In what way is Ed Miliband wrong about immigration?
This morning Ed Miliband made a speech saying that Labour had got it wrong before on immigration.
He told the IPPR:
By focusing exclusively on immigration’s impact on growth, we lost sight of who was benefiting from that growth – whose living standards were being squeezed. We became disconnected from the concerns of working people.
James Kirkup has said, in the opening line of his dispatch, that:
The Labour leader will say that while middle-class households benefited from mass immigration to Britain their working class counterparts suffered.
This focus has resonated with leftist criticisms of Miliband this morning who are accusing him of playing dirty immigration politics and trying to create a them-and-us feeling among the working class.
All the while, the far right are saying Ed is coming round to their thinking.
Nick Griffin, the leader of the BNP, for example on his Twitter feed has said:
Miliband joins ranks of BNP recruiting sergeants. Legitimation of our message by party that everyone knows is utterly obsessed with migrants and the multi-cult. Public won’t be fooled!
(It took me a couple of times to get what Griffin is saying here, but it is that Miliband is realising the truth, but the public knows he is being insincere because his party is insincere).
But I don’t think those leftist criticisms, or indeed the far right ones, are correct.
Miliband’s main points address employers. Even where he talks about the benefits of Middle-class families against working class ones, he’s not pitching foreigners against natives, just that having an abundance of labour, often cheap labour, is a benefit to the richer in society.
Four of the measures Miliband called for are very interesting:
- Forcing medium and large employers to declare if more than a quarter of their workforce is foreign, so that gaps in training British workers can be addressed, allowing them better to compete
- Banning employment agencies from taking on only overseas workers
- Setting up an early-warning system, run by the Migration Advisory Council, to highlight areas where the workforce is “dominated by low-wage labour from other countries”
- Tougher legislation on the minimum wage, with a doubling of the fine from £5,000 to £10,000 for those who break the law
These should appeal to our leftist sentiments.
A common left wing argument goes that capitalists don’t want full employment so they can keep a section of the capable workforce free in order to drive wages down. Any sign of solidarity arguing for the increase in wages and better working conditions can be combatted by the capitalist class seeking labour elsewhere.
The free movement of labour in the EU, in many ways, follows this logic. And to that end, we have what Miliband today identified as a situation where
If you wanted a conservatory built for your home, you were probably better off. If you were working for a company building conservatories, you probably weren’t.
We had this argument in 2009 with the Lindsey oil refinery workers. The Unite union claimed that ‘the Italian firm IREM, a subcontractor at the Lindsey plant, had exclusively hired Italian labour – a practice the union said was spreading across the construction sector.’
This was a clear undercutting of the existing workforce – and as Unite noted, was becoming commonplace in this sector.
We had a left wing argument then – but we are choosing to ignore its application today.
As Miliband said today, immigration is being discussed in “every kitchen”. These discussions often take place when labour activists are knocking on doors, and when the conversation comes up we tend to buckle.
We need a Labour narrative that addresses situations like the Lindsey oil refinery workers. It’s not xenophobic, but just look at the reaction it has caused on Twitter. It’s almost as if you can’t talk about immigration today without getting your ear chewed.
Carl
you are right to pull the +ve worker-defending measures (either via employment guarantee or e.g ensuring access to housing, though this is less clear a commimtent).
But take a step back. Initiatives 1, 2 and 4 at least could have been ‘packaged’ in a speech not framed as Ed’s big immigration speech, but as Ed’s big worker-defending speech, and 3 could have been redefined as a commitment to ensuring services are adequate, whoever you are. By pitching it as an immigration speech, Ed gets the worst of all worlds – called to task by the right for not talking more about keeping the bloody foreigners out, and by the left for pandering to the right and falling into the Griffin trap.
