Brexit has shown us that Labour has been ignoring voters on immigration – as leader, I would have the courage to listen
The immigration system which the government has just announced is nothing more than a platform to show how tough it is. It is ignoring the fact that its new plans will run down our National Health Service and put our social care system into crisis.
This sort of dead end politics is the consequence of having Boris Johnson as prime minister.
I’m standing to lead the Labour Party, because I want us to start making the political weather and stop being blown off course by it. Over the last few years Labour has been true to its values, but too often we’ve let the Tories frame debates and lay political traps for us and the country. This was never clearer than on Brexit. Torn between Leave and Remain voters, we accepted the idea we had to pick a side and spent three years fighting about which side it was. It tore our electoral coalition apart and abandoned the country.
But the problems began long before that. We fought the 2016 referendum campaign without a clear and positive vision for what being part of the European Union meant. So while the leaders of the Leave campaign said we were a small nation with a proud history of punching above our weight, the leaders of the Remain campaign failed to offer an effective counter narrative of a confident and outward-looking country, working to raise people up together, here and across the world.
For decades now, Labour hasn’t been listening to what people are trying to tell them. About the decline of local economies and high streets. A loss of trust in politicians and in us, to deliver on our promises. We’ve offered policy solutions devised by a small group of people behind desks in central London, when the deafening cry from people out in the country was for more power and control over their lives and communities, and a new national story in which they felt they had a role to play. One that acknowledges the tough challenges we face as a country and is honest with people about what is required to fix them.
I am tired of us losing and I know what it will take for us to win again. There have been too many defeats over the last 10 years. Each of them was heartbreaking. But after four election losses and the collapse of our Labour base in what were once our heartlands, we cannot just change the man at the top again and hope for a different result.
As immigration climbed up the list of voters’ priorities, there was a shallowness of understanding in our analysis and a lack of courage in our response. We need to understand why, in areas with low immigration, people are concerned about it.
And we need to understand that in towns like mine, freedom of movement meant opportunities for people from other countries. They felt that others had the chance to come and work at the local hospital, while local people weren’t able to train as nurses, because the government had cut the nursing bursary.
Voters weren’t irrational or racist, but our political strategy treated them like they were.
It’s not the fault of voters that this complexity was missed – it’s the fault of politicians, who should have been making a more principled and braver case for the last 20 years.
Because too often we lacked courage and ended up seeking ever more desperate ways to pretend we were offering solutions to something that, in our heart of hearts, we don’t agree is the problem.
So it’s time we levelled with people and trusted them to get it right. It means making the case for freedom of movement, alongside an ambitious investment in UK skills.
It’s by sticking to our values and making the hard arguments that Labour is going to win again. By articulating a political vision and not just a set of policies. By building the kind of country that I believe we can be but have not yet seen: proud, compassionate, ambitious and outward looking. That is the Britain we will build.
Lisa Nandy is MP for Wigan and a Labour leadership candidate
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