If Labour want to end the toxic debate over immigration they need to listen to voters

Dame Angela Eagle, Minister for Border Security and Asylum, has said at Labour’s conference that the previous Conservative government created a “toxic” discourse around asylum, which gave a “yellow flash light” to racists and created space for “overt racism on our streets”.

Instead she said that what was needed was a system which can deal with asylum seekers “quickly and fairly”, as well as ending the “industrialisation of small boat crossings” used by illegal immigrants through more cooperation with, rather than blaming, other countries.

There’s certainly no doubt that immigration has become an increasingly toxic debate, or that failings in the asylum system have contributed to that, but the focus on rhetoric as the root of the issue is a common Westminster fallacy. Public anger about immigration and asylum isn’t driven by the tone of discussion, but rather by the material realities people see all around them.

Governments both Labour and Conservative have promised to reduce immigration over the last two and a half decades, while the number of immigrants has continued to increase. As planning laws have made it increasingly hard to build things, the amount of immigration has outstripped our level of house building and infrastructure development. The result has been higher costs for everyone and an increased fraying of public services. Viral headlines about huge queues for Bristol dentists are the most visible sign of this austerity by immigration.

At the same time, there has always been significant anger about illegal immigration, which is seen as “jumping the queue”, even if the immigrant turns out to have a genuine asylum case. This has increased in recent years with the rise in small boat crossings, which jumped from almost none before late 2018 to tens of thousands every year, with many of those from countries like Albania or Vietnam which are not at war.

The visible inability of the British state to secure its own borders led to a clamour to deal with the issue. At root, the problem is one of human rights: Britain simply doesn’t have the power to remove many clearly fraudulent or dangerous individuals. Just this week we saw the case of a Ugandan who clubbed a man to death in the back of an ambulance but cannot be sent home because they can’t provide the psychiatric support he needs there. That just passes the danger onto the British people.

This has had significant costs. Rescuing, housing, and processing these asylum seekers has cost billions of pounds. Indeed, a major chunk of what Labour claims is a £22 billion “black hole” in the public finances is due to over-spending on asylum. At a time of anaemic growth many people are understandably furious to see people who’ve arrived illegally being looked after with taxpayer money. They ask why pensioners should lose their winter fuel allowance while illegal immigrants in hotels have their heating paid for.

While Labour has promised to move them out of the hotels, that means buying up properties to put them in. Local authorities are increasingly receiving government grants to enable them to facilitate this. While understandable, it means yet more redistribution of money from the British taxpayer to uninvited asylum seekers.

The anti-asylum seeker riot in Knowsley last year provides a good example. Although there was an effort to present it in some parts of the press as a result of rhetoric on immigration by some Conservative ministers, the facts didn’t bear it out. The area has been Labour since it was created in 2010, so was hardly fertile ground. Nor was there any specific bit of rhetoric which led to the riot.

It was actually a viral video of a schoolgirl being approached by a man who wanted her phone number despite her telling him no as she was underage. Locals connected it to a nearby hotel where asylum seekers were staying, which became the focus of the riot.

Instead of blaming political rhetoric and racism, Labour should listen to the public and reform the immigration and asylum system so that it meets the needs and desires of Britain. Sadly that seems unlikely. The fringe panel where these comments were made was organised by the Refugee Council, which continues to push to expand routes for asylum despite the huge increase in asylum seekers in recent years. In this climate, that really is toxic.