Successive governments have failed to accept that their ideas are not just unpopular but wrong
“Immigration is an issue of real concern to people,” and Britons “feel they do not have permission to freely express their fears.”
Was this taken from a government paper from this week? No, it was taken from a government paper from 2004. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
This week, the Telegraph has dredged up “a secret plan to make immigration more popular” that was formulated under Tony Blair.
The document, the Telegraph informs us:
… recommended a new approach to improve the public’s “understanding” of migration and “correct public misconceptions about the scale, nature and potential benefits of managed migration” and “open the way for a more sensible conversation on immigration”.
“Shifting public attitudes on immigration is a huge challenge”, it added. “It requires a radically different communication approach.”
What was never considered, the reader will be wholly unsurprised to learn, is the possibility that the public were right. No, according to Blair’s cronies, they were hoodwinked by tabloid fearmongering about, say, bogus asylum seekers, and they missed “the bigger picture”. The “bigger picture”, we now know, entailed the historically unprecedented transformation of British demographics, the emergence of a dependent class of low-skilled residents, wildly disproportionate crime rates and various unexpected and horrifying phenomena like terrorism and grooming gangs.
Of course, this is not all that it entailed. It also entailed the arrival of countless good-hearted and industrious people. But the fact remains that Britons who predicted the disadvantages that would emerge would have been – indeed, were – dismissed as bigoted hysterics. Back in 2004, the government believed that instead of having a policy problem, it had a communications problem. All it had to do was “correct public misconceptions”.
Here, one finds the emphasis on “spin” which developed into a defining negative characteristic of the New Labour era. But more deeply, one finds the assumption that the masses had no real preferences of their own but were just a prize to be won by a government in competition with a hostile press. The public had no real concerns — they were just being misled by the Murdoch media. (This attitude persists today when it comes to elite paranoia about online misinformation.) Thus, public discontent demanded that the government change its words and not its deeds.
Blair’s cohorts did have the sense that the average Briton with concerns about migration was not just a fuming xenophobe. “Intolerant views,” they acknowledged, “Can be held by people who really do value our multicultural society and are genuinely proud of our tolerant heritage.” Hold on – should that not have been cause to question whether those views were “intolerant”? Should there not at least have been a moment of consideration of the idea that if restrictionists accepted a multi-ethnic society to some extent they might have valid grounds on which to be concerned about the scale and nature of migration under New Labour? Nope! They were just delusional and had to be subjected to a different “communication approach”.
Warning signs, clearly, were there all along, but they were too arrogant to accept that the problem transcended the realms of PR
It’s tragic really. Britons are a welcoming and tolerant people, for the most part, and while the Broadwater Farm Riots or the Salman Rushdie protests, among things, prove that there were always tensions in a multi-ethnic Britain, I suspect there could have been a much more mutually agreeable society had politicians not been so careless and complacent. Warning signs, clearly, were there all along, but they were too arrogant to accept that the problem transcended the realms of PR.
Hang on, a New Labour loyalist might say, should politicians always do what voters want? Didn’t Burke say that a politician should not sacrifice his judgement to the opinions of the common man? Fair point. I suspect that commentators — myself included — tend to be defensive of the majority opinion until they happen to disagree with it. But the fact that politicians can pursue unpopular policies does not mean they should. They must at least ask themselves if the voters have a point rather than needing to be corrected. Now, the results speak for themselves.
While the extent to which Blair and his co-conspirators actually changed their “communication approach” is apparently unclear, the focus on managing perceptions rather than considering opinions, which still very much defines Keir Starmer’s strategy, is symptomatic of the deep smugness of a government which saw itself as being the architect of “the model 21st century nation”. Then, the likes of Tony Blair thought they could steer the public towards the promised lands. Now, the likes of Starmer find themselves panickingly dampening unrest. One can be concerned about that potential for unrest while still experiencing a twinge of schadenfreude.
