Politicians – speak up for immigration

By being both meek and complacent, the left had managed to let the right define the arguments, as well as the terms of engagement. As a result, the right had ended up winning. There were no great surprises there.

Has anything changed over the past eight years? Not really. We know, from polling, that many British voters have a positive view of immigration, or at least a neutral, reasoned one. I know, from private conversations and thanks to common sense, that many MPs have a positive view of immigration, or at least a neutral, reasoned one. The only question, really, is: where are they? Where have they been this whole time?

It should be noted that Green politicians and some Liberal Democrat ones have been speaking positively about immigration, but they only represent a fraction of the political sphere. Where is everyone else? The Labour party managed to win the majority of a lifetime last month by being overly cautious, but it is worth wondering what comes next.

Over the past week, Britain has been set aflame by far-right thugs, hellbent on terrorising asylum seekers, migrants, and anyone not looking white enough for their liking. It has been terrifying to witness and, at time of writing, is showing no sign of stopping.

Many people and systems have been blamed for the violence so far, from Elon Musk’s toxic Twitter to private communication apps, Russian disinformation units and populist media commentators. It is absolutely true that they are all to blame, to various extents, but it does feel like we are currently missing one part of the story, either wilfully or by accident.

For as long as I can remember, most discussions of immigration and asylum seekers in the media and politics have been negative. The right mostly hates it when people move here, and the left tries to avoid talking about it at all costs. That’s how it always goes. It’s something an adviser to Ed Miliband told me about some years ago.

The then Labour leader just didn’t want to talk about immigrants head-on, and his team felt that he could avoid the topic by instead tackling some related issues. They’d give workers better rights, improve pay and working conditions, and surely that would be enough to keep ignoring the elephant in the room, right? Of course, we all know how that went for Miliband.

Sadly, it doesn’t look like Starmer’s Labour chose to learn any lessons from their predecessors. Immigration is still only ever talked about like it’s a problem to be solved; numbers to be managed, and hopefully brought down. There is no sign that immigrants, asylum seekers and refugees are real, breathing people who deserve dignity.

We’re only ever good when we work for the NHS, or we bring free refreshments to the community after riots have occurred. In order to matter, we can only ever be exemplary. That is a problem because we are merely human. Some of us are good and some of us are bad; for the most part, we’re somewhere between the two.

What we do is make Britain richer, both economically and culturally. That is something that ought to be celebrated by the mainstream media, and by politicians. They may be worried about the pushback, but they don’t really have a choice. If you don’t make the case for something you believe in, someone else will come along and do it for you, and you probably won’t like what they have to say.

In this particular case, burying their heads in the stand just cannot, and will not cut it. As we were reminded this week, real lives are at stake here. Something has to change.