The topic of immigration has become increasingly heated in the UK. While the right has dominated newspaper headlines with their constant migrant-bashing, the number of people legally coming to the UK only increased under the Tories. This might seem paradoxical at first, but it really isn’t; you just don’t hear why very often, because the corporate media go along with the narrative. As such, Susanna Reid’s appearance on this weeks Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg led to an interesting discussion:
Susanna Reid: "Successive governments have failed to tell a positive story on immigration, we rely on immigration… how Chris Philp can lecture the current government on immigration… is kind of remarkable…"#bbclaurak #TrevorPhillips pic.twitter.com/Gz5SUlm1Pp
— Haggis_UK 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 (@Haggis_UK) December 15, 2024
Reid’s analysis didn’t touch on everything, but it was refreshing to hear someone giving voice to these points in the hostile media environment.
‘Public confidence’
Earlier in the BBC programme, Kuenssberg interviewed home secretary Yvette Cooper and shadow home secretary Chris Philp. A BBC recap summed up key points from each interview:
- Home Secretary Yvette Cooper says the government aims to reduce small boat crossings but won’t commit to “gimmicky” targets
- She says the focus is on working with other countries, boosting law enforcement, and “going after the criminal gangs” to tackle the backlog
- Meanwhile, shadow home secretary Chris Philp says the Conservatives would introduce a hard cap on migration and argues that Labour’s decision to cancel the Rwanda plan is a mistake
Following these interviews, Kuenssberg hosted a roundtable discussion with guests including ITV‘s Susanna Reid. In the discussion, Kuenssberg said:
Well, um, Susanna, it’s obvious Yvette Cooper doesn’t want to repeat what she sees as the political mistakes of previous governments by making a promise and then spectacularly failing to keep it. But do you think that matters to public confidence when she sort of says, oh, I just can’t tell you.
Susanna Reid: talking sense
Susanna Reid responded with an answer that had a surprising amount of sense for a BBC discussion:
Yes, I do. I think that successive governments have failed to tell a positive story on immigration. We rely on immigration to run our public services, to grow our economy.
It’s like we said before – the Tories increased both legal migration and migrant bashing. Why did they do this? A few reasons:
- Our ageing population means we need an influx of young people to keep the retirement system affordable within the capitalist structure we live under.
- Businesses want access to workers who are willing to work for the minimum wage (and even less than that in the instance of some gig economy workers and fruit pickers).
This explains why they increased migration, but why simultaneously increase migrant bashing?
The chief reason is that it drew attention away from the horrible job the Tories were doing running the country. Eventually, it went further than that, and now many don’t just think migration is a problem; they think it’s the problem – the singular reason why everything in this country has gone to shit.
‘Huge concern’
Susanna Reid’s next point gets into the “huge concern” many people have. Usually when you hear a mainstream journalist talking about ‘concern’, the implication is always that people are right to be worried. Reid, however, did a somewhat decent job of explaining that it’s the government causing the problem; not migrants.
But there is huge concern about how we support the immigrants who come. And, you know, with all due respect to Chris Philp, how he can lecture the current government on immigration when it was under the previous government that… legal net migration went up to almost a million in the year to June 2023 is kind of remarkable. Because anybody is going to be worried that if you have that scale of legal migrants coming in, how are you going to support them in the NHS? How are you going to support them with housing?
And I think what governments need to do is say ‘we need migrants; they are positive and valuable contributors to our society, but this is the number, roughly, we need’, because otherwise you get into this kind of binary position where you have the government saying, well, you know, I know it wasn’t one of the milestones, but it’s on page 18 of the plan for change, and we’re going to lower immigration.
That sounds like immigration is a bad thing. We’re going to lower it because immigrants are bad, but they’re not bad. And then you hand over the political argument to reform and a sort of Farage-ist proposal of one in, one out.
It’s true; if you bash migrants and your country is in shambles, of course people are going to wonder how massive influxes of people will impact public services.
Really, the only thing wrong with what Reid is saying is that her framing is entirely centred on the value these human beings bring to the system – a system which we all know is failing to benefit anyone besides the 1%.
Susanna Reid: honest conversations
There’s another key reason why the government doesn’t want to have an honest discussion about migration; that reason is any such discussion would inevitably mean analysing how our economic system works. Under the neoliberal capitalist order that’s existed for several decades, you need to keep pumping more young people into the workforce to realise the system’s goal – infinite growth – a goal which cannot be achieved in a country with finite resources.
There’s another point that we need to discuss, and that’s while we believe people should have the right to come here, they should also have the right to stay in their home countries. Many come not because they love British culture; they come because the unequal global system has vastly diminished life in their country of origin.
Britain is rich because other countries are not. And again, having an honest conversation about migration would shine a light on this.
And so, while you can definitely say Susanna Reid’s discussion didn’t go far enough, it certainly went much farther than host Kuenssberg ever would.
Featured image via BBC
