Labour has consistently been “too frightened” to talk about immigration and must show leadership on the issue, a party grandee has warned, as she said the party ignores underlying anger among some voters “at our peril”.
Keir Starmer is also facing calls to draw up a new strategy to boost support for multiculturalism following the outbreak of violent scenes over more than a week. It comes with party figures inside and outside government considering how to address some of the wider issues they believe contributed not only to the unrest but also to the low election turnout and strong showing for Reform UK.
Dame Margaret Hodge, the former Labour MP who took on the far right in her Barking constituency after a strong BNP performance in 2006, said the government had acted promptly and well to the violence. She called on the party to show leadership by talking to voters about the reality of immigration, making a positive case for it and being willing to be tough about securing borders.
“We are all at fault that we’ve always been too frightened to talk about immigration,” she said. “If you’re a politician, you have a voice. We need to use that voice to develop a new discourse about immigration – you lead, rather than follow.
“It’s talking about why people are here, what they contribute, the richness they bring to society. We also have to show we can control our borders. Those who aren’t legitimate asylum seekers, you send back as quickly as you can. If somebody breaks the law here and ends up in prison, you send them back where you can. But then link that to a much more positive and realistic view of immigration. We’ve got to just tackle it.”
She added: “People who want to hang on to their seats next time have got to worry that [the election] turnout was low – and be worried that there was this protest vote. We ignore it at our peril.”
Hodge said that as well as a clear and confident message on immigration, the lesson from tackling the BNP was to change how Labour MPs did their job, switching to a relentless engagement campaign that dealt with the mundane issues causing frustrations.
The party’s approach to immigration in the wake of the unrest will be a hugely delicate issue for home secretary Yvette Cooper within the party, with many figures on the party’s left wary of adopting a position that appears to toughen its rhetoric. The new border security command, tasked with reducing Channel crossings, is set to be given priority in the forthcoming budget.
As the violence has subsided, there has been interest among Labour figures over how the far right was defeated in east London. Two senior figures in Starmer’s team – strategist Deborah Mattinson and campaigns chief Morgan McSweeney – were both involved in attempts to understand and combat the BNP’s rise in the area.
Some Labour figures pointed out that Starmer’s agenda of housebuilding and access to GPs would ultimately deal with some of the underlying tensions in some communities. However, others involved in the Barking effort against the far right said his “incrementalist approach” was not radical enough.
One senior figure said the local council had drastically overhauled how it worked, offering residents a streamlined one-stop shop to state services and investing massively in its own stock of social housing. “It requires quite bold institutional, structural change,” they said.
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There are also Labour calls for the development of an overarching strategy for building community relations and supporting multiculturalism. John Denham, the former communities secretary who was also involved in tackling the BNP in the wake of the 2009 European elections, said the concept of multiculturalism had effectively “been abandoned” by the state for more than a decade.
“Blair distanced himself from it in 2006,” he said. “David Cameron announced the end of state-sponsored multiculturalism in 2011. So you have the extraordinary position that during this period of astonishing levels of migration in historic terms, there has been no state philosophy of how it’s meant to work as a diverse society.
“Once the law and order phase is over and there has been some process for accountability for the online facilitators of all of this, then I think it would be good for the government to come forward with a new initiative to establish a framework. I don’t care whether you call it multiculturalism or integration – it’s how you make a diverse society work so that groups feel their own identities are respected, but also make it very clear what we share together.”