Yesterday Ed Miliband reiterated his party’s existing policies on immigration for voters, today Yvette Cooper went into further detail about how Labour would address the policy area in government. Like Miliband’s PPB, Cooper’s speech speech to IPPR included an acknowledgement that politicians don’t like to talk about immigration, and a mea culpa. She said Labour should have been quicker to bring in the Australian-style points-based system, that the party should have kept transitional controls for Eastern Europe, and that as a government it should have ‘looked more at the impact, and been ready to talk about problems.
Cooper was heavy on the policy detail, and some of that detail included embracing certain Tory immigration policies, including the cap on tier 2 workers, and restrictions on welfare and public services for Romanian and Bulgarian migrants.
But the Conservatives are saying today that in spite of these ideas – many of which deal with how immigrants integrate into society once they are here, and how workers already living here to can ensure they are well-equipped to compete with them – Labour has opposed them on all their measures to bring down immigration.
The party has produced an extensive list of all the occasions on which Labour spokespeople have attacked policies designed to drive down the numbers, some of which Cooper picked up on today. Here’s an example from that list:
Cap on Economic Migration
Public support our policy…
- More than 4 in 5 of the public and two thirds of Labour voters back the cap. 81 per cent of the public support the Government’s cap on non-EU economic migration, including 69 per cent of Labour voters. Participants were asked: ‘The government has announced plans to limit the number of economic migrants from outside the EU who are entitled to work in Britain. Do you support or oppose this policy?’ (Yougov, 25-26 November 2010)
…but Labour oppose our policy.
- Labour attack the Government’s cap on economic migration. Ed Miliband said: ‘I think this cap is a very dubious thing’ (BBC Radio 4 Today, 4 May 2011) and Labour’s Immigration spokesman, Gerry Sutcliffe, said it was the ‘worst of all worlds’, would do ‘very little’ to control immigration and was ‘bad for business’ (BBC News, 18 November 2010).
The number of MPs and Tory spinners who have been raising what Labour parliamentarians have said so far in opposition and what they did when in government highlights a big problem for the party, and one it couldn’t really have avoided. Because of the length of their policy review, frontbench Labourites have fallen into the habit of just opposing everything in the meantime. David Cameron picked up on this weakness when he attacked the party’s opposition to welfare cuts at Prime Minister’s Questions this week. And over the next few months and years will come a number of other climbdowns on policies shadow ministers made an enormous fuss about when they were moving through the Commons. It’s unlikely, for instance, that Labour will scrap the £26,000 benefit cap, even though it (eventually) opposed it when it made its way through Parliament.
The question on key areas such as the economy, immigration and welfare, is whether the electorate sees these about-turns as signs the party doesn’t know what it’s doing.
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