The former prime minister Gordon Brown has called for tougher migration controls as part of a package of measures designed to address the concerns of Brexit voters and to prevent the UK being permanently paralysed by its decision to leave the European Union.
Speaking in London, Brown said the referendum result was a revolt against the political, business and cultural establishment and it was a mistake to dismiss the 52%-48% result as false consciousness.
The former prime minister said ministers should be concentrating on tackling the main concerns of leave voters rather than focusing on the fine point of the Brexit agreement.
“In our long history as a United Kingdom – at times threatened by invasion, sometimes subject to bombardment and for a time laid low by civil war – we have always found the strength from within ourselves to come together as one. By seeking and then finding common ground we have triumphed over whatever crises we have confronted,” Brown said.
“Yet we are now at serious risk of being permanently paralysed by seemingly irreparable divisions – a fractured country divided not just over Brexit, but also with Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and the English regions at odds with Westminster and at what they see as a London-centric view of the world.”
He said there was mismatch between the Westminster debate about thrashing out the details of Brexit and the debate in the rest of the country about what needed to happen to address the dissatisfaction that led to Brexit.
“The public want Westminster to address the core causes of their dissatisfaction – concerns about stagnant wages, left-behind communities, migration pressures, sovereignty and the state of the NHS – each of which cannot be dealt with just by fixing the technical details of what kind of Brexit.
“Dealing with these five critical concerns is the starting point to building national unity and healing a fractured country and we can only move forward as a country by doing so.”
Brown presented a six-point plan for dealing with concerns about migration: no undercutting of wages by migrants; registration of jobs to give local people a chance to apply; registration of migrants on arrival in the UK; possible removal of migrants if they failed to find a job within nine months; a ban on employment agencies advertising jobs abroad that had not been advertised in the UK; and a bigger fund to help mitigate the impact of migration on local communities.
Leavers, Brown said, had to listen to the legitimate concerns of remain voters about the loss of access to the UK’s biggest export market, which could drive down wages, hit northern communities hard and deprive the NHS of staff.
But remainers had to address the concerns of the millions of people feeling left behind. The referendum was a “genuine expression of people’s anxieties about the future” and sent out a message that globalisation was “not working for British citizens”.
