Wonderful: Labour has a new slogan on immigration, which appears to be the Conservatives’ old slogan from 2005, the one that Labour said was racist.
I have far more respect for any Labour politician who actually defends their record on mass immigration – only a fifth of which was from Europe, incidentally, although that gets at least four-fifths of the coverage – than those who goes along with the current fashion. Someone who said that diversity made us more tolerant and kinder and was culturally-enriching; and that the economic benefits, although they are more helpful to the rich than the poor, are worth the downsides. That mass immigration was a Left-wing thing – in the words of former Labour speechwriter Andrew Neather, part of the ‘Leftish language of social justice’.
I don’t agree with any of those arguments, but it’s a defensible position, and it’s central to the modern Labour Party. If you don’t agree with it, why would you be on the Labour front benches?
I suspect they don’t make this honest argument because under Blair Labour encouraged immigration knowing it would be pretty unpopular with their supporters, but they thought that these people were simply wrong and would either come around to it or die out.
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