The Government's Plan for Brexit

Andy Burnham Excerpts

Wednesday 7th December 2016 Commons Chamber

[Andy Burnham (Leigh) (Lab)]

The sad context for today’s debate is that far from coming back together as a country since the referendum, we are probably more divided than ever. The blame for that lies not with the public, but with the way in which Parliament and the Government have responded in the six months since. In the referendum, the public were issuing a sharp rebuke to the political class, which they feel does not listen to them and is not straight with them, but what has the Government’s response been? They have been saying that they want to keep the citizens of this country in the dark about their plans for Brexit so as not to give anything away to the other side—or, as the hon. Member for Reigate (Crispin Blunt) said, “the enemy”. That is simply unacceptable. In these anti-politics times, it is hard to imagine a more politically inept approach.

[Crispin Blunt]

Let me just correct that. I did not say that they are the enemy and I made it crystal clear in the speech I have just given that that is not my position. If the right hon. Gentleman wants to wind the temperature up in this debate, he can go on like that, but I suggest that everyone should try to calm it.

[Andy Burnham]

The hon. Gentleman used the phrase “the enemy” and he needs to clarify what he meant by that. I do not think it helped to raise the tone of this debate.

The Government’s politically inept approach of saying that they can keep the public in the dark has, first, bred suspicion among remain and leave voters alike, making them think a fix is going on. Secondly, it has cast the negotiation in an unnecessarily aggressive light and has fuelled even more bad feeling towards Britain among its EU partners, in turn meaning that it will now be more difficult to get a favourable deal once article 50 has been triggered. At the moment, we are not getting a hard Brexit or a soft Brexit, but a botched Brexit. For all our sakes, the Government need to get their act together, which is why I congratulate my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer) on forcing their hand.

[Mr MacNeil]

rose—

[Andy Burnham]

I will make some progress. Today needs to mark the beginning of a new phase in the Brexit debate. It is time to move beyond the re-running of the referendum arguments and accept what people voted for. The 700,000 people in Greater Manchester who voted to leave, many of them lifelong Labour voters, voted for change on immigration. I am clear about that, and it has to be our starting point in this debate. The status quo—full free movement—was defeated at the ballot box, so it is not an option. What is to be debated is the precise nature of the changes that replace it, so that we get the balance right between responding properly to the public’s legitimate concerns and minimising the impact on our economy.

[Callum McCaig]

The right hon. Gentleman’s party is suggesting that leaving the customs union was not on the ballot paper, so how come free movement of people was on the ballot paper? It simply was not. The ballot paper asked whether we should leave the EU or not.

[Andy Burnham]

I suggest to the hon. Gentleman that he speaks to the public and listens to what they had to say during the referendum campaign. If he is saying that they were not voting for change on free movement and immigration, I am afraid that he simply was not listening to them.

I have long argued for a change in the system of free movement to reflect people’s concerns. As it stands, it is not working for the more deprived parts of our country, particularly those where traditional industry has been replaced by lower-skill, lower-wage employment. My preference was to work within the EU to fix those problems, but the country, understandably, lost patience with that approach.

Free movement does not affect all places in the same way; it affects cities differently from former industrial areas. It has also made life more difficult in places where it is already hardest. These are areas that got no real hope from the Government when traditional industry left and that saw house prices collapse and whole streets bought up by absent private landlords. They are places that, alongside taking new arrivals from the EU, continue to take in the vast majority of this country’s asylum seekers and refugees. Largely they do so without any real strife or difficulty, so I do not want to hear anyone claim that people in places such as Leigh who voted to leave are in any way xenophobic or racist. They are welcoming, generous people, but they also want fairness, and they do not think that it is fair that the country’s least well-off communities should expect pressure on wages, housing, public services, primary schools and GP services without any help to manage it.

[Steve Rotheram (Liverpool, Walton) (Lab)]

I agree with my right hon. Friend that it is certainly not xenophobic or racist to call out unscrupulous employers who are causing some of the problems in our working-class areas by allowing the undercutting of wages, which is causing resentment from people who work in traditional industries such as the construction sector. Is not that what we really need to understand? We hear it constantly on the doorstep.

[Andy Burnham]

That is precisely the issue that neither Europe nor, let us be honest, this Parliament was addressing. Free movement was being used to undermine skilled wages and we did not do enough about it. We have to be honest about that.

People in my constituency want to continue to welcome people here who contribute to our society, but they want an immigration system that affords greater control and reduces the numbers. I believe that that is what we must work towards. The left across Europe has got to break out of its paralysis on this issue. The fear of being labelled as “pandering” stops people entering the debate, but it also stops progressive ideas that meet the public’s concerns and leaves the pitch clear for those with right-wing solutions.

I want to set out two principal reasons why there is a legitimate left-wing case for reform. First, in an era of increasing globalisation, free movement has arguably been providing greater benefit to large companies than it has to the most deprived communities. There is nothing socialist about a system of open borders that allows multinationals to treat people as commodities and to move them around Europe to drive down labour costs and create a race to the bottom.

Secondly, there is a strong case for saying that the immigration system that has developed over time in this country is inherently discriminatory—it does not treat all migrants equally. Instead, it accords a preferential status to migrants from our nearest neighbours in the context of a policy that seeks to cap numbers. That, therefore, discriminates against those non-EU migrants who seek to come here and who have families here.

My call to this side of the House is to put forward a plan that treats all people equally and that applies progressive principles to migration. We need to make the argument for an immigration system that allows greater control and that reduces the numbers coming here, but that does so in a fair way. This would be a system that treats all migrants equally, that does not allow people’s wages to be undercut, as my hon. Friend said, and, crucially, that continues to welcome people from Europe and around the world to work here. Those are progressive principles that can form the basis of a new immigration policy for the left.

It is time for many of us on this side of the House to confront a hard truth: our reluctance in confronting this debate is undermining the cohesion of our communities and the safety of our streets. I am no longer prepared to be complicit in that. We need answers to the public’s concerns, but answers that are based on hope, not hate.