‘The jobs all go to foreigners’: a critical discourse analysis of the Labour Party's ‘left-wing’ case for immigration controls

ABSTRACT

This paper critically examines how senior figures in the UK Labour Party and wider labour movement discussed the topic of immigration in the immediate aftermath of the UK's vote to leave the European Union in 2016. Influenced by the Discourse Historical Approach, the paper is based on an analysis of 86 public interventions by Labour figures, over a 6-month period, delivered in speeches, articles and essays. The paper examines argumentative strategies adopted by Labour figures – including Members of Parliament, advisors and trade union leaders – who called for stronger immigration controls from an avowedly ‘left-wing’ perspective. Foregrounding their commitment to progressive politics, Labour politicians argued that restricting the number of migrants entering Britain was democratic, anti-racist and an expression of the Labour Party's commitment to the interests of working-class people. Nevertheless, it is the contention of this paper that the Labour Party's rhetoric tapped into right-wing populist discourses which constructed immigration as a threat to the racialised privileges of a ‘white’ working class.

KEYWORDS:

• Brexit
• Corbyn
• immigration
• Labour Party
• racism

Introduction

Following the UK's 2016 referendum on membership of the European Union (EU), Britain's main opposition party, the Labour Party, was consumed in a lengthy and heated argument about immigration. In the immediate aftermath of the vote, immigration was identified by commentators as perhaps the single most significant factor in the success of the ‘Leave’ campaign: the issue dominated media coverage, particularly in the final weeks of the referendum campaign, and was prioritised by voters ahead of issues such the economy (Ashcroft, 2019).

The salience of immigration posed a dilemma for the Labour Party, then led by veteran socialist, Jeremy Corbyn. As a left-wing social democratic party, nominally rooted in traditions of solidarity and internationalism, how should Labour respond to the unpopularity of immigration among many of its core voters? Arguments over this question raged throughout the summer, autumn and winter of 2016. This paper examines these arguments in detail, with a focus on written and spoken interventions by Labour movement figures in the 6 months which followed the EU referendum. Over this period, the leaders of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP), including prominent members of the Shadow Cabinet, gradually moved to a position which advocated the ending of free movement in Europe together with a ‘managed migration’ approach which ultimately aimed to reduce the number of migrants arriving in the UK. While this approach was initially resisted by the party's leader, Jeremy Corbyn, it nevertheless attracted widespread support from figures on the left, right and centre of the Labour Party, including some of Corbyn's closest allies. Drawing on a Discourse Historical Approach (DHA) (Wodak, 2001), the paper examines argumentative strategies adopted by Labour figures – including Members of Parliament (MPs), advisors and trade union leaders – who called for stronger immigration controls from an avowedly ‘left-wing’ perspective. In this sense, the paper aims to contribute to the body of discourse-critical scholarship which has focused on the rhetoric of liberal and left-wing advocates of immigration control in recent decades (see, for example, Augoustinos & Every, 2007; Goodman, 2008; Kilby et al., 2013). Foregrounding their commitment to left-wing politics, the tightening of immigration controls was portrayed by Labour figures as democratic, anti-racist and an expression of the Labour Party's commitment to representing the interests of working-class people. It is the contention of this paper, however, that the Labour Party's rhetoric tapped into right-wing populist discourses which constructed immigration as a threat to the racialised privileges of a ‘white’ working class (Pitcher, 2019).

The paper begins with an overview of the role played by immigration in wider debates around Brexit, and the Labour Party's recent history of grappling with this question. The data and methods are outlined in subsequent sections, focusing on the analytical approach of DHA which is applied to a corpus of 86 media texts spanning the period from June to December 2016. A number of discursive strategies are then explored and illustrated with examples, including attempts by speakers to invoke ‘the people’ and ‘ordinary’ working class voters, while foregrounding their anti-racist credentials and seeking to ‘deracialise’ immigration controls. The paper concludes with a discussion of the intersection of race and class in contemporary political discourse.

Immigration, Brexit and public opinion

In the aftermath of the EU referendum, it was widely acknowledged that the issue of immigration played a major role in persuading voters that the UK should vote to leave. Polling undertaken on the day of the referendum, for example, found that a third of all ‘Leave’ voters felt that exiting the EU ‘offered the best chance for the UK to regain control over immigration and its own borders’ (Ashcroft, 2019). In many respects, this was a culmination of long-term trends: as Clarke et al. (2017, p. 146) comment, attitudes towards immigration and feelings of national identity, though significant in the referendum result, were ‘baked in’ long before the referendum took place. Opinion polling throughout the late 1990s and 2000s regularly found immigration among the top issues of concern for British voters, with many wildly overestimating the number of migrants living in the UK (Ipsos Mori, 2013). Between June 2015 and June 2016, immigration was consistently cited by voters as the most important issue facing the country, reaching a high point in September 2015 during the ‘refugee crisis’ in the Mediterranean (Blinder & Richards, 2020). Unsurprisingly, the issue featured prominently in pro-Brexit campaigning, with the Vote Leave and Leave.EU campaigns focusing on the economic, cultural and security threats posed by ‘uncontrolled migration’ and ‘open borders’.

