Immigration and the election.
| Author | Flynn, Don |
| Position | Essays |
The 2010 general election was the most unpredictable and enthralling in recent history.
This article delves into the election through the prism of immigration. How did immigration play in the election and in the actual campaigns? What was the salience of immigration to the result? What lessons can be learned as immigration assumes critical importance to the Labour leadership election?
This article is divided into three parts. In the first part we focus on how immigration and immigration policy changed under the Labour government. Second, we analyse how immigration played in the election and critique the gathering wisdom of how immigration drove Labour's loss and the Liberal Democrats' 'boom and bust'. We find voters did switch from Labour and the Liberal Democrats as a result of immigration, but also that these were second order issues and less important than in 2005: in 2010, economic issues were manifestly more important.
Finally, we begin to unpick the implications of that analysis, focusing in particular on how a social democratic narrative might develop in the longer term and what lessons could be learned.
Immigration under New Labour
Labour in power made substantial changes to immigration policy. Prior to 1999, the country's immigration policy framework had been in place for more than a generation. The approach, created when the British Empire was being dismantled, was based on two pillars. The first pillar, limitation, comprised three laws--enacted in 1962, 1968, and 1971--that together had the goal of restricting immigration. The 1971 Immigration Act, the capstone legislation that repealed all previous laws, made a strong statement: Britain was a country of 'zero net immigration'. The second pillar, integration, involved a framework of race relations inspired by the US civil-rights movement. The most potent policy measures were anti-discrimination laws, in a limited form in the 1965 and 1968 Race Relations Acts and most comprehensively enacted in the 1976 Race Relations Act. The dominant post-war policy model thus emphasised both the integration of immigrants through a 'race relations' approach and the restriction of immigration (Somerville, 2007).
The Labour Party discarded this template. Politicians made a commitment to economic migration as part of economic policy and, as a result, limiting or restricting immigration was no longer the sole goal. Among the most important new policies that enabled change were those aimed at high-skilled immigrants (such as the Highly Skilled Migrants Program, now incorporated in Tier 1 of the new Points-Based System or PBS); the expansion and redesign of the work-permit system (now Tier 2 of PBS); and measures to attract international students (including two Prime Ministers' Initiatives).
While the government has opened up channels for students and certain workers, it has also attempted to restrict other migration streams, notably asylum, in response to increased application numbers in the last decade (which peaked in 2001-2002) and public and media pressure to reduce the numbers of asylum seekers, and in more recent years aimed to reduce immigration--and especially illegal immigration--full stop. Successive pieces of legislation have sought to curb the number of asylum applications, speed up application processing, and more effectively deport failed asylum seekers. The government also instituted a set of internal and external measures to reduce 'undesirable flows'. These include more restrictive visa regimes for some countries and mandatory identity cards for foreign nationals living in the UK. In addition, the government has implemented major institutional reforms, probably the most important of which was the creation of a separate arms-length agency that has greater operational freedom and combines customs and immigration functions: the UK Border Agency.
Overall, Labour was a boldly reforming government on immigration, re-casting immigration policy as a component of economic policy. In many senses, Labour actually achieved a significant degree of success in this approach, at least measured in terms of easing labour bottlenecks and containing cost growth. It may also have achieved some success in decoupling race from the immigration debate. However, polls showed that the public was never won over to a more liberal immigration regime and never believed the government had control over immigration, which became a consistent political liability for Labour from the late 1990s on, when immigration became a salient issue.
Immigration and the 2010 Election
In the run up to the 2010 election, mainstream politicians were largely silent on immigration
(1). Gordon Brown and David Cameron shared a desire to keep it that way, albeit for different reasons. Brown didn't want to talk about immigration because Labour has long been vulnerable on immigration issues--Labour supporters are internally divided and swing voters view Labour as weak on the issue--while Cameron was silent because keeping the volume low on immigration was critical to his detoxification strategy--designed to move the Conservative Party away from policies and issues associated with 'nasty party' intolerance. For mainstream politicians, the recent calculus has therefore been that there is more pain than gain in talking up or talking down on immigration, largely because of broad support for the existing policy of managed migration but also out of concern over the political message.
In line with this general strategy, the manifestos of the three main Westminster parties revealed little about their immigration plans, which largely hewed to similar lines, such as cross-party support for the Points Based System. The Conservatives promised a cap on immigration, but provided few details about how it would be implemented. Labour promised tighter controls and more emphasis on speaking English (including mandating public servants to have fluency in English). The Liberal Democrats also promised more control, alongside progressive policies of earned regularisation. For the main parties, discretion was the better part of valour.
In contrast, radical change was promised by UKIP and the BNP. UKIP promised a halt to immigration (a five year freeze) and a maximum level of net immigration of 50,000 per year. The BNP made repatriation central to their pitch, offering [pounds sterling]50,000 to encourage resettlement by those defined as not 'White British', with an expectation that 180,000 people per year would take up the offer. Both sets of policies came apart under media and policy scrutiny, although coverage levels were relatively low (2).
As the campaigns geared up, the cacophony of noise on immigration increased, with immigration issues alive in the media and heard on the doorstop. There was an implicit (and sometimes explicit) difference between local campaigns--where tough talk on immigration was frequent and de rigueur--and the national campaign, where there was a deliberate effort to give it a low profile. Politicians and their strategists managed to keep immigration at arms' length until the start of the campaigns. However, like much else in this election, the leaders' debates changed everything.
Immigration was the only issue to surface in all three debates. The debates revealed marginally different narratives (Conservatives would implement a cap, Labour would ensure only those with needed skills would be let in) but few details. The discussion on immigration remained steadfastly anchored on limits. This is hardly a surprise: the 'numbers game' has long been a feature of the British debate on immigration. While testy, it is worth remembering that despite the sharp words, the discussion on immigration was ultimately a civilised one and all three leaders were careful not to play the race card. In the immediate aftermath, analysis indicated only Cameron 'cut through' (Ipsos MORI Social Research Institute, 2010, 3).
One aspect of the immigration issue that got particular play was amnesty or regularisation. The Liberal Democrats were the only party to support an earned amnesty for irregular immigrants. Other parties made consistent attacks on this specific element of policy. Brown and Cameron made the case that amnesty doesn't work and that it would lead to more illegal immigration, using the old saw that 'amnesty is a magnet for more illegal immigrants' which combines both these lines of argument (3).
However, by far the most important moment in the campaign as far as immigration was concerned, and perhaps overall, was the comments by Gordon Brown about Gillian Duffy. 'Bigotgate' dominated coverage of the campaign for several days and five or six media...
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