[2] The problem with the fund was that it  relied on a mere £50-a-head levy imposed on non-EU migrant visas, and never raised more than £50m, which did little to ease the pressure points.