Paul Embery on Labour and immigration – part one
“The immigration debate is taking place in bad faith. What the left does is criticise individual policies designed to control immigration without saying, ‘actually the reason we’re doing this is because we believe in open borders’.”
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 two of this interview shall be released soon.
Mario Laghos: You were critical of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) shooting the Rwanda plan down. Do you suppose there’s now a stronger argument for removing ourselves from those human rights jurisdictions and going it alone?
Paul Embery: I wouldn’t lose any sleep if we weren’t signatories to the ECHR. I do think it’s almost as if people, particularly those on the left – the liberal left and the radical left – are suggesting that if we weren’t signatories to it, Britain would overnight become some kind of dystopia. That we’d become a completely uncivilised country. You kind of think, well, actually we’ve got the 1689 English Bill of Rights, habeas corpus, the Magna Carta, all of these cornerstones of liberty which originated here. The idea we’d just become some kind of benighted authoritarian backwater if we weren’t signatories to the Convention is, I think, nonsense.
There are genuine questions to be asked, whatever people’s views on the Rwanda policy (and I have misgivings about it), given you had an elected Government trying to implement the policy and two national courts, the High Court and the Court of Appeal, who saw no reason to intervene, at this stage at least, and yet what appears to have been the on-duty judge in Strasbourg late at night deciding to block it. That raises genuine questions around sovereignty.
It’s similar to the debate on the EU. I know the ECHR has no direct connection to the bloc but I think the debate is quite similar. [Concerns were raised because] the decisions of the judges seem to be becoming more and more political… I don’t think you can have a situation where European judges can intervene on what are key planks of the policy of an elected government in this way, and I think I would be saying that whatever side of the debate I fell on in terms of the policy itself.
ML: This could be a wedge issue the Labour Party finds itself on the wrong side of. Whether the flights go ahead or not, if Labour isn’t seen to endorse some kind of border control, that’s not good for them electorally, is it?
PE: No, and the whole debate on much of the left is completely dishonest because a large part of the left actually believes in open borders – believes in letting everyone come whether they’re refugees or economic migrants. But they don’t say that openly in the debate itself because they know it wouldn’t be a very popular position throughout the mainstream. It’s a fairly dominant position in much of the left but across much of the country it’s still, I think, the minority view.
So, the debate is taking place in bad faith. What they do is criticise individual policies designed to control immigration without saying, “actually the reason we’re doing this is because we believe in open borders”. They’ll just focus on the policy itself and try and find reasons to stop it being implemented.
Much of the left presents the whole debate around border control as a debate between good and evil. If you believe in open borders and letting everybody come regardless of whether they’re refugees or not, you are on the side of the angels, and if you believe in any sort of border control, you’re on the side of the devils. What I find really interesting is how that position has become so dominant on the left over a relatively short period of time. It wasn’t that long ago that belief in control of the labour supply was the dominant position on the left. Socialists and trade unionists understood that governments needed to control the labour supply to plan around housing, welfare, employment and so on in order to ensure there wasn’t pressure on wages in particular sectors as a result of an oversupply of labour. Actually, the open borders position was a fringe position at one time which was held only by Trotskyists, anarchists and hyper-liberals. Now that’s shifted completely and anyone on the left who argues in favour of border control runs the risk of being demonised as some kind of neo-fascist, some bigot, some reactionary. Because of that, the debate has become toxic.
I think the vast majority of people in this country are pro-immigration. Most people are not on the “close the borders and stop anybody from coming” line. I think most people see the benefits that immigration can bring. All they want is proper control and for the numbers to be modest and manageable.
What we’ve had over recent years is a situation where it hasn’t been controlled and people’s faith in the system has been rocked as a result. What I say to people on the Channel crossings is that no serious country can allow a situation continually in which tens of thousands of people a year are turning up on their shores in boats undocumented. You simply cannot allow that as a country, you have to do something about it.
By all means, criticise the Rwanda policy – that’s fine. But [not] unless you can come up with a better solution, and in response to that people sometimes say “well it’s not my job, I’m not in government”, but if you don’t propose a better solution, you can’t really complain when people propose other solutions that you don’t like. So much of the debate is taking place in bad faith.
