Labour has long been host to an unpleasant strain of nativism. It was Harold Wilson’s government that passed the unabashedly discriminatory Commonwealth Immigration Act in 1968, which introduced a requirement to demonstrate a “close connection” with the UK. The party boasted in its 1970 election manifesto of a “rate of immigration under firm control and much lower than in past years.” On the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show on Sunday, Jeremy Corbyn faithfully echoed such insularity and parochialism in expounding what Labour purports to be a strategy for Brexit.
Asked about immigration policy, Corbyn said: “It would be a managed thing on the basis of the skills required.” And, lest anyone fail to heed the subtext, he added: “What there wouldn’t be is whole-scale importation of underpaid workers from central Europe in order to destroy conditions, particularly in the construction industries.” In short, Labour’s leader believes foreigners are coming over here and taking native-born workers’ jobs and wages, and they must be stopped.
It’s a commonplace observation that Corbyn doesn’t know anything about anything but it’s especially true in economics. Real incomes in Britain have been under sustained pressure since the financial crisis and are falling rapidly now. This has almost literally nothing to do with immigration, however. It’s due in the first instance to Britain’s poor record on productivity and more recently to a spike in inflation due to the sharp post-Brexit depreciation of sterling. At the very low end of the income distribution, immigration may have slightly exacerbated these pressures for some workers. But the notion that Britain suffers from immigration rather than benefiting from it, economically, socially and culturally, is insupportable: it’s demonstrably factually wrong.
If there’s one thing that can be reliably predicted to pressure living standards further, it’s Brexit. The mechanisms are well known to economists, which is why the profession overwhelmingly advised against a vote for Brexit. By erecting barriers to flows of goods, services, investment and labour, Britain’s withdrawal from the EU will divert scarce resources to less productive uses and thereby needlessly constrain the growth of national income. As Labour’s foremost thinkers like Tony Crosland have understood, economic growth makes easier the redistribution of resources and the attainment of greater equality.
Corbyn’s approach to Brexit is heedless of economic reasoning and social democratic principle, however. It amounts to supporting the Tories in a hostility to Europe for which they have absolutely no electoral mandate. Theresa May alone decided that a small majority for Brexit in a binary choice in the 2016 referendum meant withdrawal too from the European single market. That question was not on the ballot paper and is not required by the referendum result. Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein are all members of the European Economic Area and hence of the single market without being members of the EU. These three states are joined in the European Free Trade Association by Switzerland, which is likewise a member of the single market. In defiance of the plain evidence that being outside the EU does not necessarily entail withdrawal from full membership of the single market and the customs union, Corbyn insists on a maximalist Brexit.
"Corbyn’s approach to Brexit is heedless of economic reasoning and social democratic principle"Labour’s analysis is empirically wrong and politically disastrous. It’s an indication of how pitiful is Corbyn’s grasp of international economics that he repeats, like a mantra, that “we want a tariff-free trade access to the European market and a partnership with Europe.” He apparently doesn’t understand that the principal barriers to trade among advanced industrial economies 73 years after the Bretton Woods conference and 67 years after the Schuman plan are not tariffs. They are non-tariff barriers like rules of origin and product regulations.
The significance of the single market is that it removes these barriers altogether. The position of, say, Norway is very much a second-best compared with membership of the EU, because it has no say in forming EU regulations by which it’s bound. But Norway’s position is the least damaging course now available to Britain if it’s hell-bent on Brexit. For a party of the centre-left, committed to achieving collective goals in workers’ rights, jurisprudence and environmental protection, the EU should be a natural cause; for Corbyn and his associates, however, it’s an obstacle precisely because it stands for a framework of rules constraining arbitrary state power.
I’ve once debated with Corbyn and (separately) with Nigel Farage, and—though there is a 15-year age gap between them—was struck by their essential similarity. Their bonhomie is skin-deep and swiftly dispensed with when they’re contradicted. Despite their respective privileged backgrounds and expensive private schooling, the sense I get from their behaviour around Brexit is that they don’t know much, don’t speak foreign languages, don’t read books and don’t especially care for foreigners. For us on the centre-left, Corbyn’s dominance of Labour is a dismal prospect. For young people who, under Tory plans supported by Corbyn, will be denied the automatic right to live and study in the European Union, it’s a historic tragedy.
