Keir Starmer rules out the return of free movement if Labour comes back into power

Politics & Elections
21

Which in some ways is what is happening; immigration to the UK is at record high levels, but virtually none of it is from the EU.

From a political point of view, it may be the worst of both worlds. People who voted for Brexit on the basis that they though immigration was “out of control” and they disliked its social implications, or for simply racist reasons, will be unhappy that (a) there is more immigration, not less, and (b) it is from countries that are more culturally and ethnically “foreign” to the UK. Meanwhile businesses still experience a significant shortage of qualified labour and, if they have to sponsor immigrants or establish their entitlement under fairly complex rules, that obviously involves a cost that didn’t arise when hiring workers with free movement rights. Plus, UK citizens have themselves lost the (employment and other) benefits of free movement.

22

Quick factual nitpick: the border in Ireland is more than 3 times longer than the land border between England and Scotland (310 miles vs 96 miles). However, I suspect you’re right that the latter would be much more economically significant. For example, quite a few large UK financial businesses have headquarters in Scotland. You are certainly correct that this could cause immediate issues if Scotland were to leave the UK, and even more issues should they then join the EU.

23

I’m not sure if I’ve parsed your statement correctly, but I think you’re disagreeing with this paragraph.

You’re, of course, welcome to disagree with me, but the election shows that the pro-Remain parties and candidates lost. If you think there’s electoral math that indicates there was underlying popular majority support for Remain in the 2019 vote, then I think you’re wrong. Show me the numbers to support such a claim. Or clarify the idea you’re claiming, and back it with some evidence. Please.

Also, to keep the thread on track, free-movement within the EU was not the only reason for voters who supported remain. Keir Starmer probably has lots of polling data on how voters view the return of free movement into the UK from EU countries. Just a reminder, Keir Strarmer was a Remainer. If he’s opposed to the idea, you can be pretty sure that the general voting population isn’t supporting free movement into the UK from EU countries.

24

No, I do think that Labour adopting euroskeptic positions on various EU-related issues gives them the best chance to win the seats they need to win. The unfortunate result is that there are elections where there isn’t actually a significant choice on those issues, and as a result we don’t have a definitive conclusion about what the public thinks of them. Most marginal constituencies in England are marginal between Labour and the Tories, parties which often adopt positions that aren’t that different in part because their own supporters are divided. The same dynamic happened in reverse in elections like 2010 and many prior but with both of those parties adopting Europhile positions on many issues.

25

I tend to agree with that. There is no clear blue water between the parties on many issues. In the last election, with Labour dominated by its radical wing, there was too much and the voters did not like what they were seeing. One of the features of the UK electorate is that it has a long memory as a result of the aging national demography. Many remember well the conflicts of 70’s and 80’s and had no wish to elect radicals from the left into power who would simply try to reverse all many policies for idealogical rather than pragmatic reasons at great expense.

Labour and Conservative will fight for ownership of policies that appeal to the political centre. Goodness knows that there is a long list of systemic problems facing the UK and well as dire economic prospects. The choice may be decided by which party looks competent enough to deal with them. In that respect the Conservatives are at a great disadvantage. Labour face an open goal that they can only lose by worrying the electorate with some magic money tree solution to fix the economy.

The voters do not want another Brexit issues debate. They are exhausted by the issue and will switch off. Immigration is part of that. They want the healthcare and social care problems fixed, they are not so much interested where the medical staff come from. That is the governments problem to solve. That is what they are paid to do.

I expect Starmer will announce some signature policies once a general election draws near. To do so at this stage would be a mistake. He will be accused of turning his party into a lighter version of the Tory party by his left wing. The same happened to Blair. The left of Labour still resent him despite the socialist elements of his political program that made many improvements to public services during the 1990s. Starmer will face the same scepticism and he has to control his left wing. Blair had the union man Prescott protecting his left wing. I am not sure if Starmer has his people in place. Labour are putting up a united front but I am sure there are lots of tensions in the background.

Policies like immigration are usually kept in the background. It was rarely discussed during the Blair/Brown years, even though they opted for early free movement of labour for the eightcountries that joined the EU in 2004. They wanted the economic benefits of a flexible labour market. They did not make this a big issue to trouble voters, they just did it in the background.

The Conservatives, however, decided to adopt immigration as their signature Brexit policy. They have been directing attention to it regularly, led by successive Home Secretaries who want to be seen to be strong and assertively fixing the ‘problem’.

Creating a crisis by mismanagement and then ceremoniously fixing the problem by strict new laws and aggressive policies seems to be in the Conservative playbook. This is getting quite tedious. But I guess worrying about immigration diverts public attention from the ‘elephant in the room’, which is that the government has borrowed a huge amount to finance the Covid lockdowns and is now having to manage a mountain of debt, made worse by the energy crisis.

Starmer needs to position Labour as the party that can fix this problem. Sunak is desperately trying to do the same thing for the Conservatives. For Sunak the timing is very bad because the economy is trending towards recession and he has few options that are palatable to his own party.

The next election will be fought over the economic policy and the cost of living crisis. The Brexit bundle of trade, sovereignty, border security and immigration will return to the background. These issue are not first in mind to voters when the bills start piling up that they cannot pay.

26

I mostly agree with your post, though I gather a big part of the dessication of the NHS, which is very much on voters’ minds, is because Brexit has slashed the number of foreign doctors, nurses and support staff needed to keep it running. If Labour were smart, they could thread the needle of not saying they’ll fling the doors open again but at the same pushing for a much more expansive visa policy for jobs like this (and the agriculture jobs, and the teaching jobs, and…) and selling it to the red wall Little England voters as a welcome necessity.

