In 2000 Minister Barbara Roche gave a speech at the Institute of Public Policy Research. Roche framed the question by contrasting Britain, and its perceived skills gap, and countries including the United States and Australia, who were using migration to grow their economies: ‘We are in competition for the brightest and best talents. The market for skilled labour is a global market and not necessarily a buyers’ market’, she said. The answer was to relax immigration controls and let more in. Roche was cautious and there were some caveats, but the message was clear enough to irritate the opposition Conservative Party. Later, she recalled: ‘I wanted to be the first minister to say that migration is a good thing. It is.’16
Roche’s speech came after a discussion in the Performance and Innovation Unit, Tony Blair’s Cabinet Office think-tank. A paper, titled ‘RDS Occasional Paper no. 67, Migration: an economic and social analysis’, made the argument that more migration was good for Britain. The argument was widely taken up by many. Will Hutton, citing the development economist Nigel Harris, argued that
as long as demand for labour is buoyant, the existence of a supply of immigrant labour at lower wage rates in some sectors will so boost their fortunes that, by increasing employment overall, incomes and output in aggregate will, in turn, be lifted through spending, begetting more spending in a classic Keynesian multiplier.17
Professor of Social Policy Peter Taylor-Gooby wrote that ‘immigrants are not a burden on the taxpayer, they are a benefit, because there are not enough children being born in the UK to work and finance our pensions and healthcare’.18
Some of the ways that the rules were changed to make them more liberal were: first, the repeal of the ‘primary purpose rule’ which had made it more difficult for men from the Indian sub-continent to bring their wives to Britain; second, the bringing in of a right of appeal (in 2000) where family visas were not allowed; and also the Human Rights Act (1998) which made it harder to deport people, and gave them rights in British courts from the point that they were in the country.19
One of the stranger outcomes of the Race Relations (Amendment) Act of 2000 was that it was ‘legal to discriminate on the basis of nationality or ethnic or national origin (but not race or colour)’ only ‘when ministers expressly authorise this’ — and this in particular ‘covers the area of immigration, asylum and nationality law’. In other words, the immigration service had to ask express permission if they were going to discriminate. Following the letter of the law, perhaps to absurdity, as reported by the Commission for Racial Equality, ‘since April 2001 there have been three ministerial authorisations permitting immigration officers to discriminate’. ‘The first authorisation allows discrimination when it can be shown that people of a particular nationality have broken, or will try to break, immigration laws’, the Commission explained. Further, ‘the second authorisation’ — to discriminate — ‘allows immigration officers to examine passengers from specified groups with particular care’. The groups identified were those of ‘Chinese origin presenting a Malaysian or Japanese passport’, Kurds, Roma, Albanians, Tamils, Somalis, and Afghans. The Commission registered their objection ‘that this could amount to racially discriminatory treatment’. The third authorisation to discriminate allowed immigration officers to ‘pilot a project to analyse the language used by asylum seekers from Afghanistan, Somalia and Sri Lanka’.20 You might have thought that it was impossible to restrict immigration without discrimination. But such was the government’s care over the new Race Relations Act that they thought it would be possible to have non-racist immigration controls, and where that was not possible, that it would be best if discrimination was specifically authorised.
Labour’s schizophrenia on immigration saw them scrambling to appear hard on the question in 2015
According to one of the policy wonks that drew up the original Cabinet policy document, Andrew Neather, the original went even further before it was toned down. He wrote that ‘earlier drafts I saw also included a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural’. More, Neather said, ‘I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended — even if this wasn’t its main purpose — to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date’.21
These arguments were being made at the height of the re-motivation of the Labour Party as ‘New Labour’, and indeed the country as ‘New Britain’, by its youthful Prime Minister, Tony Blair. A speech he gave the year before the change in immigration policy contrasted his vision for a New Britain with the ‘forces of conservatism’. The forces of conservatism were all those holding us back. As Blair said, he was for a ‘progressive politics distinguishing itself from conservatism of left or right’. Blair argued that these were ‘the old prejudices, where foreign means bad’, and ‘Where multiculturalism is not something to celebrate, but a left-wing conspiracy to destroy their way of life.’ The future was coming whether we liked it or not, and ‘these forces of change driving the future don’t stop at national boundaries.’
In that moment of self-confidence, Blair and his Cabinet believed that increased immigration was a part of the new changes that were making Britain into a multicultural country, one in which the right would not win power again, and where the dinosaurs of ‘Old Labour’ — in particular the trade union defenders of state socialism — were relegated to obscurity.
The liberal intent of Labour’s immigration policy, however, was undermined by their caution about winning over ordinary people to support immigration. They did not — perhaps could not — do that because they had defined their new political project in direct opposition to the party’s own working-class base. The old Labour supporters were the ‘forces of conservatism’, too. A new multicultural Britain was conceived as an escape from Labour’s commitments to its heartlands in the formerly industrial north of the country. The Labour Party’s psephologists were telling them that most Britons did not like immigration.
