Did immigration really cost Labour these elections?

A little over a week ago, in council elections across the UK and a parliamentary by-election in a historically safe Labour seat, the so-called Reform UK party, whose leader is Nigel Farage who previously ran the Brexit Party and before that was leader of UKIP and is notorious for bringing everything down to immigration, gained control of a number of provincial county and unitary councils which neither that party nor its predecessors have ever done before, as well as gaining the seat of Runcorn and Helsby on the outskirts of Liverpool from Labour, a by-election triggered by the resignation of the old MP who was convicted of assaulting a constituent in the street last October. Keir Starmer, the prime minister, penned a piece for the Times (paywalled, but archived here) which contains a lot of platitudes but very little substance other than a warning not to rip up fiscal rules and a mention of “reforming the out-of-control benefits bill left by the previous government” which started its period in office with an attack on disabled people’s allowances, but a major response has been that Labour should focus more on “stopping the boats” than on anything that might improve anyone’s standard of living, least of all the threat of cuts to disability allowances, something Labour freely condemned when they were in opposition and the Tories were doing it.

One of the loudest Labour MPs favouring an over-emphasis on immigration is Jonathan Hinder, a former police inspector who is now MP for Pendle and Clitheroe in Lancashire, one of the counties Reform gained control of (from the Tories) last week. His Twitter feed is full of “culture war” talking points, accusations of Labour being dominated by a “liberal elite” out of touch with Labour’s ‘traditional’ (read white) working-class base. Hinder wrote an article for the Daily Telegraph, a paper heavily associated with the Tory party and probably read by few working-class people, which starts with a claim that “the engines of the liberal establishment are revving up to explain why Reform’s success is not down to the one thing we know it definitely is: immigration”. He makes a brief statement of three examples of his support for what is commonly thought of as Labour policy, but then proclaims that “immigration is fundamentally an economic issue as much as it is anything else, and working-class people are generally the losers”. He demands that Labour pursue a “net-zero” migration goal, of one person entering for one leaving.  He has also called for ‘reform’ of our human rights rules on the basis that a number of deportations have been blocked on “right to family life” grounds, as if the HRA did not guarantee rights to British citizens also (for example, the right of disabled people to live in their own homes rather than institutions).

There is a tendency for ‘populist’ right-wing politicians to talk of immigration, and sometimes ‘identify’, as codewords for race. Judging by Hinder’s recent posts, I suspect the same is true of him. When the Telegraph reported that an 18-year-old Muslim council candidate won a seat on Burnley after giving an interview to PoliticsHome in which she advocated separate public spaces for women, such as gyms, because Muslim women were not comfortable sharing spaces with men, he proclaimed: “we have to put our ‘cultural sensitivities’ in the bin and sort this out. Intolerable”. He also retweeted someone who called this “proper sectarian stuff”. Two weeks earlier, when the Supreme Court gave its ruling on the meaning of ‘woman’ in British equality law (i.e. that it excluded trans women), he gave it his enthusiastic support, sharing among other things Blue Labour’s tweet calling it a “common sense and definitive ruling” based on “biological reality”. This ruling was partly about the circumstances in which one sex can be discriminated against, such as in crisis spaces such as women’s shelters and rape counselling centres, as well as more mundane women’s facilities such as toilets and, yes, gyms. But as soon as Muslim women want spaces away from men, this becomes ‘intolerable’.

An important aspect of these results that has been glossed over in the debate over what lesson Labour should learn from them is that the biggest loser in terms of seats was the Tory party who lost 674 council seats in the authorities in which elections were held (which was by no means all of them) compared to Labour’s 187. Reform gained 677 (from nothing), the Lib Dems gained 163 and the Greens 44. Many of the county councils were rural counties whose urban centres have been excised to unitary authorities since the late 1990s: Nottingham, Leicester and Derby are all unitary, and aren’t governed by the new Reform (or Reform coalition) county councils. The Lib Dems also gained control of three councils: Oxfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Shropshire (the last from the Tories, the other two from hung councils), while both Labour and the Tories gained no councils between them. The dissatisfaction with Labour is clear, but what also appears to be happening is that the former Tory vote is moving to Reform, and that depending on the performance of Reform councillors around the country, Labour at the next election may not have the advantage of a divided Right anymore. It has been reported that many candidates stood for Reform not expecting, or even wanting, to win and have no idea how they will juggle their council commitments with work. How this situation will be resolved remains to be seen, but it could result in some quicker than expected council by-elections.

But as for why Labour lost so badly in places they should have won, just a year into a Labour government, perhaps immigration played a part but there is no denying that people are angry at Labour continuing Tory policies of targeting the welfare system and those who need the support it provides while spouting rhetoric about “working people”. Imposing means-testing on winter fuel payments is pure political folly, even if a lot of the recipients can afford it, because pensioners are far more likely to vote than younger people, but targeting disabled people who bore the brunt of fifteen years of Tory austerity policies and the demonisation that went with it, behaving as if even more people are getting support to live with disability who “don’t need it” than the Tories claimed, simply betrays everything many of us thought Labour stood for. Labour have touted reforms (read cuts) to PIP (Personal Independence Payment) as a means of getting people back to work; PIP is not an out-of-work payment but rather a way of meeting the cost of being disabled, by paying for things like wheelchairs, vehicles, adapted computers and software and the like. By continually harping on the virtues of work, they ignore the fact that many disabled people could not work reliably because their condition requires medical attention often, because of relapses or crises; it ignores the fact that a lot of workplaces are physically inaccessible to wheelchair users and many employers are unaccommodating, even if the job could be done by a disabled person.

When Kamala Harris lost the US presidential election last year, some of her supporters blamed the loss on ‘woke’ or her perceived closeness to trans rights, despite these issues having been present four years ago when Joe Biden won. All the immigration issues we have now were present less than a year ago when Keir Starmer won a large majority in parliament, and progressive parties won a combined majority of the popular vote. What’s changed is Labour’s stance towards pensioners and the disabled. The people insisting that the turnaround could only be because of immigration are those who already have an anti-immigration bias. Labour have to understand that if they do not serve the needs of the working class, Reform will step in and cater to the prejudices of some of them. They cannot beat Reform at their own game because Reform will always proclaim that it is not enough or find another scapegoat. Labour need to get to work at repairing the damage caused by fifteen years of Tory government, restoring the fabric of society — social care, social housing, youth clubs, libraries, schools — rather than boasting that they will make people’s lives harder, not easier. They have a substantial majority in parliament and four more years to make a positive change. If they spend their time making it a meaner place with more clampdowns on disability benefits and work visas, they will produce the conditions for Reform to sweep to power in 2029.