Much of the public debate on immigration preceding Brexit focused on themes which framed the issue as a problem to be addressed with more stringent border controls (Drzewiecka et al., 2014; Maccaferri, 2019; Portice & Reicher, 2018). As with historic forms of immigration, however, public perceptions of the issue were inevitably mediated through prevailing discourses circulating in newspapers, broadcast news and social media. Balch and Balabanova (2017) observed that coverage of Europe in British newspapers between 2006 and 2013 was increasingly framed by ‘welfare chauvinist’ arguments which portrayed EU migrants as a drain on national resources rather than good for the UK's economy. In this and other respects, coverage of EU immigration in the British media mirrored negative representations experienced by other groups, such as asylum seekers and refugees, with a focus on themes such as numbers, economic burden, crime and terrorism (Baker et al., 2008; Khosravinik, 2010). For example, in their analysis of immigration policy and tabloid journalism, Fox et al. (2012) show how Hungarian and Romanian migrants were racialised using frames which drew on liquid metaphors (such as floods, deluges, swamps and streams) to convey a sense of Britain being overwhelmed, as well as frames of law-breaking and deviancy to convey the impression that Britain was being exploited by opportunistic foreign criminals. Such themes fed into the Brexit campaign, along with claims that immigration posed a threat to jobs, wages and public services (Goodman, 2017; Zappettini, 2019).

The extent to which these fears were rooted in ‘legitimate concerns’ has been hotly contested. Despite much of the anxiety over immigration being implicitly local in nature, support for Brexit was found to be highest in places with the fewest migrants (Goodwin & Heath, 2016; Lawton & Ackrill, 2016). Indeed, Ipsos Mori observed a vast discrepancy between people's views of immigration nationally versus locally, with relatively few people believing that immigration was a problem in their local community (Duffy & Frere-Smith, 2014). Furthermore, research carried out throughout the 2010s casts doubt on the veracity of claims by the anti-immigration lobby regarding the negative impact of immigration on jobs, wages and public services (Devlin et al., 2014; Dustmann & Frattini, 2013; Migration Advisory Committee, 2018; Portes, 2018).

However, despite the availability of such research, both before and after Brexit, relatively few Labour politicians were willing to challenge the consensus that immigration needed to be reduced (Bale, 2014). As Goodman (2017, p. 49) observes, ‘the defensiveness of the Remain campaign's claim that migration is problematic and in need of control reflects a broad acceptance within the UK that migration is a problem that needs dealing with’. Indeed, many critical discourse studies have previously highlighted the way liberal and left-wing politicians share common ground with their conservative and right-wing counterparts on the topic of immigration: van Dijk (1991, 1993), for example, describes how an ‘ethnic consensus’ exists across the political spectrum, favouring controls and disavowing links between immigration, racism and colonialism; Augoustinos and Every (2007), meanwhile, note how values and ideals associated with liberalism – including freedom, individualism, equality, and progress – are invoked in discourses which oppose anti-racist policies (see also Kilby et al., 2013). Indeed, the preponderance of such rhetoric in Britain's ‘labourist’ tradition is evident in histories of the Labour Party and labour movement which focus on the role of trade unions and Labour politicians in the history of immigration controls (Knowles, 1992; Miles & Phizacklea, 1984).

Once immigration was established as a key contributing factor in the outcome of the referendum in 2016, the issue of free movement within the EU became a key dividing line, as politicians increasingly argued that it would need to be curbed or abandoned in order to reduce immigration generally. This was also true in the Labour Party, where arguments for stricter controls were articulated in the language of socialism and anti-racism. These are explored in further detail below.

Data and methods

The analysis undertaken in this paper is broadly influenced by the Discourse Historical Approach (van Leeuwen & Wodak, 1999; Wodak, 2001) in that it focuses on the linguistic devices adopted by Labour figures arguing for stronger immigration controls, whilst locating them within wider historical discourses around immigration and processes of racialisation. Distinct from other forms of Critical Discourse Analysis, the DHA places a particular emphasis on socio-diagnostic critique which ‘embeds the communicative or interactional structures of a discursive event in a wider frame of social and political relations, processes and circumstances’ (Wodak, 2001, p. 65). This makes the DHA particularly useful for analysing Labour discourse, as it is fruitful to draw on multidisciplinary scholarship on immigration, as well as social and cultural theories of race and racism, to make sense of the discourses which circulated in Labour after the EU referendum. Like other forms of Critical Discourse Analysis, the DHA contends that ‘through discourse, discriminatory, exclusionary practices are prepared, promulgated, and legitimised’ (Wodak & Reisigl, 1999, p. 176). For Wodak (2001, p. 66) discourse can be understood as ‘a complex bundle of simultaneous and sequential interrelated linguistic acts, which manifest themselves within and across the social fields of action as thematically interrelated semiotic, oral or written tokens, very often as ‘texts’, that belong to specific semiotic types, that is genres’. In the following analysis, these fields of action include policy development, inter-party debate and attempts to influence public opinion, drawing on genres such as policy essays, newspaper columns and speeches by senior figures in the Labour Party and the wider labour movement.

