Labour abandoned telling the truth on immigration. It's come back to haunt them

Everybody knows that you can’t please all of the people all of the time but the original adage, first coined by a 15th century English monk called John Lydgate, also contends that you can at least please some of the people all of the time or all of the people some of the time. With her new immigration policies , Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has somehow contrived to please precisely none of the people exactly none of the time. Condemned from one side for being performatively cruel and from the other for being unduly lenient, it is hard to work out how she has managed to make such an almighty mess of things.

Until, that is, you stop to work out what she was trying to achieve. And how utterly ridiculous that ambition will always be. In politics as in funfairs, the queue for the ghost train is always longer than the queue for the speak-your-weight machine. One uses theatrical falsehoods to provoke powerful feelings; the other delivers cold and often unwelcome facts that we can choose not to believe. In the fairground of British politics, and most obviously in the specific context of immigration , the speak-your-weight machine was shut down in 2016 and we have all been on the ghost train ever since.

Some killjoy contributors to public discourse try to point out that the ghosts aren’t real while others, generally with louder voices and bigger platforms, scream with confected fear and encourage the electorate to be terrorised. One major job of a progressive – or even simply honest – politician in power is to deal in facts and figures and to use them, where necessary, to defuse or refute feelings being cynically whipped up by opposition populism.

At some point over the last 20 years, the Labour Party abandoned the mission of telling people the truth about immigration. It elected instead to pander to the feelings of people frightened by the phantoms and ghouls conjured up to get Brexit over the line, and which are still stalking our body politic. This sorry process possibly began when Gordon Brown was accidentally recorded calling a perfectly pleasant, but demonstrably bigoted woman, a “bigoted woman” during the 2010 election campaign and promptly lost the ballot.

It reached what I hope, but sadly doubt, will prove to be its apotheosis in Parliament on Monday. Because Mahmood’s policies are not designed to address extant issues or real problems. They are designed to assuage, soothe or seduce voters who believe things that are not true. People who, at best, believe that immigrants are somehow responsible for the perceived paucity of the existences of people already here. Consider for a moment, because Mahmood and Andy Burnham don’t seem to have done so, the evolution of the rhetoric being deployed by the pied pipers leading these people to the cliff edge.

Pipers to whose tune this government seems determined to dance. These people insist they are not “racist”, they just want immigrants to contribute more or to integrate better. They do not, they claim, object to immigration per se, they just object to the current levels. And they are, they tell us, happy with “controlled” immigration; it is the “uncontrolled” variety that exercises them. These people are lying. They are the people who celebrated Brexit even though the nurses who cared for them would be banished and the drivers and other workers who kept the country’s wheels turning would be sent packing.

They are the people who, like Reform MPs Robert Jenrick and Sarah Pochin, are disturbed by the very presence of brown-skinned people on British streets and television screens. They have, of course, not been reasoned into these positions. And yet, Mahmood thinks she can reason them out of them. By extending the time foreign-born people must work here before achieving the rights and security everybody born here enjoys, Mahmood’s redrawing of Indefinite Leave To Remain (ILR) legislation simultaneously punishes people who are contributing and makes it measurably harder for them to “integrate”.

You try assimilating fully into a society that has told you, explicitly, that you are worth measurably less to your community than its laziest, nastiest native. By failing to tirelessly report the reality of net migration figures, down 48 per cent in the year to May and falling fast, she has removed the single most important fact about immigration – that it stands at its lowest level since 2012, outside of the Covid pandemic – from the politics of immigration.

And by behaving as if the opposite is true – that the numbers are higher than ever and growing exponentially – she can’t even make the case for immigration being more “controlled” than at any other point in living memory. She has, in other words, alienated informed people by behaving indecently and failed to appease the indecently ill-informed because most of the things they believe are not and never will be true. There is, I suppose, one vaguely charitable rationale for this disaster.

Namely, that Mahmood thinks a few far right-adjacent policies framed to appease ignorant voters will quell their misgivings and dissuade them from offering support to the real McCoy, the actual fascists promising to deport everybody one degree wide of magnolia on the Dulux colour chart. But that is a race to the bottom, a pointless promise to be just vicious enough to keep the real barbarians from the corridors of power by doing some but not all of the things they would do when they got there.

Eventually, a government will have to tell the British people the truth about immigration, about its net benefits to our economy, about its increasing necessity in the face of our changing demographics, about the damage already done to both by pandering to people reeling off that ghost train. Monday made it clear that it is not going to be this government that does it. And that all the monsters they have elected to feed instead of slaying will grow bigger and more dangerous as a result.