Ten years have passed since Britain voted to leave the EU. As national organizer for the left-wing anti-Brexit alliance Another Europe is Possible, I spent the final weeks of the referendum campaign on the stump. In an increasingly desperate attempt to spur progressives into action as the vote narrowed, I closed most meetings with a skit, asking the crowd to imagine Prime Minister Boris going to greet Airforce One and President Donald Trump departing. By and large, they hissed at Johnson and simply laughed at the prospect of a Trump presidency.
Everything became reality. Free movement is over, rivers overrun with sewage, and the authoritarian right dominates our politics so much that it can rely on former social democrats to implement its agenda. One of Starmer’s first foreign visits as prime minister was to Italy, where he praised far-right Giorgia Meloni’s “remarkable progress” in tackling illegal immigration. Protesters are condemned as terrorists for holding signs opposing a genocide. Racist riots are a semi-regular fixture of our summers. The other big target of the right is the European Convention on Human Rights.
As if to come full circle, Andy Burnham, defeated in the 2015 Labor leadership race, is now on his way to Downing Street. His popularity among Labor members and the decisive victory in Makerfield owes much to the perception that he has an answer to the Brexit project and the forward march of the new far right. In general, it involves the symbolic re-centering of the North in British political life and the break with an economic orthodoxy that is still, somewhat, caught up in Westminster. “Britain’s Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” he has written in January, “they are deindustrialisation, privatisation, austerity and Brexit”.
Burnham’s Manchesterism provides a practical rebuttal to Starmer’s attempts to reclaim the “red wall”. The current government has moved right into social issues while doing little to provide for people’s material needs, its workers’ rights legislation and Great British Energy bogged down between aggressive fiscal rules and an unwillingness to challenge private ownership of natural monopolies. By contrast, Burnham’s record as Mayor—symbolized most clearly by the Bee Network of publicly owned buses—represents the kind of steady, imperfect progress that can capture the public mood.
But if Burnham claims he can exorcise Britain’s Brexit demons, he only has half the tools. In economic policy and public ownership, he has consciously positioned himself as an antidote to the status quo. As for immigration, it is much murkier. Surprisingly, he has publicly supported Shabana Mahmood’s plans to remove permanent refugee status, a move that goes further than any Tory government. He is said to be planning to retain Mahmood as Home Secretary.
For the nationalist right, the demand for border controls is not just a vote-winning slogan. It is the essential story. In an era of falling living standards, housing crisis and declining public services, it provides a clear answer to who is to blame. As the climate changes and people are forced to move (between 250 million and 1.2 billion people they may be climate refugees from the middle of the century) will provide an inexhaustible pretext for the escalation of inhumanity, racism and violence.
In the immediate aftermath of the 2016 referendum, Burnham went out of his way to promote the case for tighter border controls. arguing in one Guardian ITEM that the referendum was “above all… a majority vote to end the current system of free movement”. Last week, he had said the House of Commons that it was “no longer prepared to be complicit” in Labour’s failure to confront the issue of immigration, which is “undermining the cohesion of our communities and the safety of our roads”.
Burnham’s case against free movement in 2016 rested largely on a claim to recognize the will of the electorate, although he also claimed that immigration had depressed wages. At the time he was writing, the UK average earnings it had shrunk by 10.4 percent since the financial crisis, the second-worst decline in the developed world. Burnham nodded to the Bank of England explorative which showed that for every ten percentage point increase in the share of migrants in a given occupation, wages fell by 0.3 percent—a drop in the ocean of overall wage depression.
Ten years later, the jury is out on this strategy. Removing free movement from the EU did not make the roads safer, or reduce the importance of immigration as an issue. Shockingly, the debate over migration on the terms dictated by the people who went on to raise the Reformation did not stop the rise of the Reformation.
By succumbing to an immigration narrative that depresses wages and strains housing stock and public services, progressives rob themselves of the ability to point the finger at billionaires, slum landlords, and the political elite. This was less of a problem for Keir Starmer, who is not interested in any kind of anti-establishment pitch, but for Burnham it is a profound contradiction and opens the door to a more generalized movement to the right.
Since the end of free movement, net migration has increased. Immigrants’ rights are not about whether or not people come to the UK, but about the rights they have when they get here. Placing people at the mercy of the Home Office or their visa sponsors simply makes them more insecure and exploitable – and less likely to stand up for themselves, their wages and their rights. Reform’s support for economic deregulation and its demand for ever-tighter border controls are two halves of a coherent whole.
Britain’s malaise is the product of a neoliberal economic experiment that began in the 1980s, plunged into austerity in the 2010s, and is now changing again. Improvement will come when the state invests, wages rise and workers organize. Evictions do not build homes, staff NHS wards, or enrich our culture and society. Immigrants do.
Andy Burnham certainly knows all this, and he sometimes says it. Unlike Starmer – a composite politician with no discernible core, a Prime Minister seemingly held prisoner by whoever is his most right-wing adviser at any given moment – Burnham has the ability to think and communicate in a straight line. But native to Labour, and especially to the soft left where it has pitched its tent, is a politics of the tight triangle and respect for common sense. Surrounded by a Parliamentary Labor Party that has spent two years cheering authoritarian and anti-immigrant policies, he will be tempted to take the path of least resistance.
Labour’s problem with immigration is not their unwillingness to talk about the issue, but their inability to root their response in reality and the values of social solidarity it claims to represent. There are many outside the party, myself included, who see easily the prospect of a Burnham government and who are open to some sort of alliance to defeat Reform. This will be unsustainable as long as Labor remains committed to an immigration policy that strengthens the far right, brings misery to vulnerable people and undermines leftist narratives and class politics. Ten years after the referendum, the Labor leadership-in-waiting must decide whether it wants to finally move on from the Brexit moment, or be doomed to repeat it.
(Further reading: The Prime Minister resigns – so shut up)