The data on which on the analysis is based comprises of 86 texts published between 24 June 2016 and 31 December 2016, a 6-month period after the EU referendum. The 86 texts are a mixture of newspaper or online news articles, opinion columns, essays from reports published by think-tanks (such as the Fabian Society) and transcripts from speeches. The aim in gathering this data was to capture interventions on immigration by Labour movement figures which generated national media coverage within the given period: this included written or spoken statements about immigration or free movement of no less than a sentence long (i.e. not including fleeting references, wherein the word ‘immigration’ may be mentioned among other issues) produced by MPs, current and former members of the Shadow Cabinet, former Labour Ministers or Shadow Ministers, trade union leaders and advisers to the party leadership, published in national newspapers or websites. The Nexis online newspaper database was used to search for articles in all UK national news outlets and their websites containing the words ‘Labour’ and ‘immigration’. This included all national newspapers (such as the Sun, the Daily Mail and the Guardian) and websites such as the Huffington Post and Politics.co.uk. Local media were excluded from the search criteria in a bid to keep the amount of data manageable. The search yielded over 3000 results. A process of sifting was then undertaken whereby irrelevant stories and duplicates were eradicated, and one text was selected for each incident in which immigration was discussed by a Labour figure: for example, if a Shadow Cabinet member made comments about immigration which were reported in several newspapers, only one newspaper article would be selected for inclusion in the corpus, namely the one which quoted the speaker most thoroughly and extensively. This yielded a much smaller corpus which amounted to 86 texts containing public statements on immigration. Sometimes it was possible (via Google search) to replace newspaper articles in the corpus with original sources such as speech transcripts: for example, speeches which generated media coverage were occasionally published in full on the Labour Party's official website or in Hansard. At other times, news stories which appeared in the media were derived from opinion columns written by Labour politicians. The number of texts in the corpus consisting of full transcripts or fully authored articles was 38, while the remaining 48 consisted of news articles containing subjects’ reported speech. While full transcripts were preferable, shorter news articles containing quoted speech were found to be useful for wider context, hence their inclusion in the corpus; indeed, during the analysis it was possible to identify discourses which were evident both in ‘direct speech’ and ‘reported speech’.

Taken together, the corpus of 86 texts amounted to 115,320 words. The most common sources of texts were left-leaning liberal newspapers the Guardian (20 texts) and the Independent (9), as well as the Labour-supporting independent website, LabourList.org (9). This reflected the fact that many interventions made by Labour figures sought to influence party policy on immigration and were therefore targeted at fellow Labour MPs, members and supporters. The 86 texts encompassed interventions by a total of 45 different individuals, 25 of whom were current Members of Parliament. In this respect, much of the data consisted of what van Dijk (2002, p. 148) refers to as ‘elite discourse’ or those with ‘special access to, and control over, the most influential forms of public discourse, namely, that of the mass media, politics, education, research and the bureaucracies’.

The 86 texts were analysed by the author with three questions in mind: what was being argued? If immigration controls were advocated, how were they justified? What rhetorical strategies were adopted in arguing for stronger immigration controls? The texts were initially ‘coded’ for recurring themes such as the invocation of ‘ordinary voters’ and the impact of immigration on public services, before the analysis moved to consider how such themes were deployed. A number of linguistic concepts drawn from Critical Discourse Analysis were useful in this process. These included the use of ‘topoi’ in argumentation strategies (Boukala, 2016; Wodak, 2001); noun and verb phrases, wherein complex processes are ‘bundled up’ and the agents responsible for actions are unspecified (Chilton, 2004); and the use of hedging and low modality in referring to the impact of immigration (Simpson & Mayr, 2010). van Dijk’s (1993) notion of ‘positive self-presentation’ was also useful for understanding the ‘left-wing’ case for immigration controls, as was the invocation of ‘vox populi’ to claim that immigration controls are justified because of their popularity among ‘ordinary’ people.

