Why can’t Labour talk sensibly about immigration?

The public still doesn’t trust Labour and Ed Miliband on immigration. His speech last year — admitting ‘the last Labour government made mistakes’ — was aimed to draw a line under the past and start afresh. How helpful for him to have two key figures of the New Labour era popping up again to remind Britain of where Labour went wrong.

First, David Blunkett told the BBC yesterday that an influx of Roma migrants could potentially lead to riots, akin to Oldham and Bradford in 2001:

‘We have got to change the behaviour and the culture of the incoming Roma community – because there’s going to be an explosion otherwise…if everything exploded, if things went wrong, the community would obviously be devastated. We saw this in Bradford, Burnley and Oldham all those years ago when I first became Home Secretary’

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Then another former Home Secretary, Jack Straw, has made the following comments in his local newspaper, the Lancashire Telegraph, on the errors Labour made with transitional controls:

‘One spectacular mistake in which I participated (not alone) was in lifting the transitional restrictions on the Eastern European states like Poland and Hungary which joined the EU in mid-2004.