Immigration is not Labour’s Problem. Evasion is.

Left and right are both wrong about immigration. The popular policy is also the right one: be more liberal, but make sure that the liberalism is also a bit more muscular.

Let’s just acknowledge something that everyone already knows: Labour’s political problems begin and end with immigration. Keir Starmer is a profound political liability on this question because almost nobody thinks he believes anything in particular about it (or much else). But an inability to coalesce around a strong stance is a problem that won’t be fixed by replacing him.

The irony is that immigration policy offers — potentially — a huge opportunity for Labour if it can get it right.

The weakness of Labour’s leader is not even its biggest problem. The inability to articulate what Labour is for is. [picture credit]

Aside from the large and genuinely difficult problem of the Tories’ economic legacy, Labour continues to flounder because its opponents can use immigration and integration-related curveballs whenever they want to knock the government off its stride.

But those economic problems can’t be addressed without a refocusing — and acquisition — of skills that only a good policy on immigration can bring.

At some point, Labour needs to say some things out loud because current government policy appears to be something like…

“FFS, what can we say or do that will stop people moaning about immigration for five minutes?”

Labour doesn’t just have a policy problem. It refuses to even articulate an approach. Voters don’t follow the details of labour market economics or demographic decline, but they know hesitation when they see it. And because Starmer is Starmer, no sense that clarity is ever going to emerge from him.

He will keep looking managerial, evasive and temporary. Politics as reputational risk management.

The worst part? The idea of persuading people of anything appears to be a non-starter.

This is crazy, because the demographics that are most critical of the government have the most to lose if we have a stupid policy on immigration. Without migrants, voters in their 60s and 70s need to hear that the elderly will face misery in crumbling understaffed hospitals. If they need care-visits in five or ten years time, the best they’ll get is a ten-minute visit from a harassed early-twenty-something to change a bedpan once every few days.

Those are genuinely dark, scary prospects. And — if that doesn’t move the needle — they need to be warned about the eventual collapse of the fiscal assumptions underpinning from house prices to the Triple Lock. The UK doesn’t have the workforce, the demographic structure, or the skills capacity to sustain the economy on our own.

“No immigrants? OK. That’s your pension screwed then!”

Secondly, immigration policy cannot simply be “numbers up” or “numbers down”. The country needs a purposeful description of what skills are needed, where they are needed, and whether they can realistically be generated domestically. If they can’t, then migrants should be described honestly: as contributors. As people educated elsewhere whose labour and taxes Britain now requires because it failed to plan adequately itself.

And if Labour wants to make that argument, it also has to stop behaving as though questions of integration are intrinsically illegitimate. A liberal society should accommodate many faiths, identities and traditions, but it also needs to avoid having pockets of the population that are economically disconnected, linguistically isolated, or openly hostile to parts of the society around them.

None of this is remotely controversial outside online political culture. Any government that wants to do a few performative crackdowns on shitty attitudes to women, or towards other faiths should start now and be loud about them.

But there is another awkward truth here too. Britain increasingly needs migration while simultaneously becoming less attractive to precisely the skilled workers it requires. Brexit damaged that pipeline badly, particularly from Europe. If sectors like healthcare, construction and engineering genuinely require labour, then Britain should be openly trying to attract those workers again rather than performing embarrassed evasions around the issue.

At the same time, immigration can’t just be a mechanism for sustaining a permanently low-productivity gig economy. A serious policy would be tied to sectors that increase national productive capacity — healthcare, logistics, construction — rather than functioning as a hidden subsidy for economically marginal cash businesses and endless delivery apps.

Big adverts everywhere: Your health service and your construction sector need you!

Small changes to the way taxes are logged to enable us to see the contribution from migrants. Policies to spend those increases on building social cohesion (cut the tax on beer in pubs?).

That probably means another popular crack-down on the bits of the economy operating in a twilight world of dubious accounting, exploitative labour and semi-fictional turnover. Turn up the heat under the vape-shops and dodgy barbers that fill town centres. It also means admitting that there are forms of work which are neither socially useful nor economically developmental.

There is a perception that the wrong sort of immigration is intended to staff that part of the economy anyway. So treat that as a political opportunity. Labour can be seen to push some parts of the workforce towards more productive employment — and if Labour is doing it to improve their wages and value to the economy, no-one on the left should oppose it.

None of these arguments are particularly radical. We’re in a world of difficult trade-offs. If we have the confidence to address them, they’re a political asset and not a liability.

Voters increasingly distrust a politics that won’t describe reality plainly because every difficult subject is treated primarily as a communications problem. Reform know this and parrot a mythical version of Britain that most people, deep down, know doesn’t exist.

Labour has the advantage of describing reality.

Labour’s real difficulty isn’t immigration. It’s a purposeful articulation of what it is and isn’t for. We need to rediscover our belief that it’s possible for decent values to be a legitimate part of the national conversation.