Does Andy Burnham really want an ‘honest’ conversation on EU free movement?

When a politician says that they want to have an “honest conversation” or discussion, there’s two things to take note of. One is that announcing your intention to have a conversation, honest or otherwise, is a way of avoiding having the conversation here and now. It is an earnest sounding manana . The other is that “honest”, in all such circumstances, protests too much. It seeks to imply that the conversations that have already been had by, y’know, those other people have been dishonest, and that you’re the straight dealer who’s going to tell it like it is. But it simultaneously betrays an anxiety. The same applies to honesty as applies to being powerful or being a lady: if you have to say you are, you aren’t. See also, “I’m not complaining, but” and “with all due respect”. “It’s fine to have free movement as long as not too many people move” isn’t a policy So it is with the government being pressed on the question of Europe. So it is with the government being pressed on quite a lot of things. They’re not ruling anything out, nothing’s off the table, and they’re prepared to do some radical stuff, you betcha… some time. After an honest conversation. Saying: “This is what we believe and this is what we’re going to campaign for” offers hostages to fortune. So looking forward to an “honest conversation” is the holding line. It’s the one that Angela Rayner used when asked about the subject by Laura Kuenssberg yesterday: “It’s ten years on since we left the European Union. We can’t go backwards,” she said. “That’s not a possibility for us. We have to go forwards – twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom [I made that last bit up] – and therefore you have to look at what that future relationship will look like. I would like us to have an honest conversation about what the trade-offs could be and then put that to the people at a general election. The Prime Minister is clear that you can’t take anything off the table when you’re having a conversation.” Most popular Madeline Grant In praise of Master and Commander Max Jeffery Alastair Campbell would like your attention Patrick West Andy Burnham is a people-pleaser and that’s a problem So it was, too, with the Prime Minister speaking to the Sunday Times . Asked whether he could see the UK under his premiership returning to EU rules on the free movement of people, Andy Burnham said: “Freedom of movement had very significant challenges associated with it and I spoke about them in my previous time in parliament… But at the same time, it was a type of immigration that perhaps wasn’t as difficult. Revolving door migration where people would come and then go back is different. The balance of migration has changed, hasn’t it, since then? I think we’ve just got to have an honest discussion about those things.” And there, he does speak a truth, but it’s one that he’s a little hesitant to name more explicitly. What’s the difference between the type of immigration that “perhaps wasn’t as difficult” and the type we’ve got now? It is, yes, that the migrants we were seeing came over here for a year or two and then went home; whereas now that migrants are coming to stay. But it’s also that these are two different sorts of migration, for the most part: that one was the sort from Europe, and the other is the sort from outside Europe, and that when we’ve muddled them either ignorantly or instrumentally in our public conversation, no good has come of it. Burnham could point out, in this forthcoming honest conversation, that free movement of people under the EU rules was not much of a problem at all for most of its history. That it allowed our people to go over there to work and play (like the Prime Minister’s father, whose stint working in Germany he cutely ascribes to his being “part of the Auf Wiedersehen, Pet era”) and their people to come over here to work and play, as the glories of the free market moved them, and that most of them then went home. Net migration in the 1990s for EU citizens, as the Times affirms, “hovered around zero”. He could then concede that the couple of years before the Brexit referendum saw a surge of migration from the EU (pretty small beans compared to where we are now), and that this energised the people who had always hated the EU and had been campaigning to get shot of it for decades. But that the idea of “taking back control” of our borders, which was sold on the premise that leaving the EU would do the trick, had absolutely no effect on migration from everywhere else in the world. Indeed, it went into orbit almost immediately after. He might say that net migration has more than tripled since we supposedly took back control, and that the same people who were once squawking about EU migration have now changed track to squawking about migration from outside the EU without so much as a blush of shame. He might say, therefore, that the question of whether to rejoin the EU’s free movement scheme is a colossal red herring when it comes to the migration issue everyone’s concerned about, ie small boat arrivals. It’s also the case though – and I write this as a pro-immigration softie – that the type of immigration you happen to have (the nice, “revolving door” type or the bad, staying-here-and-setting-up-madrassahs type) in any given era shouldn’t affect the principle of the laws you make. They need to be robust whatever the swirling push and pull factors might be from decade to decade. “It’s fine to have free movement as long as not too many people move” isn’t a policy: it’s a pair of crossed fingers. So in defence of the take back control mob, and in a note of caution to Andy Burnham, we could admit that while refusing EU free movement might do diddly squat to stop the boats, reinstating it certainly wouldn’t give us greater control over who’s coming in. In any case, it’s an honest conversation to look forward to, and I can’t wait.