Paul Embery on Labour and immigration – part two

We ask Paul Embery: “You’re almost the Last Samurai of the Labour Party, do you ever feel like giving up?”

Bournbrook’s Mario Laghos has also interviewed Paul Embery for our latest print issue, exploring his views, as well as Peter Hitchens’, on the idea of ‘the Cathedral’. To receive future print issues, where cultural, political and other issues of the day and past are analysed and written about, subscribe here.

Part one of this interview can be found here.

Mario Laghos: There’s the economic argument on immigration and there’s also the cultural argument. Have you seen what’s happening in Linton-on-Ouse up in Yorkshire?

Paul Embery: I know a little bit about it, yes – not a lot though, I have to confess.

ML: The population of the town is around 700, and 1,500 migrants are set to be housed in an RAF base which is effectively in the town. Overnight the residents will become strangers in their own town. You have talked about this phenomenon, not in those terms, but in terms of change, in relation to your experience in Dagenham. Dagenham’s MP, Jon Cruddas, is barely hanging on – are we going to see that same kind of backlash in Linton and other areas where this occurs?

PE: I think if the Government doesn’t get a grip on the whole issue of immigration, which as far as I can see it hasn’t done, it will continue to be a running sore in society. There’s every chance that there will be a reaction, particularly among working-class communities which are often the main recipients of large numbers of immigrants and have to deal with the pressure on services and wages. What I say to people, and as I said in my book Despised: Why the Modern Left Loathes the Working Class regarding the experience in Dagenham, it's too easy to dismiss these people as racists, bigots or xenophobes. The vast majority of people who were going through that experience in Dagenham when I was living there were not any of those things, actually. Most of them, I would say, were pro-immigration, but they just saw it wasn’t controlled, and when they cried out to their political leaders, particularly in the Labour Party because it had always been a Labour area, they were just told to suck it up: “It’ll be good for you,” "it’ll bring cultural enrichment”, “it’ll be good economically because it’ll put a couple of percentage points on GDP”. But actually, most people didn’t feel better for it culturally, economically or in any other sense.

The scale of immigration into the borough of Barking and Dagenham, particularly in the first ten years of this century was phenomenal, and I lay out the actual statistics in the book. It was very, very significant, and it wasn’t that people’s sense of race had been violated, but that their sense of order had been violated. Everything they had known and been familiar with in what had been for generations a very stable working-class community – and by the way, I’m not someone who thinks things should never change, but what you can do is manage that pace of change so it doesn’t violate people’s sense of order. What was genuine bewilderment and disorientation about the whole thing was dismissed as racism and bigotry, which was a large part of why people voted for Brexit. They wanted not to put the gates up, but simply to say "you have to control this better”, and what I can see in the six years since is that the Government has not controlled it better. We are still seeing significant net immigration and I don’t think the issue is going away if it isn’t dealt with.

ML: It looked like Sir Keir Starmer was going to have to remake the Labour Party as a pro-working-class, small-c conservative vehicle. But Boris’s slip ups now mean he could look to win by virtue of not being the governing party. Is there a chance Labour could win without undergoing radical change?

PE: I think something kind of similar to what you say there has happened in Australia. In the Australian election, the Labor Party came back to power, not because it had changed particularly, and not because it was inspiring people, but because people were fed up with Scott Morrison’s Government and wanted a change. So, you can’t rule out the possibility, certainly. But what I would council people on is, hold on a second, we’ve been here before. Michael Foot, people find it hard to believe this now, was something like twenty points ahead in the polls against Margaret Thatcher around the time of the Toxteth riots, around 1981. Neil Kinnock was about twenty points ahead of John Major before the 1992 election, and obviously he lost it. So, polling leads mid-term do not always translate into general election victories and I think the Labour Party cannot be complacent and hope that the Government loses it rather than us having to undergo the change that is necessary to win it.

I think Labour has barely got started. It needs a DNA change and a radical ideological overhaul, and to bring back the electoral coalition its always had when it’s been most successful, which I’ve described as the Hampstead and the Hartlepool coalition. If you’re going to win power you can’t just rely on the old blue-collar vote and the C2DE’s. You do need middle-class voters, but you can’t forget your base, and Labour has forgot its base. It needs a radical overhaul, and until it starts to win back the hearts and minds of its old heartlands, I would be very sceptical about its chances of winning back power any time soon.

ML: You’re almost the Last Samurai of the Labour Party, do you ever feel like giving up?

PE: I don’t feel like giving up, partly because on one level it’s quite sad to see what’s happened to the party and the wider Labour movement which I’ve been a part of for thirty years, as a trade unionist and then as a party member. In many respects, it’s tragic, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say I enjoy the kind of jousting I engage in with people on the left. Some of them are so crankish in their views and yet so certain that they are the good guys, and that if it wasn’t for the nasty media then everyone would be able to see how righteous their view is. This argument that the working-class are suffering a false consciousness and must be shaken out of it to come across to ‘our’ ideas. It’s an interesting exercise to see how people delude themselves into believing their minority views are, or would be, very popular if not for the nasty old media getting in the way.

I’ve got no intention to walk away from it but I’m under no illusions that things will shift back to my direction any time soon. The two dominant forces in the Labour party are still the liberal left and the radical left, and I don’t think either point toward salvation for the Labour Party. There are people who support the ‘Blue Labour’ tendency, and I think particularly after the referendum and general election we’ve got a lot of political capital in the movement – people like me who can say “well we did tell you this was coming and you didn’t listen to us”. But no, I don’t detect that there’s going to be a major shift any time soon.

ML: Has it ever crossed your mind to join the Tories?

PE: Absolutely one hundred per cent no, never. I can honestly say that’s never crossed my mind, ever, to become a Tory. I know people in the Conservative Party – I’m friends with people in the Conservative Party and I think there are good Conservatives who do care about their country, who do care about the poor, if you look at Conservatives who do good works in their communities, through the church and charity. But I just don’t think they have the answers for ordinary working-class people. They don’t like it when working-class people come together through their trade unions to campaign for improvements in their lives, pay and working conditions.

I think the Tory party has always been too in hoc to the market and have undue faith in market outcomes, doesn’t like the principles of public ownership, believes the rule of the market should reign supreme and for me those are not the answers for the kind of society I want to see. So, it would be anathema for me to join the Conservative Party.

I joined Labour party in 1994 when I was nineteen, I’ve been a trade unionist since I was sixteen and, in truth, it is probably partly tribal – when you’ve been part of a movement for thirty years it’s hard for it to not be tribal, if we’re honest. But despite everything I do still think for all its faults that the Labour movement has the ability to deliver advances for working-class people. Throughout history most advances the working-class have secured have come through the Labour movement. I think that will be the case in the future, although the Labour movement has a lot of work to do to make itself relevant again.