Events | 2010.06.14
Immigration will define Labour's leadership contest | Richard Darlington
Rivals Diane Abbott and David Miliband are united in criticising Balls and Burnham\'s stance on the \'Gillian Duffy question\'
Gaby Hinsliff is going to enjoy chairing tonight\'s Labour leadership hustings . While Observer readers remember her liberal broadsheet days, we shouldn\'t forget that she cut her teeth as a reporter on the Daily Mail. She is likely to be the most challenging chair of any hustings so far, and I suspect that the debate is going to come to life when she challenges the candidates on immigration.
The " Gillian Duffy question " has dominated the early skirmishes among the contenders because it symbolises ordinary voters\' experience of globalisation. The debate is taking place at the intersection between foreign and domestic policy and is exposing the trade-off between principle and pragmatism for the left. As the hustings move out of metropolitan London, the immigration debate is likely to take on added importance.
The pensioner from Rochdale challenged Gordon Brown\'s portrayal of fairness in Labour\'s welfare to work policies. She was a Labour voter worried about access to education and health and care services, but her comment about eastern Europeans only came in response to Brown\'s defence that there is "no life on the dole". In today\'s Daily Mirror Ed Balls says that "Mrs Duffy captured our reality. Too many people believed we\'d stopped talking their language. We can\'t win again if we ignore people like her".
Balls says he spoke to hundreds of Mrs Duffys before the election and claims to have urged Brown to talk more about immigration. But, most significantly, Balls now says Labour should not have rejected transitional controls on migration from eastern Europe in 2004. While Ed Miliband was the first of the leadership contenders to identify immigration as "a class issue", it was Balls\'s article in the Observer and his subsequent BBC Politics Show interview that took the debate to a new level.
All of the leadership hopefuls now agree that the agency worker directive should have been implemented, but Balls has become a lone voice among the candidates in arguing for restrictions in free movement of labour. Not only does he want restrictions on eastern Europeans but he wants movement restrictions on unskilled Turkish workers to be a condition of Turkey\'s EU membership.
Is Balls being Eurosceptic, or is his brand of what he calls "pro-European realism" the reason Britain has stayed in the EU but stayed out of the euro? Is he the moderate in Labour\'s European debate, actually closer to the centre ground of British politics than any other candidate? Or, as Mary Riddell has eloquently argued, is he "faling back on inward-looking populism"?
Denis McShane forcefully defended the pro-European case last week and pointed to the huge number of Brits living in Spain while happily having nothing to do with Spanish culture. Andy Burnham continues to argue that people should not be able to claim child benefit and send the money home but McShane points out that Brits in France do just that.
Europhile McShane is a David Miliband supporter, and one of the most interesting things about the dynamic during the hustings so far is the way that Diane Abbott and David Miliband find it one of the few issues that they can agree on.
While Abbott urges Labour activists to "hold the line" against voter disquiet on immigration, David Miliband feels confident in criticising Balls because Turkey will not be ready to join the EU during this parliament. Diane and David may keep on passionately disagreeing about Iraq and Trident, but their body language and barbed comments towards Balls and Burnham put the left and right wingers on the same liberal side of this immigration argument.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]tion-labour-leadership-contest