The concept of ‘discursive deracialisation’ is also relevant in instances where Labour politicians use disclaimers to deny or pre-empt accusations of racism (Goodman, 2014; Reeves, 1983). A similar notion is posited by Lentin (2020), who argues that media and political interventions structured around claims of being ‘not racist’ invariably serve to legitimise racial rule by narrowing the definition of racism to individual acts of hatred, prejudice and discrimination, thereby normalising deeper, institutional structures of racial dominance. The analysis presented here is informed by race-critical scholarship which recognises racism as ‘an expression of systematised logics with complex and multi-routed underpinnings’ (Lentin, 2016, p. 36). This lends itself well to the Discourse Historical Approach, which makes it possible to examine how racial logics inform language choices, and how language choices reinforce racial logics. The DHA also facilitates analysis of how ways of speaking and writing on immigration contribute to social practices which cause harm to people racialised as ‘immigrants’, as harsher measures are called into being by politicians drawing on racist myths, tropes and rhetorical ‘sleights-of-hand’.

Results

What were some of the main discursive strategies used to legitimise support for tougher immigration controls by prominent Labour figures in the latter half of 2016? This section of the paper analyses two strategies which occurred frequently in the corpus of data. The first focuses on politicians’ invocation of class and ordinariness, and how the toughening of immigration controls is constructed as a response to the reasonable concerns of working-class Labour voters; along with invocations of democratic popular will, this was the most frequently occurring theme in the corpus. The second strategy focuses on the way immigration controls are not only ‘deracialised’ but constructed as progressive, left-wing and anti-racist, while models of anti-racism which advocate free movement or uncontrolled immigration are implicitly blamed for inflaming racism against immigrant and minority communities.

Immigration as a working-class issue

A common discursive strategy adopted by Labour figures in defence of stronger immigration controls was to claim that this was demanded by the electorate; this was sometimes accompanied by disclaimers in which Labour voters were praised for their tolerance and described as ‘ordinary’, ‘traditional’ and ‘working class’. One example of this is provided by Andy Burnham, Shadow Home Secretary:

Extract 1

Labour voters in constituencies like mine are not narrow-minded, nor xenophobic, as some would say. They are warm and giving. Their parents and grandparents welcomed thousands of Ukrainians and Poles to Leigh after the Second World War (Burnham, 2016a).

Another example comes from former Labour Home Secretary Jack Straw, writing in the Daily Mail:

Extract 2

I have met too many people, as decent and hard working as anyone – who complain bitterly that their living standards and their opportunities have been adversely affected by mass migration – to dismiss their concerns as fabricated (Straw, 2016).

In both of the extracts above, senior Labour politicians draw on strategies of positive self-presentation to advance an argument for controlling immigration (van Dijk, 1993). Reducing the number of migrants is associated with decency, reasonableness and common sense: as Capdevila and Callaghan (2008) note, this is a tried and tested method in which accusations of racism are pre-empted with appeals to a sense of British ‘fair play’ which is both generous but firm towards outsiders. Decency and tolerance are also invoked in a series of contributions to the debate which were published by the Fabian Society, an affiliated centre-left think-tank and ‘socialist society’ with historic links to the Labour Party: in a report on Brexit which consists of eleven essays by Labour politicians and advisors, several contributors argue that the party should introduce stricter controls on immigration if it wants to win back working-class voters (Bailey, 2016). One of the essays, for example, is by former Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Rachel Reeves, and begins with an anecdote about visiting a local business in her constituency of Leeds West in the run-up to the referendum (see Extract 3). Reeves’ piece is worth examining in detail because it offers an elaborate version of the commonly-occurring argument that immigration controls benefit working-class Labour voters.

Extract 3

The business employs about 800 people, up from 750 in 2007 and 500 during the last recession. The business helps major retailers import clothing and get their goods to shops across the country. The chief executive works with a community centre to recruit young people, although – like many employers – they also hire many Eastern European workers, particularly Poles.

Despite the support for Labour, I knew it was going to be a tough audience. Many workers blamed Europe for the fact their wages had barely kept pace with the rising cost of living. Most felt immigration was too high and out of control. Few thought the government was on their side. They listened politely while I talked about the risks of voting leave. But the raw anger came out in the question session afterwards.

The arguments included: ‘who cares if leaving Europe meant fewer jobs? The jobs all go to foreigners anyway’; and ‘there was a massive recession when we were in the EU, so you can't say leaving will cause a recession’. The people I met believed leaving Europe would mean less pressure on public services and more money for them because the downward pressure on wages would ease with fewer EU migrants competing with them for work.

A recent study by the Resolution Foundation found that, while widespread migration into the UK had no overall impact on the wages of British workers, it had caused a ‘slight drag on wages’ in some sectors. The remain campaign consistently refused to acknowledge that effect on wages – even though people felt it was true.

