Andy Burnham launched his bid to be mayor of Manchester on a promise to introduce ambition to the people of the north. “It’s hard growing up in the north: if you say you want to be a doctor, lawyer or MP you get the mickey taken out of you,” he said in May, which could use some mickey-taking of its own, were it not for all the things he’s said subsequently.
He has spent the intervening months really drilling down into the kind of leader he wants to be, and emerges as a man who can “confront hard truths”, an honest Stark to the corrupt metropolitan Lannisters. So, for instance, he told the Commons on Wednesday: “Our reluctance in confronting this [immigration] debate is undermining the cohesion of our communities and the safety of our streets.”
Previously known as a man who could change his mind over the course of a sentence, Burnham has had a reinvention Madonna would envy. He is now the decisive champion of northern Labour, which is like regular Labour, except tougher, and without all that tedious elitist respect for facts (a comprehensive takedown of the link between immigration and the “safety of our streets” can be found in Business Insider, from the Office for National Statistics, the LSE, or indeed, from almost anywhere).
Politically, “northern Labour” is a development to which Burnham personally will probably turn out to be unequal, yet it should be taken seriously: how should southern Labour respond? What about those, in any region, who value freedom of movement, who think there are arguments for and against the single market but would like to hear the most intelligent of them and not the least, who value openness generally and think a narrow and bordered approach is, at best, unhelpful and, at worst, self-sabotaging? Could Sadiq Khan build a political movement around London Labour? As relations between the mayor and the government look ever more fraught and unproductive, he may as well find some enjoyable way to occupy himself.
I would like to propose a thought experiment. Immigration is the issue on which no party, bar Ukip, has internally reconciled itself. The Conservatives claim to have resolved it, but what in fact they have done is to coalesce around a vocabulary – listening hard to people’s “concerns”, bringing it down to the “tens of thousands” – which nobody really believes meaningful. The Liberal Democrats may have a coherent creed of openness, or there may just be so few of them, in such a state of siege, that to ask about their differences is pointless. And Labour has been trapped in the same godawful dance since Gordon Brown traduced the good name of Gillian Duffy in 2010: people who don’t want to have the conversation at all, on one side – and on the other, people who feel that any interrogation of the substance of their anti-immigrant position is just more elitist sneering.
What would happen if immigration was a devolved issue? Leave aside for the time being the practicalities of having internal regional borders, and imagine how this debate would go. How many immigrants do you want in your constituency, or county?
The Greater London argument, if I made it, would go something like this: unlimited numbers of students, since they generate wealth and knowledge and use the NHS for barely anything except beta-blockers and STIs; a decent and humane number of refugees; skilled labour as businesses required it; unskilled labour where it was part of a mutually agreed zone of free movement, but not where it was deliberately recruited (as in the care sector) as a means of wage suppression.
In Lincolnshire, the conversation might look different: there might be voices calling for no unskilled migration, but instead of being taught their manners by out-of-touch Londoners, they could debate directly with the farmers who rely on it. They could thrash out the trade-offs between them. In Yorkshire, people with “concerns” could flesh out who they were concerned about: they could talk student numbers with the chancellors of their universities; refugee numbers with their neighbours; freedom of movement with their businesses. If the answer came back “none” – no refugees here, which I find unlikely, given that Sheffield was the nation’s first City of Sanctuary – so be it. That’s what devolved democracy is about.
In having a more granular and practical discussion, individual employers might be forced to confront the impact of low wages, rather than statisticians breezily pronouncing that wages might be stagnant, but that isn’t immigration’s fault. Regions wouldn’t need to be gleefully informed by the liberal commentariat that they were only worried about foreigners because they didn’t know any: they could do their own maths and reach their own conclusions.
Consensus has been reached, broadly, that we need to have an “honest conversation” about immigration. But, instead, we have politicians of varying degrees of populism, ventriloquising what they’ve decided people think – and when told that they are wrong, complaining that you can’t say anything these days without being called a racist.
A better place to start would be, if you could run your county as a country, what would your borders look like? How strict, how open, how inclusive, how humane? How would that affect your local economy, your civic institutions, the future of your communities? Of course it is hypothetical, but it would foster understanding, between one interest and another, one region and another. At the moment, we’re dealing in half-truths, untruths and mistrust; in this dusk of unspoken resentments, only Farage-alikes can operate.
