by Kevin Meagher

My dad’s just turned 67. Like many people these days, he’s still working. But he’s not sat in a cushy office hunched over a laptop; he’s up on a scaffold, or knee-deep in mud and clay in the footings of a house.

He’s a bricklayer; and still finds himself out in all-weather doing the job he’s been doing for 50 years. He can’t afford to retire. When you work in a speculative industry your pay goes down as well as up. In a non-unionised industry, the rate is under constant negotiation.  In the 1960’s and 70s it was a good job – paying well above average earnings.

During the 1980s, two biting Tory recessions wiped out construction. Try saving for retirement when you’re not earning enough; keeping the wolf from the door is the name of the game. So work on he must.

That’s partly because the past decade hasn’t been much better for construction workers either. Even during Labour’s boom, the wealth didn’t trickle down to people like him. There were two crushing forces at work: the Labour government’s general failure to build enough homes and the impact of low-cost immigrant labour, following the accession of the Visegrad countries to the EU in 2004.

The first issue is well chronicled – and indeed championed by the Left. Construction of new homes dropped to a post-war low under Labour. Having fallen by two thirds since the heyday of the 1960s, just 156,170 houses were built in 1997-8. By 2009-10, this had nearly halved to just 88,690. Not enough houses mean not enough jobs and flat pay.

Of the second issue – immigration – you will hear ne’er a squeak.

There’s been a self-denying ordinance in even talking about the issue for as long as I can remember. Like actors who won’t say the name of “the Scottish play” for fear of bad luck, the centre-left has been utterly mute on the subject of immigration for years.

Of course there is a familiar form of words about ‘valuing the contribution immigrants make’ but no discourse on the other impacts. The downsides must remain unspoken; such is the paranoia about feeding the far right.

So Ed Miliband’s speech was hugely significant, if only for its topic. Stacked full of caveats and careful formulations, he did, however, manage to throw off the veil that “worrying about immigration, talking about immigration, thinking about immigration” does not make people bigoted (“not in any way”). People are simply “anxious about the future” he said.

Indeed they are; and this speech was long overdue from a Labour leader. In large part because there is a big chunk of Labour’s traditional working class base that the party – and the trade unions – simply don’t understand anymore.

The largely non-unionised, casualised, peripatetic world of the £90bn construction industry is a prime example. It employs more than two million people and contributes 7 per cent to GVA but its highly cost-sensitive, so reducing labour costs through using cheaper foreign workers was a boon to the big construction companies.

Toughening up on employer abuses in the labour market so that cheaper immigrant alternatives are not as attractive a prospect (“so that we can build our economy so that it works for working people”) is music to the ears of many hard-pressed British workers like my Dad.

Not all agree, however. The reaction in some quarters to Ed Miliband’s speech was predictably sour.  Talking about immigration, even in the context of the failures of the labour market, is falling for the “myths of misanthropes” according to The Independent ‘s Ian Birrell.

The former Cameron speechwriter turned columnist, claimed that: “A series of recent studies [none named] has shown the wave of migration under the last Labour government had no impact on unemployment, even among the least skilled. Nor did it significantly depress wages.”

Yet wage bargaining in the construction sector is usually done on the basis of building site to building site, or, worse still, actually takes place hidden away from academic number-crunchers in our £200 billion black economy – where there are simply no statistics to gather.

In making his case – and in the predictable responses to it – Ed Miliband exposes the three distinct views on immigration.

The first is that of the traditional nationalist who which sees immigration as inherently damaging to national identity and cohesion. This is articulated by the nostalgics of the Daily Mail through to the bigots of the BNP. It was not surprising, therefore, to see voices as diverse as Migrationwatch and Nick Griffin welcome Ed’s speech.

The second is, if I can call it this, the liberal middle-class view. I don’t mean that to sound too pejorative. Liberal is the correct term. Adherents see immigration as inherently good: socially and economically; let it be. Immigration brings benefits in terms of cultural plurality, but it has big financial pluses too for the owner-occupier. It means cut-price landscape gardeners and cheap builders, holding out the prospect of suddenly affordable loft conversions and garage extensions.

The third viewpoint is that of the traditional social democrat. This is the ground Labour should always have occupied on immigration, but foolishly abandoned, before people like Maurice Glasman, Jon Cruddas and now Ed Miliband rediscovered it. Immigration can have its benefits, sure, but there are impacts too.

If the impact is to see harsher competition for jobs or homes then there is a downside for the people now facing this extra competition. Of course its people like my Dad – and millions like him – who sees the sharp end of it. I’ve not noticed any of the liberal middle-class pontificators at The Independent losing their jobs to eager – and cheaper – Polish journalists of late.

For liberals, even discussing immigration outside the confines of its all-round wonderfulness is heresy. It simply eggs on the BNP we are always told. Debate must be shut down.

Hence, commentators like The Independent’s Owen Jones mutter darkly that talking about the “myth” of immigration having downsides will “simply fuel the sense that people from other countries are responsible for society’s ever-growing ills.”

For social democrats there is a real, genuine downside that should be discussed and remedied. Ed Miliband has served – at long last – to validate this argument. Some good old fashioned dirigisme in re-regulating the labour market to end workplace abuses is long overdue. As he pointed out in his speech, just seven employers have ever been prosecuted for not paying the minimum wage.

To deprecate the downsides of mass immigration is not to tread the same ground as traditional nationalists. The issue is not about nostalgia, but concern at the hard, bottom-line impact on standards of living and life chances for many ordinary people. This should be Labour’s natural territory.

And this is not a question about the ‘perception’ of immigration. Labour has been in breach of contract with many of its core voters. Some of those abandoning Labour last time around were simply acting in their rational self-interest by rejecting a policy that was never put in any manifesto and was pursued, blindly, by a party supposedly on their side.

Not great terrain for a self-styled people’s party to find itself occupying. But voters will listen about the benefits of immigration if politicians will be honest about the problems that come with it.

If Ed’s speech signals that the party’s social democratic tradition, rather than its liberal impulses, now holds sway, we might just get that hearing.

Kevin Meagher is associate editor of Labour Uncut

Tags: Ed Miliband, immigration, Kevin Meagher

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