Reeves’ argument for stricter immigration controls is thus couched in economic terms; indeed, the focus of her essay is nominally on economic matters. As is often the case in political debates around immigration, the topoi of ‘burden’ and ‘finance’ are present (Wodak, 2001): it is suggested that there is a limited number of jobs and a finite amount of money, and therefore reducing the number of migrants would mean reducing the demand on these resources, leaving ‘more money’, more jobs and less strain on public services for non-migrants. Reeves does not fully commit to these propositions, instead choosing to quote her constituents, directly and indirectly, drawing on low modality verbs such as ‘feel’ and ‘believed’ in her summary of their reported speech. Nowhere does Reeves refute the logic of such propositions or challenge the assertion that ‘the jobs all go to foreigners’; if anything, she attempts to partially legitimise these claims with reference to empirical evidence, citing a report by the Resolution Foundation as proof that ‘widespread migration to the UK … caused a “slight drag on wages” in some sectors’. Reeves then switches back to low modality verbs, arguing that people ‘felt’ it was true that wages were being held back. In short, the strategy Reeves adopts is one of ‘calculated ambivalence’ whereby the link between wages and immigration is neither fully confirmed nor denied (Hatakka et al., 2017; Wodak, 2003). This strategy is designed to appeal simultaneously to voters who believe that migrants pose a threat to jobs and wages, but also to Labour Party members who may oppose harsher restrictions on immigration. This also represents a form of ‘plausible deniability’ in which racist views are not directly expressed but instead transferred to others and laundered through rhetoric which remains ostensibly passive and neutral (van Dijk, 1993, p. 148; Sengul, 2021).

This linking of immigration with declining wages is typically a component of right-wing populist discourses which pit ‘the people’ against ‘elites’, accusing the latter of conspiring to impose immigration and multiculturalism on the former (Mudde, 2019). Reeves draws vaguely on such discourses in her comment that the Chief Executive of the largest employer in her constituency ‘works in a community centre to recruit young people, although – like many employers – they also hire many Eastern European workers, particularly Poles’. Here ‘community centre’ serves as a synecdoche for ‘local community’, the inference being that the Chief Executive works with local community organisations to employ local people; yet the conjunctive adverb ‘although’ to emphasise that it ‘also’ employs Polish workers makes a distinction between the ‘local community’ and ‘Poles’, and an implicit binary is created in which Poles are effectively ‘othered’. A further hint of this populist stance occurs when Reeves states: ‘Most felt immigration was too high and out of control. Few thought the government was on their side’. The metaphor of politics being a game or a form of warfare in which people ‘pick sides’ evokes a question: whose side is the government on, if not the local workers whose wages and jobs are threatened by immigrants? In this scenario, local workers and Polish workers have antagonistic interests, with the government accused of favouring the latter.

In summary, Reeves identifies immigrants with an out-of-touch ‘elite’ which cares little for the concerns of ordinary, local, working-class people. In doing this, she draws on ‘the political grammar of right-wing populism’ (Pitcher, 2019, p. 2495) in which nativist concerns around the threat posed by immigrants are combined with a critique of political elites which are blamed for ‘taking the side’ of immigrants. Her argument cites academic evidence to lend it ‘epistemic authority’ (Chilton, 2004) but generally Reeves relies on a strategy of calculated ambivalence in which the negative link between jobs, wages and immigration is hinted at rather than proven.

A different example of immigration being constructed as a threat to working-class people is provided by left-wing trade union leader Len McCluskey. In November 2016, McCluskey delivered a speech focusing on free movement and immigration at the annual conference of the left-wing think-tank CLASS (McCluskey, 2016). The speech was subsequently published on LabourList.org and later in the Morning Star newspaper, as well as generating substantial coverage in the national media. In it, McCluskey argued for a system of ‘managed migration’ in which the ability to recruit workers from abroad is dependent on the existence of collective bargaining rights.

Extract 4

Let's have no doubt – the free movement of labour is a class question.

Karl Marx identified that fact a long time ago. ‘A study of the struggle waged by the British working class,’ he wrote in 1867, ‘reveals that in order to oppose their workers, the employers either bring in workers from abroad or else transfer manufacture to countries where there is a cheap labour force.’

So it is today. Anyone who has had to negotiate for workers, in manufacturing in particular, knows the huge difficulties that have been caused by the ability of capital to move production around the world – often to China and the Far East or Eastern Europe – in search of far lower labour costs and higher profits.

Likewise, the elite's use of immigration to this country is not motivated by a love of diversity or a devotion to multi-culturalism. It is instead all part of the flexible labour market model, ensuring a plentiful supply of cheap labour here for those jobs that can't be exported elsewhere.

The benefits of this are for sure easier to see in Muswell Hill than they are in Middlesbrough.

