If Labour lost contact with the way many voters saw immigration, then how can it take the multiculturalism debate forwards?
Losing elections is always painful, but there is one incident from 2010 that has left a scar on Labour's collective soul: Gordon Brown's disastrous encounter with Gillian Duffy. Ten months on and Labour thinkers are still anxiously picking at the painful scab, all too well aware of what it revealed about the party and its politics of the previous decade.
At a discussion earlier this week of policy wonks, academics and party thinkers there was a chorus of self criticism. There may be differences of interpretation or emphasis but the consensus was clear: the centre left has got the politics of multiculturalism wrong for a generation. An elite had totally lost connection with how the issues of immigration were being felt and experienced.
The list of sins went on. During a period of unprecedented migration, Labour had allowed a gap to open up between the rhetoric and reality; they had lost control; they had been incompetent.
One argument, put forward by Tim Bale of Sussex University, was that Labour's position boiled down to "multiculturalism is inevitable, so you'd better get used to it". It was tantamount to a coercive bullying which resulted in resentment, racism and losing votes on the issue to the right. What has made this issue particularly toxic to Labour and social democrats across Europe was that their stance on multiculturalism and immigration was seen as contradicting their traditional unique selling point as the party of fairness when there were reports of immigrants getting ahead in the queue for housing and benefits.
The same aspect of a patronising elite emerged in Professor Mike Kenny's analysis in which anxiety about multiculturalism had emerged in the context of a wider process of working-class dispossession. New Labour's relentlessly upbeat championing of modernisation and individual aspiration allowed no space for the nostalgia of a world passing away nor for a language of collective security.
Kenny argues that what Labour mishandled was a politics of recognition. While certain identities were recognised ? new legislation on civil partnerships and gay rights for example, as well as recognition of different ethnic minorities ? that process exacerbated how working-class identities appeared or were being marginalised. This spills over into issues of political representation as a predominantly university-educated parliamentary Labour party became more and more distant from its working class constituents. He cited James Madison's concern that representation should not be captured by elites.
No one had much good to say about multiculturalism. "It's an inherently segregating narrative," declared Sunder Katwala of the Fabians. He also urged parties of left and right to take up the responsibility to legitimise the situation we're now in ? and warned that it was "miserabilist" to be grudging about half a century of mass migration.
Miserabilism hovered round the table ? who was guilty of this thought crime? Was there any merit in it, a sort of grim honesty?
Just as it was getting very gloomy, a reality check. The fact is that over the last 40 years, despite deindustrialisation, and periods of high unemployment, there has been no major rise in racism in the UK. Enoch Powell's predictions have been proved wrong. Rather the reverse: there have been major advances. The debate of the 80s about whether it is possible to be black and British is now seen as absurd.
The political classes have recognised for a generation, however they may play the politics, that there is an educative process involved here in reconciling people to diversity. To reassure the anxious and the fearful. That reassurance has often come under the rubric of multiculturalism ? that diversity is something to enjoy, celebrate, benefit from.
And there lies part of the conundrum. If multiculturalism is dumped as a disaster (or dead or failed, as the current narrative goes), what are you left with? Not much, and the conversation showed up the vacuum. You get some discussion of Britishness and then you get miserabilism. And that's not a cheerful option.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/apr/01/labour-gillian-duffy-multiculturalism
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