One thing was for sure: they did not like the economic argument for immigration, since its premise was that immigration was good for the economy because it would keep wages down. Another kind of movement might have been able to win over working-class support for immigration. But Labour’s dilemma was that it thought of immigration and multicultural Britain as a de-throning of the old Labour heartlands. It was for that reason that the Labour Party was nervous about race and immigration.
While Barbara Roche was talking about relaxing inward migration, Home Secretary Jack Straw was cracking down on illegal ‘people trafficking’. In April 2000 Straw had himself filmed working alongside the immigration police in Dover. As a truck was searched and a Kosovan stowaway captured, Straw gurned for the cameras and blamed truck drivers for taking money for getting people in. The news that the police would be searching for stowaways had consequences — people took more desperate measures to get through. Fifty-eight Chinese men and women were being smuggled in inside a sealed refrigerated truck. When the lorry was opened all were suffocated. Straw said that the deaths were a ‘stark warning to others’ who might be tempted to come. It was an ugly moment that showed the other side of the government’s immigration policy.
Over the winter of 2008-09, workers at the Lindsey oil refinery in North Lincolnshire walked out on strike, protesting at the company’s preference for contract labour from Portugal and other European countries. Prime Minister Gordon Brown was at pains to say that he supported the case of ‘British jobs for British workers’. A Downing Street spokesman explained that the contracts had been issued for foreign labour when there was a labour shortage in Britain, which was ‘obviously not now the case’.22
Some Labour supporters were already hostile to immigration, before Gordon Brown’s volte face. David Goodhart, the Prospect editor and most recently director of Demos, makes the argument that social democratic government must control its own borders. So, too, does the veteran commentator Polly Toynbee arg
ue that immigrants ‘hold down the pay rate for all other low-paid workers, keeping wage inflation remarkably low and the Bank of England very happy’. Of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, Toynbee says they ‘embrace the inevitability of globalisation, but make a deliberately class-blind analysis’ — meaning that immigration hurts the working class. Toynbee’s argument makes sense if you see the working class as bounded by national borders, and all of those migrants marooned in Calais as outside of the working class (the ‘British working class’, perhaps). The force of her argument is that the case for immigration that was being made by the government was a case for boosting profits at the expense of workers: ‘Of course the wealthy want an immigration free-for-all’, she writes.23 But the case that should be made is the one that sees working-class solidarity that goes beyond national borders — which is a case for defending workers’ rights to free movement alongside a defence of workers’ wages, as well as their political right to be consulted about a change in policy, rather than have a policy surreptitiously foisted upon them.
In the election the following year, Labour were clearly on the defensive about their immigration policy. They were seen to have foisted an unwanted immigration on a sceptical public. To liberally-minded people it was a concession to listen to those who were sceptical about immigration. But that was the problem. Ordinary people needed to be won over if it was to be more than an elite policy to hold down wages. In the middle of the election campaign Gordon Brown was persuaded to talk to a voter, Gillian Duffy, who was critical of the policy. The exchange was forced, and the Prime Minister, not known for his personal touch, was struggling to make the case. Worse, when he moved on, he forgot that his television microphone was still attached to his lapel. In the car Brown was recorded telling his handlers ‘that was a disaster’. But it was his view of Duffy that stood out: ‘Ugh everything! She’s just a sort of bigoted woman that said she used to be Labour. I mean it’s just ridiculous. I don’t know why Sue brought her up towards me.’ It was a turning point in the election. Everyone could see that it was Brown who was bigoted — bigoted in his contempt for Gillian Duffy. For Labour, the idea of winning working-class voters over to immigration was too hard. First they tried to bring in the policy round the voters’ backs. And then when that failed the party simply reversed its policy, and clamped down on immigration.
Since the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government took office in 2010, and since the majority Conservative administration was elected in 2015, there has been a surprising continuity in policy over immigration. Government policy still remains committed to race equality in Britain — most recently launching a new campaign to advance progress towards equality early in 2016 — while at the same time promising to stem inward migration. Politicians were talking tough on immigration, but still people came, adding to the sense that the politicians were lying, and allowing it to happen without admitting that it was happening. The great weakness of those who favoured a more liberal immigration policy was that they had not won a political consensus in favour of greater migration, but were believed to have connived at that result. The widespread feeling that immigration had not helped poorer communities in the country’s depressed industrial towns doubtless added to the vote to leave the European Union in the 2016 referendum. Fears that the referendum campaign itself would provoke greater hostility to migrants were demonstrated by a spike in recorded race attacks. The difficulty for the ‘Vote to Remain’ camp was that they were seen to be the establishment, whereas as the ‘Leavers’ spoke to a large swathe of England that felt that it had lost out in the globalised economy.
Multicultural Britain?