McCluskey relies less than Reeves on strategies of calculated ambivalence and instead offers a more specific justification for why immigration poses a threat to British workers. Yet there remains some ambiguity, particularly concerning McCluskey's use of noun phrases. As Chilton (2004, p. 122) observes, complex sets of actions, effects and recipients are often ‘bundled up’ in noun phrases and treated as agents which have effects in their own right: examples in Extract 2 include ‘free movement’, ‘immigration’, ‘capital’, ‘labour’ and ‘flexible labour market’. The core of McCluskey's argument is that the free movement of workers across borders facilitates their exploitation by employers. In this respect, McCluskey is clear about the agents at work in this process, and who is exploited by whom. It is notable, however, that the category ‘labour’ is deprived of agency, and is instead only acted upon by various other agents such as ‘capital’, the ‘elite’ and the ‘flexible labour market model’. Workers who are ‘moved’ by capital are even reduced to the status of ‘cheap labour’ to be used by employers to undermine the wages and conditions of other workers. The way immigration is constructed by McCluskey as only a tool of elites amounts to a populist stance which forecloses the possibility that migration may benefit workers; so too is the metonymic invocation of ‘Muswell Hill’ (suburban, metropolitan, affluent) as benefiting from immigration in contrast with ‘Middlesbrough’ (urban, provincial, poor) which only loses out. The fact that Muswell Hill is a multicultural area, with a large Jewish population, further serves to implicitly link minority groups with the interests of ‘elites’. Absent from McCluskey's account is any sense that workers who migrate may actively contribute to struggles which benefit their class as a whole (Lopes & Hall, 2015) or that migrants and minorities in Muswell Hill may have (class) interests-in-common with workers in Middlesbrough; nor is there any acknowledgement of how the experiences and identities of people who make up the category ‘labour’ are not necessarily uniform, and that the ability to move freely may be more pressing and urgent to some workers than others. This largely negative conception of immigration is further signalled when McCluskey argues that ‘elites’ are not motivated to favour immigration by ‘love of diversity’ or ‘devotion to multi-culturalism’: thus, the only benefits of immigration cited by McCluskey are essentially by-products of the process, experienced from the perspective of the receiving country, in which immigration and immigrants become synonymous with ‘diversity’.

Indeed, it is the ‘British working class’ which is centred by McCluskey rather than ‘the working class’ in a universal sense, as is evident in his quotation of Marx. Designed to appeal to McCluskey's more left-wing audience (CLASS and the Morning Star being considerably to the left of the Fabian Society), the ‘Marx’ quotation derives from an address by the International Workingmen's Association (IWA) to its members and affiliates ahead of its second congress in 1867. McCluskey makes the quotation fit the thrust of his argument by omitting the IWA's next line: ‘Given this state of affairs, if the working class wishes to continue its struggle with some chance of success, the national organisations must become international’ (IWA, 1867). The omission is an important one: while the IWA statement supported the view that employers use free movement of workers to their advantage, it did not advocate immigration controls to combat exploitation, nor centre the plight of one national working class over another; rather, it posed the issue as one of international solidarity and cooperation between workers. As Ypi (2019) points out, the discursive emphasis on differences between migrant and domestic workers ‘gives primacy to the identification of workers with the state in which they happen to live’. Under capitalism, Ypi argues, ‘employers do not favour the movement of people as such. They favour the movement of people without rights’ (her emphasis). It should be noted here that McCluskey stops short of calling for an end to free movement, instead proposing ‘safeguards’ such as collective bargaining which would ‘slash demand for immigrant labour, without the requirement for formal quotas or restrictions’. Nevertheless, this is accompanied by a vague reference to ‘managed migration’ which presupposes border controls, presumably in addition to tighter labour regulation.

In summary, McCluskey's focus on class differs from Reeves’ in the respect that it offers an explicitly socialist argument for immigration controls, with claims to ‘epistemic authority’ (Chilton, 2004, p. 117) deriving from direct experience of workplace negotiation and a quotation from Karl Marx. Nevertheless, what Extracts 3 and 4 share in common is a populist framing of immigration as a tool used by elites to apply downward pressure on wages. McCluskey offers a more detailed account of how this is the case, but his interpretation of class is bounded by nationalism. Furthermore, McCluskey's speech includes only a fleeting reference to racism which arguably serves to ‘deracialise’ immigration controls – a strategy explored in more detail in the next section.

De-racialising immigration control

As well as arguing that immigration controls are necessary to address the concerns of voters, senior Labour figures were often at pains to argue that public concerns around immigration were not motivated by racism. However, some went further, arguing that immigration controls were necessary to prevent racism and even outbursts of violence: for example, Rachel Reeves was widely quoted in the media as predicting that ‘riots’ might occur in her home constituency if voters’ concerns on immigration were not addressed (Mortimer, 2016). Further examples in the corpus included Shadow Home Secretary Andy Burham (Extract 5) and backbench Labour MP Ian Austin (Extract 6).

Extract 5

We need to make the argument for an immigration system that allows for greater control and that reduces the numbers coming here, but that does so in a fair way […] It is time for many of us on this side of the House to confront a hard truth: our reluctance in confronting this debate is undermining the cohesion of our communities and the safety of our streets (Burnham, 2016b).

