Some thoughts on the Gillian Duffy anniversary. Yes, she was (being) a bigoted woman & it's a sad reflection on our media & political culture that Gordon Brown was eviscerated for saying so. BUT >
She wasn't "just" some bigoted woman. She was the personification of - and lightning rod for - a widespread expression of disconnect between public, politicians and policy that had been allowed, or even encouraged to grow over the preceding five years. >
New Labour chose to sign the UK up to the full A2 expansion in 2004, allowing unlimited migration from Bulgaria & Romania. IMO this was the right thing to do BUT Blair's government was never straight with the British public about what they were doing & why. >
They continued to pander to & actively feed right wing tabloid myths about the terrors of immigration, nod to legitimate concerns, dogwhistling enough for an entire fckn series of One Man & His Dog, making ridiculous, unattainable targets for bringing down immigration. >
They never explained what they were doing or why. Consequently, when A2 expansion hit full steam, parts of the UK suddenly changed dramatically, especially the parts like Rochdale that had been left devastated & hollowed out by Thatcherism & never recovered.
Now the Mandelsonian/Blairite pen-pushers saw this & celebrated. They understood what was happening was that migrants were re-populating dying housing estates, filling vacancies in the employment market, keeping the UK part of a fluid global economy. >
What Gillian Duffy & millions like her saw was their communities suddenly, dramatically changing, neighbours talking in languages they didn't understand, behaving in ways they didn't recognise. Almost overnight the Duffys didn't recognise their own neighbourhoods - that is scary.
And while we can make (correct) intellectual arguments about migrants being & becoming the nurses, doctors & careworkers, what Gillian Duffy will have seen when she went to the GP was a queue of pregnant Romanian women waiting ahead of her. >
So when Gillian Duffy asked "Where are all these East Europeans flooding here from?" Loads of middle class graduates thought it was hilarious to point out the answer was "Eastern Europe" while completely ignoring the reasonable question she was trying to ask, which was >
"Why has my community suddenly changed when nobody asked me if I wanted this, agreed with this or was happy with it?"
Now all of this could have been avoided. It could have been avoided if our political class had been upfront with the public that immigration is a good thing. >
Now all of this could have been avoided. It could have been avoided if our political class had been upfront with the public that immigration is a good thing. >
It could have been avoided if the government had put some thought & planning into where hundreds of thousands of Eastern Europeans would be living when they arrived & how local public services would cope with sudden transformation. >
It could have been avoided if both local & national governments had made serious efforts to engage local communities & integrate new arrivals. They never did, because the areas where the migrants were moving to were areas which no one cared about, >
> Not even Labour, because hey, y'know, they're going to vote for us anyway, right? And we all know where that led us.
So yeah, 10 years on, Gillian Duffy really was important, not because of what she said to Gordon Brown or what he said to her, but for what she represented at the time, which was the utter hypocrisy & contempt which New Labour felt for many of their core voters.
tl;dr Tony Blair & Peter Mandelson did Brexit.
/ENDS
/ENDS
PS (Yeah I know I said /ENDS but I just thought of this) - my corner of inner city Manchester was one of the places heavily impacted & one of the things I heard said loads at the time by local Gillian Duffys was "But why are the Government moving them all here?" >
It was assumed that politicians had made a deliberate choice to house thousands of Eastern European migrants in Longsight & Levenshulme. The actual truth was that it was a dirt-poor, dilapidated part of the city >
& there were so many empty properties that buy-to-let landlords had bought them up for peanuts & were renting them out (in some cases) to extended families of 10 or 20 in pokey 2-up-2-down terraced houses. >
No matter how hard you tried to explain, people continued to insist that there must be a grand plan, that it was happening because the government & the council were making it happen. They couldn't conceive that it was happening because basically nobody gave a shit.
