Carryfast:
Rjan:
TiredAndEmotional:
Labour want more immigrants because they think that increases their chances of staying in power
How exactly does that work when immigration is (and has been since the 1960s) one of the biggest factors that alienates the majority of the electorate from a party perceived to be tolerating or encouraging it?
If that was correct the Cons would never have got into power again after ditching Enoch Powell and Labour might as well give up while the LibDems would be totally wiped out.While also showing the under estimation if not downright misrepresentation of just how big the immigrant vote now is v the indigenous vote and rising.
The reality is that there have always been waves of immigration under the Tories. The Tories governed from 1951 to 1964, and then when mass immigration started to become a hot political issue in the 1960s, the Tories started to become hardline in their rhetoric.
I’ve struggled to find detailed statistics. This House of Commons speech seems to suggest that Commonwealth immigration rose 50-fold under the Tories between 1953 and 1961: Immigration (Hansard, 19 March 2003). Other authors are more modest, and suggest the rise was merely 10-fold under the Tories in that period, but considering only those originating from the Carribean/West Indies (not the entire Commonwealth).
The old Labour party seem to have been much more moderate as far as the evidence goes. They governed 1945-51, 1964-70, and 1974-79. In the 1945-51 period the number seems to have been in the thousands per year, and in the other periods there don’t seem to have been any sharp jumps in immigration - in the 70s it stayed stable (going slightly down). Labour’s rhetoric too was always modest - the 1964 manifesto referred to controls on immigration, the 1970 manifesto (when Labour didn’t win) referred to immigration already being “under firm control” and also to the need to avoid “immigrant ghettoes”, and the 1974 manifesto didn’t refer to immigration at all.
Immigration then ramped up again in the 80s under Thatcher. So the Tories seem to have consistently spoken with forked tongues about immigration - increasingly hardline in their rhetoric, but always presiding over sharp actual increases. Whereas the old Labour governments never indulged right-wing rhetoric about immigration, but also never presided over huge numbers in 1945-51 nor presided over significant increases either in 1964-70 or 1974-1979 (and of course between 1951 and 1997, Labour were only in power for 11 years total - the Tories were in power for 35 years total).
New Labour in the period 1997-2010 is a different case entirely. Immigration of all kinds skyrocketed under New Labour.
But again, under the Tories in the period 2010-2015, despite their hardline rhetoric, and despite the fact that they retain full national control over non-EU immigration, non-EU immigration has reached an all-time high.
As an aside, EU immigration also reached an all-time high under Cameron, bearing in mind that this period is pre-Brexit. Whilst the Tories don’t have control over freedom of movement within the EU, they do still have a great deal of control on issues like wage undercutting but have done nothing about it - in 2013 for example they abolished the Agricultural Wages Board and the agricultural minimum wage, which means farmers can now pay lower wages, despite complaining that they can’t find settled workers willing to do agricultural work.
So returning to your point, you seem to be correct, immigration mainly seems to be something that indeed does not seem to do parties much long-term harm - especially the Tory party. It does however seem to be something that creates a problem for left-wing Labour governments who have not (on the historical evidence) tended to encourage or permit mass immigration, but who cannot out-do the Tories on the anti-immigrant rhetoric, and are loath (for ideological reasons) to point out that all periods of rampant immigration have occurred under the Tory party that at the same time touts hardline anti-immigrant rhetoric.
My point however is this, that immigrants cannot cast votes in national elections. I don’t know the exact electoral status of immigrants who were from former British colonies who arrived in the post-war period, but nowadays (since the 70s) you cannot even hope to be naturalised until you’ve been settled here several years - and I would think that the number of immigrants who apply for citizenship simply so that they can vote (if nothing much else hinges on being naturalised, which usually it doesn’t) is a minority. And against any small number of votes gained, you would have to factor that it hands an open goal to the Tories to gain working class votes based on anti-immigrant rhetoric.
Even under the Blair government, the number of citizenship applications was (and is) nowhere near the level of immigration - so this idea that any Labour government (or even the right-wing New Labour government) has imported its votes is a non-starter.
I would suggest a different hypothesis, that centre-right governments gain votes from wealthy liberals, employers, and from the professional working classes, by stuffing the country with cheap lower-skilled labour, and they also gain votes from the duller working classes who (unlike the bosses) listen to the anti-immigrant rhetoric more than they look at the reality (the reality being that the centre-right governments since 1979, both Tory and New Labour, have been extremely pro-mass-immigration, whereas the left-wing Old Labour governments never were).