Extract 6

We’ve known for years that immigration is one of the issues people are most concerned about. You can't ignore people's concerns or, worse still, tell them what they should or shouldn't be worried about […] Even worse, changing the subject pushes people with reasonable concerns about immigration towards extreme parties that exploit the issue and fan the flames (Austin, 2016).

In these extracts, Labour politicians make what Augoustinos and Every (2007) refer to as ‘liberal arguments for illiberal ends’. Liberal and left-wing principles such as fairness, equality and democratic participation (or ‘listening’) are invoked in order to argue for illiberal ends achieved through (unspoken) means (such as visa restrictions, border guards, deportations) and applied to groups of migrants who are deemed to fall outside the boundary of national belonging. In Extract 5, Andy Burnham deploys the rhetorical device of ‘harsh reality’ (or ‘hard truth’) to justify this approach, wherein liberals are confronted with an ‘extant reality’ contrary to their values and beliefs (Kilby et al., 2013). In doing so, Burnham even suggests that to ignore this ‘hard truth’ may undermine community cohesion and safety; thus, the safer and more responsible approach is to reduce immigration. Similarly, in an example of positive self-presentation, in Extract 6 Ian Austin contrasts the ‘reasonable’ concerns of voters with ‘extreme parties’ who exploit the issue.

Another prominent figure who adopted this stance was former Labour Minister Yvette Cooper. In December 2016, as Chair of the House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee, Cooper launched a ‘National Conversation on Immigration’ which aimed to engage with communities and foster greater consensus on the issue (Cooper, 2016). Extract 7 is from Cooper's speech at the project's launch event.

Extract 7

Too often all that gets heard are the loudest, angriest voices and others are silenced.

Some people exploit public concern to whip up fear and hatred. At its worst, the Home Affairs Select Committee has seen in our other Inquiry into hate crime, awful examples of hatred and racist abuse.

But just because some people exploit the issue in a way that is totally wrong, doesn't mean the rest of us should be silent from talking about it or ignore the problem. It isn't racist to worry about immigration. We have to make sure we have a sensible debate.

Too often in the past politics has failed to build confidence or consensus. Trust has been undermined – be it by the failure to have controls on Eastern European migration over a decade ago, or setting targets that aren't met today.

Similar to Extract 6, one of the central pillars of Yvette Cooper's argument is that racism is about hatred, which is ‘whipped up’ by those who ‘exploit’ the reasonable worries of others. The notion of racism as a minority behaviour (‘some people’), perpetrated by extremists and confined to the political margins, is a well-worn trope which absolves elite agents from responsibility in sustaining racist structures of power (Lentin, 2020). It is also a further example of positive self-presentation: the racist ‘other’ is distanced from the speaker, who presents their position on immigration as reasonable and measured, while immigration rules themselves are ‘deracialised’ (van Dijk, 1993; Goodman, 2014).

Cooper's intervention differs from Rachel Reeves’ (Extract 3) and Len McCluskey's (Extract 4) in the respect that it draws less explicitly on populist frames, and instead attempts to chart a middle way: racists are thus constructed as an angry and unwanted intrusion into a rational, centrist public sphere which is embodied by the cross-party committee led by Cooper. Her inference is that the committee (whom she describes in the pronoun ‘we’) represents the neutral, moderate, non-ideological majority who abhor racism, and whose opposition to high levels of immigration is reasonable and justified. Cooper uses an extreme case formulation (Pomerantz, 1986) to emphasise this point: the dichotomy she constructs is between the ‘loudest, angriest voices’ and those who are ‘silenced’. She is clear that the angry voices are distinct from ‘the rest of us’ but she does not specify who these voices belong to. Who has been silenced by whom? There is an implicit suggestion that the ‘angry voices’ include anti-racists who wish to close down discussions of immigration with accusations of racism; thus, the voices of racists and anti-racists are simultaneously ‘othered’ and rendered equivalent.

Although Cooper argues that hostility to immigration is exacerbated by people who ‘exploit’ the issue, she presupposes that immigration is a problem regardless of the hatred whipped up by racists. In other words, immigration is a problem before racists make it one, and unless ‘we’ discuss how to manage it, racism will flourish. For Cooper, it follows that immigration controls are necessary to combat racism, and the failure of politicians to establish controls and meet ‘targets’ will generate racism. It is not specified how or why immigration is a problem, nor how much immigration is too much, and as van Dijk (1993) has previously argued, this effectively attributes racism to the presence of migrants rather than on a process in which migrants are racialised and blamed for social issues such as rising unemployment, declining wages and crime.

Cooper's speech highlights the extent to which it is taken for granted that immigration controls are necessary and desirable, and that public debates around immigration, even among liberals and centrists, take place within a framework which sees immigration as a problem to be managed (Kilby et al., 2013). Cooper's rhetoric attempts to claim the tightening of immigration controls as part of a sensible and rational centre-ground in British politics, thus marginalising voices who may object to the imposition of greater controls. The only question then to be answered is: how much control is enough?

