We Don’t Need to ‘Talk About Immigration’

Ever since the far-right riots began tearing through the country two weeks ago, the British establishment has been tying itself in knots trying to interpret them. Within days, politicians, police and pundits had diagnosed the sickness in the body politic: a pack of red-faced wrong’uns abetted by poorly regulated social media platforms and their insurrectionist owners. “You know who else should be on trial for the UK’s far-right riots? Elon Musk,” wrote the Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland. “I think very swiftly the government has realised there needs to be amendments to the Online Safety Act,” said London mayor Sadiq Khan. The BBC promised to bring its readers “the real story of the website accused of fuelling Southport riots”, while the Independent delivered the inside scoop on “the far-right Telegram messaging channels where UK rioters organise”. “Misinformation, clicks, blue-ticks – social media and the UK riots” teased an Instagram clip published by Tortoise, the VC-funded outlet headed by former BBC News director James Harding.

Confusingly, the riots were also said to be the heartfelt expression of how Britons innately feel about immigration – feeling that should therefore be carefully studied and promptly addressed. Despite seemingly understanding how outside agitators boiled rioters’ blood, Britain’s finest opinion-makers have insisted that the rioters acted (though illegitimately) upon legitimate concerns unconditioned by bad actors.

These things cannot both be true.

If we accept that immigration is at least partly what provoked the rioters, then while their methods might be exceptional, their madness is not. Only a tiny minority of British people (7%) agreed with the riots themselves; however, a marginal majority (51%) sees immigration as the number one issue facing the country – up 10 percentage points since Southport stabbings. Nothing about Britain’s immigration system has changed in the intervening period – but a quarter more people are now deeply concerned about it. This alone is indicative of how strongly our media and political environment shapes the public’s views on immigration, and how concern about it in no way tracks the material reality (recall the 2013 Ipsos Mori poll that found that British people vastly overestimated the severity of several social “issues”, including immigration; on average, respondents thought benefit fraud was 34 times worse than it actually was).

When it comes to finding someone to blame for the riots, social media is a convenient – and conveniently narrow – target. As well as proving he’s not “boring”, as his former shadow attorney general Emily Thornberry once anonymously called him, Keir Starmer’s public spat with Musk is designed to trap the post-riots conversation within a technocratic frame of reference in which the readiest solutions to fascist violence are censoring the P-word or hiring more moderators. Blaming social media also allows the far wider range of factors that precipitated the riots, such as the endemic “shit life syndrome” created by chronic under-investment in Britain’s public services and endless catastrophising by the media and political classes about immigration, to avoid scrutiny. The rioters were indeed not born but made – and not only in the fires of Twitter.

Britain’s immigration panic is, first and foremost, the product of a decades-in-the-making national hysteria about immigrants – often a byword for anyone with Black or brown skin, as it was in the case of Southport suspect Axel Rudakubana – manufactured by a coalition of the political and media classes (“class” would probably be more accurate, given they all attend the same garden parties). The Rochdale paedophile rings, Brexit, the Prevent duty, “no-go areas for white people”, anti-genocide “hate marches”, Sunak’s “stop the boats” and Starmer’s “smash the gangs” – you already know the greatest hits.

Widespread anti-immigration sentiment is also, yes, a response to the very large numbers of people coming to this country (1.2 million last year) – a situation created by our proclivity for fuelling wars in central Asia and a hangover of our having until recently owned a quarter of the globe – and the government’s deliberate failure to properly manage that process. How else to explain Tony Blair’s decision to banish asylum seekers to all-white small towns, or to ban them from working (a major way migrants learn English and otherwise integrate) for an entire year, a policy in which the UK is internationally exceptional? Far from being subsumed by a tidal wave of immigrants, successive governments have chosen to keep public anxieties about immigration at a simmer with a steady stream of infuriating headlines that helpfully distract from, say, a £22bn black hole in the public finances, the biggest NHS cuts in half a century or the roughly 2.66 million people on council house waiting lists​​. Two weeks of far-right violence later and that current is still flowing.

While there has been some selective attribution of blame to those cynically pushing anti-immigrant rhetoric, the commentariat has mostly operated on the assumption that immigration, rather than those leveraging it to sow division among the working class, is what’s at stake in the riots. On the latest episode of BBC Radio 4’s Moral Maze entitled ‘What do the riots say about Britain?’, my colleague Ash Sarkar pushed hard-right pundit Matthew Goodwin to explain how his concerns about immigration were not, in truth, fears of racial displacement; he squirmed. The rest of the panel and witnesses ignored this telling exchange, instead launching into an hour-long debate about immigration, its merits and demerits – the kind of discussion that ex-Labour MP Margaret Hodge says “we’re too frightened” to have.

Going much the same way as Blair did after he left office – which is to say, not away – Dame Margaret stuck her oar in several times over the past couple of weeks. Last Monday, the newly ennobled apartheid heiress (Hodge claims she gave her ill-got riches from South Africa to a charity, though can’t remember which) published an op-ed in The Economist offering her “lessons” on “countering the far right” learned as MP for Barking, where the British National party became the second largest on the council in the 2006 local elections. The lessons Hodge learned were entirely the wrong ones.