By framing it thus, he/his team feels he has to offer some tough stuff alongside these measures – hence the oblectively pointless stuff about croatia, say (see Jon worth on the numbers). One plus for one minus in order to seem balanced. The tragedy is that the could have set all this stuff out as commitments way beyond the ‘we must talk about immigration’ frame, and then when reacting to right wing immigration jibes about Labour not doing enough to respond to loss of employment etc, simply pointed out the range of commitments made.
And why the hell he didn’t pull this speech anyway in favour of an all-out assault on Gove, i’ll never know. His team must be full of dense twats.
I take your point here Paul, but if he was to frame it around other bits and ignore the element to which immigration plays in his speech, he leaves immigration open only to the hostile. He’s surely trying to break that down.
As for Gove, he probably read your piece and felt you had him!
Actually Carl, your piece – when I reflect on it – does open up a fuller area of inquiry round whether we need an ‘immigration debate’ at all, given what I’ve said about framing, and given what Bourdieu said about the discursive power/fundamental illigicality of the word immigrant. But I’ll blog separately on that if that’s ok – well done for opening my eyes a bit in this direction.
In many ways we wouldn’t need an immigration debate, in the usual way it is framed in the UK, particularly in the epistemically closed press, if Labour was to frame the debate around employer responsibility and, importantly, hitherto employer irresponsibility.
Agree with Paul. Also, the Lindsey case is a terrible example: the Italian contractor brought in Italian workers not in order to undercut British workers’ wages, but because it was an Italian contractor with Italian workers on its books.
Whether the contractor did it with the sole intention of undercutting workers is by the by, it did undercut those particular workers being struck off which is why they entered wildcat strikes helped out by Unite.
Carl, Just an extra word on initiative no3, if I may:
“•Setting up an early-warning system, run by the Migration Advisory Council, to highlight areas where the workforce is “dominated by low-wage labour from other countries”
This I’ve taken as a response to pressures on services etc., I think it’s handy to compare this with what happens when pressure on services e.g. shops, drainage as well as schools etc comes from other routes, notably when there is greenbelt expanion or old brownfield sites get housing stuck on them. In those cases neither the public nor the authority response is ever framed in turns of the people to be let in/kept out; the people are expressed simply as demand on services.
Why, logically, should it be expressed in terms of immigrants when the increased demand is from that source. There isn’t really a logic beyond it being convenient to blame them/their otherness.
It’s scary when you’re nice
Initiative 1) The oil refinery is an excellent example. At the time, the HR director stated that Italians were hired because the local workers hadn’t received the relevant training.
I’m all in favour of “British jobs for British workers” in that it means level the playing field and hire the best.
Initiative 3) Would be nice to know exactly what’s going on in these areas, eg farming. We’re constantly told that British workers are too lazy to work these jobs, but what’s the truth?
Initiative 2) These are the agencies spreading the above story.
Good stuff from Milliband. He gets universally panned for his lack of TV charisma yet he’s stumbling out of the New Labour wreckage still strewn everywhere.
It’s an improvement on Brown and “that bigotted woman”.
I agree that we should address immigration, especially as poll after poll shows the level of anxiety that the topic promotes:
http://eoin-clarke.blogspot.co.uk/2011/04/immigration-grown-up-debate.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/feb/27/support-poll-support-far-right
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/markeaston/2011/02/why_are_we_so_concerned_about_im.html
We can’t deny that mass immigration has negatively impacted on the employment prospects of the working class, the group labour are supposed to represent. New Labour became so in thrall of the markets and neoliberal globalisation that we instinctively thought that the undercutting of wages by migrant labour, the increased flexibility of the labour market and the pressure this placed on schools, housing and public services was inherently a “good” thing. Make life difficult for the worker, and you get a more obedient workforce, which is good for business.
We desperately need a new political economy that puts workers first. Ed seems to be on this course, having already promoting economic patriotism and in this speech where he claims to understand the anxiety over immigration. I think if the Labour Party became the party of economic protectionism (subsidies and tax breaks to domestic producers, high tariffs and quotas on non EU goods and services, a stricter immigration system etc) we’d enjoy majority support without abandoning our core values.