Discussion and conclusion

As illustrated in the examples above, senior figures in the Labour movement have offered various overlapping justifications for ending free movement and reducing immigration, articulated in a range of genres. It was argued that Labour must restrict immigration because it posed a threat to the jobs and wages of its working-class voters; because immigration controls could be used to achieve socialist or social democratic ends (namely the protection of working conditions and wages); because voters were in favour of immigration controls; and because immigration controls were necessary to prevent racism. This was in turn predicated on an understanding of racism as a phenomenon limited to the ‘bad attitude of ignorant or vicious individuals’ (Lentin, 2020, p. 10). In order to make such arguments appeal to Labour members and supporters, speakers drew on strategies of calculated ambivalence and positive self-presentation, emphasising their liberal, left-wing, anti-racist credentials, thus making ‘liberal arguments for illiberal ends’.

While there is little new about liberal and left-wing politicians invoking the language of democracy, equality and anti-racism to argue for stricter immigration policies, this paper has explored the ways in which this occurred in the Labour Party under the left-wing leadership of Jeremy Corbyn. As such, it contributes to a body of scholarship which examines the way liberal democratic governments and political parties continue to employ ‘a range of legitimation strategies to substantiate their ever stricter politics of exclusion’ (Wodak, 2020). As van Dijk (1993, p. 99) notes, appeals to ‘vox populi’ or the interests of ordinary voters are a time-worn rhetorical manoeuvre; of particular interest here, however, is the political complexion of the Labour Party in the period under study: under Jeremy Corbyn's leadership, the party arguably shifted further to the left than at any point in its recent history, adopting elements of radical left-wing populism in response to the Government's post-2008 austerity policies (Bassett & Gilbert, 2021). Nevertheless, figures from across the party's political spectrum agitated for the party to position itself as tougher on immigration, and in spite of Corbyn's strong track record on migrant solidarity (Goodfellow, 2017), the party leadership gradually acceded to the logic of anti-immigration sentiment on jobs and wages, eventually conceding that freedom of movement would come to an end after Brexit in order to reduce the number of migrants entering Britain (Shabi, 2019). Yet with a large left-wing membership, party figures who advocated stronger immigration controls needed to pay particular care not to appear as prejudiced or racist; hence the use of positive self-presentation, ‘calculated ambivalence’ and appeals to the language of class, economic justice and anti-racism. Labour advocates of stronger immigration controls therefore made little or no effort to deconstruct and debunk the purported links between immigration, low wages and pressure on public services; rather, these links were used to argue for an end to free movement on ‘socialist’ or ‘progressive’ grounds.

What emerged was a form of rhetoric which drew on left-populism in its focus on raising wages and working conditions in the face of elite power, and right-populism in its equation of immigration and multiculturalism with elites, pitted against ordinary working-class Labour voters. Under severe pressure from senior party colleagues, Corbyn's Labour arguably retreated into the familiar territory of what Virdee (2014) has called ‘socialist nationalism’ (as opposed to socialist internationalism). Mondon and Winter (2019) have noted how this appeal to working class voters is often underpinned by the strategic deployment of class posed in explicitly racial terms; while references to the ‘white working class’ were relatively few in the corpus of texts analysed here, there was nevertheless a sense in which working class people were constructed as victims of immigration, as figures on all wings of the Labour Party sought to argue that immigration should be restricted in order to improve the wages and job security of non-immigrants. In this respect, the discourse was underpinned by, and reproductive of, racial logics which pitted ‘native’ workers against immigrants in a zero-sum competition for scarce resources. Yet as Bhattacharyya et al. (2021, p. 82) warn, ‘in times of deepening global crises and ecological catastrophe, any arguments for controlling immigration converge with lifeboat ethics, in which some must die so others can live – “they” must die so that “we” can live’.

Were alternative discourses available to Labour politicians? A minority of voices in the labour movement condemned further immigration restrictions and made unambiguous calls for the right to move freely, but these were rarely heard in the media. Labour MP Chi Onwurah argued in the Guardian that ‘Labour must dare to defend freedom of movement’ (Onwurah, 2016), while Shadow Home Secretary Dianne Abbott repeatedly defended free movement throughout the autumn of 2016, telling the Guardian in November that ‘it is simply not the case that immigration has driven down wages’ (Stewart & Asthana, 2016). In 2017, Labour members launched the Labour Campaign for Free Movement (LCFM), dedicated to ‘defending and extending the free movement of people in the context of the debate around Brexit’. Nevertheless, the question of whether a sustained and successful campaign against anti-immigrant racism can emanate from the Labour Party remains to be seen.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the two anonymous referees for their invaluable comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

David Bates

David Bates is a lecturer and researcher in Media, Culture and Heritage whose work focuses on racism, migration, class and political discourse.