We all know what the Labour movement would like to do on immigration. The vast majority of the party accept that a liberal immigration policy has been good for Britain, good for our economy, good for our culture and good for our public services.
There is no need to be equivocal on this point – the evidence is clear.
So why has the debate been dominated by anti-immigration voices and why has Labour been seen as weak on the issue? Pollsters and political strategists will tell you that, along with controlling public spending and welfare, a perceived weakness on ‘tackling immigration’ has been Labour’s achilles heel over the last decade.
As a result the following three statements are all true: immigration is good for Britain, Labour is broadly in favour, and on this issue, as well as others, Labour has been out of step with its traditional base. Hence the last decade of agonised twisting in the wind, ‘controls on immigration’ mugs, tortured formulations and almost manic attempts to change the subject.
It’s fair to say that this strategy has not been a success.
In Open and Ethical, a new Fabian Society report, I argue our society and our politics are changing in a very specific way. The old class-based left/right economic divide is increasingly giving way to one based on values – open or closed. And that new divide is re-shaping our politics.
At Global Future, we put a series of value questions to a representative sample of the population – and the age/values divide couldn’t be clearer.
In every region, today’s under-45s are, on average, very strongly positive about every aspect of the open world in which they’ve grown up. And in every region, there is a huge gap in perception between today’s under-45s and today’s over-45s.
Strongly held feelings about globalism, national identity and cultural values are having a growing impact on how we vote. Increasingly, elections are now about open/closed values.
This shift is best understood when looking at the position of the average Republican and Democrat voter in US presidential elections since 1980.
The average Republican voter has rotated from the high security/low diversity towards the low security/low diversity ‘closed’ position, with the average Democrat voter rotating simultaneously from the old ‘left’ position to open’.
The same thing is happening on the political battlefield in France (Macron versus Le Pen), across Europe, and here.
Longstanding Tory voters switched away from the party in 2017 because they associated it not just with Brexit, but with commonly related ‘closed’ values. The reverse is also true as former default Labour voters as well as UKIP supporters switched to the Conservatives.
The seats the Conservatives lost – predominantly to Labour – sit mostly in the most ‘open’ section of our chart, and vice versa. In the churn, the Tory vote increased, but Labour’s vote increased much more.
The question now is how the main parties react.
Over the long term, as the open generation increasingly outnumber their elders, representing their values will become the only possible winning proposition.
But what of the short term? For traditional parties, the rotation of the political axis represents a potentially existential threat.
For the Conservatives, the temptation to identify further with closed is obvious. Ultimately this is suicide: chasing an ever-shrinking coalition and deepening the age divide that cost them victory in 2017.
But this is not a complacent argument that Labour cannot help but win thanks to demographic destiny. The party will have to take the right strategic decisions to succeed.
Fortunately, the way is clearly signposted.
Those who argue that Labour should change to match the views of those leave voters who want to reduce immigration must first consider that there were just 33 Labour-held constituencies in which a majority of Labour voters backed leave, against 200 where a majority of Labour voters backed remain.
In parts of the country the rotation of the political axis will be painful for Labour, but it will be an awful lot more painful if it builds a political strategy around the comparatively small band of Labour leavers. More fundamentally, any political party which positions itself against openness is erecting a barrier to younger voters, a category that is widening all the time, and now even stretches to early middle age.
In government an open agenda would mean a return to internationalism, multilateralism and once again positioning the UK at the heart of the global community as an influential, forward-looking nation that looks out to the world and succeeds in it. A liberal immigration policy should sit at its centre.
Open owns the future – Labour would be ill-advised to leave that future open to someone else.