I saw Zahawi today tweeting that Labour had failed to support Tory actions on border controls on 36 occasions. Imagine you have held 36 votes and still people are crossing and dying in the Channel and you think that is something to beat Labour up with - "we are useless and we are managing it without your support" would look good on the side of a bus
They bang on about immigration because they think it's a winner for them and it is.
Despite the fact the Tories are utterly inept, the electorate have no confidence that Labour will be any better because they don't believe Labour's heart is in it.
And they think that because Labour's heart isn't in it.
The basis of the welfare state is if you pay in you can draw down in times of need, it's a social contract, first introduced by Lloyd George in the National Insurance Act of 1911 and expanded by Labour in 1945. Immigration can undermine that. So while the Windrush generation and others, who spent their working lives here, paid in and can draw down as part of that arrangement, people arriving illegally from across the Channel have made no such contribution and therefore break that social contract.
The wider argument for immigration is that without it vital services would not function, indeed many services are faltering now post Brexit because so many immigrants have gone home and too few are arriving. And of course the evidence is irrefutable that immigration is a positive for the British economy, so those folk who oppose immigration must be racist! Right?
Hang about.
A growing British economy disproportionately benefits capital and the already rich over the wage slave majority. Too much of our growth has gone into profits and too little into wage packets. As we've found to our cost, the British economy was drunk on cheap overseas labour and off the shelf foreign professionals, hence the almost complete disappearance of apprenticeships, and no one now denies the irrefutable evidence that cheap immigrant labour has had a downward drag on wages.
Of course none of this was helped by austerity and the lack of public investment needed to adequately accommodate large scale immigration.
And then there's the central lie of multiculturalism, the denial of the existence of a prevailing British cultural identity, the demonisation of integration, the Orwelian concept of strength through diversity, when every rational person knows that culturally homogeneous societies are the most harmonious.
None of these things can ever be spoken about on the left, it is heresy, the domain of blood and soil racists and tweedy fascists like Farage, so that leaves the debate entirely to the Right and despite the fact they fuck up any attempt to address it, the electorate trusts them on immigration and not the left.