One of the few concrete examples Hodge gives of how she personally resisted an ascendant far right in east London (besides beating them at the ballot box) is a housing policy she personally lobbied for in 2007. Hodge wrote in the Daily Express and the Observer that Barking council should allocate social housing to families with a longstanding connection to an area before housing new arrivals. Hodge’s proposal indulged the notion that migrants were stealing British homes – rather than the British state whose right to buy scheme, launched by Thatcher and continued by Blair with only slight restrictions, had decimated the social housing stock, which both parties subsequently refused to replenish. Hodge’s remarks were lambasted by both Labour and Tory MPs, including Hodge’s Dagenham neighbour John Cruddas, who described them as “not only wrong” but “inflammatory”; they were cited by an Equalities and Human Rights Commission study of how “local connection” housing criteria can discriminate against ethnic minorities. What Hodge apparently learned from fighting the far right is that in order to defang them, you have to become them. The BNP loved her proposal.

Speaking to the Guardian, the unrepentant Hodge now says Britain “needs a new discourse about immigration”. Her assertion brings to mind the immortal words of Brenda from Bristol, informed by a BBC News reporter that Theresa May had called a snap election: not another one. Contrary to Hodge’s insistence that Britain is “frightened” of the subject, this country is obsessed with immigration. This is in no small part thanks to the cowardice of centre-left politicians willing to say whatever necessary to keep their seats in constituencies poisoned by racism, rather than seeing through their bigotry to the need that lies beneath it. 17 years after Hodge had her eureka moment about how to fight the far right and five members of Reform UK – the British National Party reincarnate, some might say – now sit in parliament. If the past two decades have taught us anything, it is that indulging reactionary neuroses might temporarily win you voters – but that the only people who ultimately benefit are the far right. Emmanuel Macron – whose courtship of Marine Le Pen’s voters has massively strengthened Le Pen – has learned this the hard way.

The right is desperate for the riots to reinvigorate a conversation about immigration. This is the last thing Britain needs. What it needs is a conversation about why one-third of children living in one of the wealthiest countries in the world live in poverty; why it has more foodbanks than branches of McDonald’s; why its rivers are full of shit; why its politicians are full of shit; why its only hijabi MP’s abusive ex-husband stood against her at the general election and none of her colleagues protested; and why it is £161 more expensive to fly to Scotland than to take the train. This is the conversation Britain needs – and the riots have created an opening for it.

The riots have made possible a new kind of conversation about broken Britain, and the role that immigration does – or does not – play in it. “Night anti-hate marchers faced down racist thugs,” the Daily Mail front page announced last week after the colossal far-right damp squib; even thoroughly racist rightwing papers could see they would be at odds with the public mood if they opposed the resistance, even though spearheaded by the pro-Palestine left (funny how “hate marchers” became “anti-hate marchers” overnight). The riots have proven that many Britons are opposed to large-scale immigration – but even more are opposed to racist violence. Now is the moment to show how the two are interlinked. By drawing out, as Ash did with Goodwin, the workaday white supremacism lurking beneath anti-immigration sentiment, the riots have created an opportunity for Labour to reject anti-immigration policies on moral – rather than, as it typically does, practical – grounds. We will not be cowed by racists who want us to “send them back”. We will not entertain endless circular discussions about immigration.

On Saturday, the Telegraph reported that housing secretary Angela Rayner is abandoning plans laid out by her predecessor Michael Gove to introduce a “UK connection test” to social housing applications – a proposal strikingly similar to Hodge’s. The timing seems significant. Following endless insistence that “mindless” rioters have, paradoxically, legitimate concerns, the move might (optimistically) be interpreted as a tentative rejection of this logic, an incremental but meaningful statement that the hostile environment – created by successive New Labour and Conservative governments, though only described as such more recently by Theresa May – might temporarily satisfy the rioters but will never lastingly appease them. Not just because hatred never solves hatred, but because the scarcity mindset that grips Britain’s racist rioters is not a mirage – Britain is severely lacking in everything from council houses to cancer treatment, and Labour’s plan to change that – “get BlackRock to rebuild Britain”, as economist Daniela Gabor put it – is powerfully unconvincing.

The chances that Rayner’s more rightwing, more senior colleagues will be persuaded by her approach are slim. Yvette Cooper seems to think that the real victims of the last fortnight are the police, Rachel Reeves that Britain can cut its way to growth. Starmer, meanwhile, is reportedly plotting with Mussolini nostalgist Giorgia Meloni to further pull up the drawbridge on fortress Europe. Yet Rayner, whose tendency to nudge the party from the left may make her a historically short-lived deputy prime minister, has the right instincts: use this mask-off moment for the “anti-immigration” right to refuse xenophobic policies and solve the problems that have really created this mess. Doing so will – Hodge is right about this at least – require bravery, which is exactly why Labour should ignore her.