As we have seen, social disorder in Bradford and Oldham in 2001 caused something of a re-think on race in Britain, and in particular about the merits of the multicultural society. Herman Ouseley’s report on the Bradford riots — cautiously — echoed some of the points that Gus John and Ian Macdonald made in their inquiry into Manchester’s schools, that some of the policies to promote the social integration of ethnic minorities had had the opposite effect, leading to division, and even social apartheid. The point was taken up by Trevor Phillips when he took over at the Commission for Racial Equality. Are we, he asked, ‘sleepwalking into segregation’?24 It was an extended argument which, he despaired, had been edited down into three words ‘Multiculturalism is dead’.
Phillips explained himself at length in an article, where he said:
The institutional response to the demand for inclusion has been cynical and bureaucratic — a series of bribes designed to appease community leaders coupled with gestures to assuage liberal guilt, while leaving systemic racism and inequality untouched. Multiculturalism is in danger of becoming a sleight of hand in which ethnic minorities are distracted by tokens of recognition, while being excluded from the real business. The smile of recognition has turned into a rictus grin on the face of institutional racism.25
Phillips’ argument was not so different from the criticism of ‘tokenism’ that black activists made against the Commission for Racial Equality back in the late Seventies. This time, though, it was being made by the chair of the Commission for Racial Equality. Phillips was saying that the policy that was supposed to fix division was actually disguising it, even contributing to it.
Another approach was argued by Munira Mirza, London’s Deputy Mayor for Education and Culture. Mirza talked about the improvements in the lot of black people in Britain, but asked whether the legislation was helping. She highlighted the Equality Act (2000) and the duty it put on 43,000 public authorities ‘to promote good relations between persons of different racial groups’. As Mirza explained, this obligation has ‘spawned an industry of behaviour management and control in workplaces, schools, fire stations, hospitals, councils and government departments’. As she saw it, ‘Hard-pressed public institutions are required to employ ethnic monitors, diversity trainers and equality impact assessors in order to guard against costly legal action’. The question remained, ‘does this heightened awareness of racism help to stamp it out?’ Mirza’s answer was surprising: ‘Quite the opposite. It creates a climate of suspicion and anxiety. Suddenly your colleague is a potential victim of your unwitting racism. A minor slight can be seen as an offence.’26 Mirza was pointing to one unexpected consequence of the way that society had changed to accommodate equal opportunities.
Trevor Phillips
One way to understand the point is to look at the contradictory evidence on race prejudice. By one measure, the evidence would seem to be that race prejudice today is getting worse. That measure is the result of an opinion poll survey question: ‘Do you think race relations in Britain are getting worse?’ The answer is that nearly half think that race prejudice has got worse, while less than a third think it has got better. Those are depressing results. But they are not the whole story. They are questions about what people think other people are like. Other kinds of questions ask about what respondents themselves feel about race. These get different results. There are two questions: one is ‘Would you mind working for an employer who was black or Asian?’; the other is ‘Would you mind being married to someone who is black or Asian?’ This question has been asked by pollsters for many years now, so that we have a time series mapping of this particular expression of prejudice. Two things stand out. The first is that over time fewer people are offended by the idea of working for someone of another race, as fewer are offended by the idea of marrying someone of another race. The second thing is that attitudes become consistently more liberal the younger the respondent.27 Put together the two different poll results point to a remarkable outcome. First people are pessimistic about race relations, thinking that they are getting worse. The second is that individually, white people are becoming more liberal, less prejudiced against black and brown people. Munira Mirza’s vision of a society that is managing racial divisions quite well on an informal basis in its own civil interactions, but at an institutional level is distrustful of people’s abilities to cope with ra
cial difference, is right.
The criticism of multiculturalism that Phillips and Mirza had made, that the policies might prove more divisive than unifying, were taken up by Britain’s new Prime Minister David Cameron in February 2011. Cameron’s speech was in part a response to the continuing challenge of Al Qaeda to British foreign policy, and the perception that Islamic extremists in Britain were not being confronted. Cameron argued that ‘state multiculturalism has failed’.
A genuinely liberal country ‘believes in certain values and actively promotes them’, he said, outlining what he meant: ‘Freedom of speech. Freedom of worship. Democracy. The rule of law. Equal rights, regardless of race, sex or sexuality.’ Cameron went on to argue that under the ‘doctrine of state multiculturalism’, different cultures have been encouraged to live separate lives.
Reaction to Cameron’s speech was dogmatic. Hassan Mahmadallie argued that Cameron was wrong because ‘the notion that multiculturalism was ever an official state policy is simply not true’ — and this in a volume entitled Defending Multiculturalism. Salma Yaqoob argued that ‘Cameron’s latest attack on our multicultural society is only a continuation’ of Trevor Phillips’ arguments.28 Substantially, however, it was hard to see what the differences were between Cameron and his critics. Both sides believed in social solidarity, and both sides believed in defending minority rights. The argument just seemed to be another example of the ‘call-out culture’, where the Prime Minister’s critics were keen to portray him as a racist, to score political points.
The Equal Opportunities Revolution Page 28