Sometimes quite viciously. Theresa May always seemed to be positively salivating at the implementation of the Hostile Environment policy, and her time as Home Secretary was also marked by the downright racist Windrush scandal. And Suella Braverman stating publicly how her “dream” was to watch aiplanes take off from Heathrow full of refugees that would be dumped without fanfare into Rwanda is the most recent example. Conservatives adopted immigration as their main focus because Nigel Farage pushed them to, forcing them to kowtow to the downright bigoted extremes on the far right. The last seven years of chaos have largely been because the Tories were trying to placate their loons and cranks because they needed them to stay in power, not because they were actually trying to improve things in the UK.

27

UK politics are very much not US politics. I agree that what you suggest above is what should happen in a mature democracy populated by mature voters served by mature politicians. And, very recent history excepted, is how UK electioneering has generally operated.

If indeed the Tories start the conversation on this ground but find they’re losing the battle for mindshare and media momentum, I’d expect them to turn to every emotional wedge issue they can find. The Brexit trio come readily to mind.

28

Isn’t that EXACTLY what Brexit was, but from the right? A revival of 1970s-style Euroskepticism? I wasn’t politically aware in the 1970s, and certainly not of British politics, so please correct me if there’s a difference. For all I know, in the 1970s, that skepticism WAS left-wing.

29

Views on european integration have never fit neatly to a right-left divide nor have they fit neatly into the divide between political parties in the UK.

Labour in the 70s actually was deeply divided on europe and with more of a euroskeptic element than the tories.

30

There was a good deal of scepticism that the UK had the political culture to participate in the growing European Common Market as it was known in the 1970s. The UK made several attempts to join and was each time blocked by De Gaulle, the French president. The UK finally managed to join under the Heath government led by Edward Heath in the mid 70’s, after DeGaulle passed away.

At that time, the UK was known as ‘the sick man of Europe’ because of its constant industrial strife with strong labour unions challenging the elected government. Both parties were fixed on trying to come up with some kind of coherent economic policy despite this, made worse by the energy crisis brought on by conflict in the Middle East. The Common Market was seen as a way to grow the economy by joining a trading bloc.

At the end of the decade Thatcher was elected into power and her attitude towards Europe was to do some hard bargaining and come up with a discount on membership fees. Her successor, John Major also engaged and negotiated with the EU. But by end of his administration the Eurosceptics had grown stronger and remained so during the Blair/Brown years until the Conservatives were finally back in power under Cameron.

The Conservatives are now the party of Brexit all the wonderous opportunities that will come from turning the countries back on one of the worlds biggest trading blocs.

Labour’s position has always been ambiguous regarding Europe, There is a strong Eurosceptic element, especially on the left, which is why there was no leadership from Corbyn during the Brexit vote.

UK history has always seen Europe as the place were bad things come from. Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin in command of large land armies. It’s policy has always been to oppose any power that looks to dominate and maintain a strong navy to defend against invasion. The view from Europe is that the ties of economic union deliver peaceful prosperity, encourage co-operation and stabilise the politics of a fractious continent.

They are both right.

But the UK needs to find a role post Brexit and develop trading relationships to grow the economy. However those noisy Euro sceptics have yet to come up with a credible plan. The UK bargaining position was for forty years as part of a large bloc. We are now a much weaker negotiating position and with little experience of delivering trade deals. This does not augur well for the future of the UK economy.

We are back to 1970s type problems. Strikes, inflation, energy crisis and dealing with the threat of the Russian bear. There is not the left - right idealogical divide that was so prominent then. But there is certainly the bloody minded attitude. Back then it came from the labour unions, today it is from the Eurosceptics that have wrecked the economy. They will now retire and let someone else pick up the pieces to try to make something of the awful mess they have made.

The UK is a trading nation, it must be open for business and ready to take up opportunities. So far there has been very little of that. The Brexit dominated Conservatives never had a credible plan. There are no deals lined up to take up the slack in trade with Europe. They fought their own internal war at the expense of the country and we now have to live with the consequences.

I guess it is much easier to break something rather than build it. Building something requires leadership by a statesmen or stateswoman. That position has been sadly vacant in the UK for quite sometime.

31

That last line is the key. The U.K.‘s citizens have been treated as an afterhought in the Tories’ desire to remain in power. When UKIP threatened to cut their majority, Cameron capitulated on a referendum, barely did anything to try and convince the public they were better off remaining, and then bailed the next day despite promising not to.

I’m not letting labour off the hook here either…Corbyn was absolutely the wrong leader of the oppositon, an old-style hippie socialist agitator much more beholden to goofy dogma (and, as it turned out, a fair bit of anti-Semitism) than any coherent plan, and was a Euroskeptic to boot. They both screwed the pooch.

But most of my ire is reserved for the Tories who have always claimed (as Conservatives do on this side of the pond) to be the only party who could possibly be trusted to run an economy, and then drove it off the cliff. And the incessant…lying? self-delusion? “We hold all the cards! Europe will be begging to trade with us on better terms than we had before! We’ll maintain food safety standards but we won’t put that in writing anywhere, trust us!” The pandering was transparent from the word go, and I really hope that ten years from now, when voting demographics have shifted, nobody forgets what was lost come election time.