OPINION: Prime Minister’s cack-handed comments on free movement are a gift to Reform UK, writes Aaron Newbury.
Andy Burnham has just written Nigel Farage’s election strategy (Image: Getty)
One of the few true choices a Prime Minister can make without seeking the approval of other politicians is when to fight an election. What they cannot control is the precise grounds on which that contest will be fought.
This week, Andy Burnham has made the incalculably reckless error of allowing others to pick for him. In a Sunday interview, the Makerfield MP called for an “honest discussion” about returning to the EU freedom of movement scheme. Yet within 48 hours, he had to insist that such a decision would not be made without putting it to a referendum first.
Less than an hour after that, the Downing Street operation he is supposed to be leading declared he was proposing nothing at all, and was “not leaning either way”. Many will focus on that chaotic sequence of events, but there is another story hidden in the rubble left behind by the Prime Minister’s blundering.
Andy Burnham has left a strategic gift in the wreckage, and there is one man expertly placed to unwrap it.
PM: Brexit has left us in a weaker position
Immigration has dominated British politics for a decade, and the so-called “Overton window” – the range of ideas deemed publicly acceptable for debate – has shifted drastically.
Nearly seven in every 10 British voters believe it is too high. Roughly four in every 10 believe rejoining the EU would push it higher still.
These specific numbers were gathered in calmer conditions than the heat of an all-out general election, where they are perhaps likely to harden.
Into this domain, Andy Burnham has volunteered, of his own free choice, the single most combustible deal in the post-Brexit vocabulary.
Using his conference speech, his first as Labour leader, to state he could be willing to keep rejoining the EU on the table, he has in effect said he would be ready to fight an election on those terms.
Officials already speak of a range of options, from rejoining the single market to full membership, either of which would mean accepting free movement.
It is hard to overstate how welcome this will be in Reform UK headquarters. Whatever one thinks of Nigel Farage, Brexit is his native tongue.
Context & Baseline
Attitudes towards immigration in Great Britain
“Do you think the level of immigration into Britain over the last 10 years has been too high, too low, or about right?”
Expected immigration impact if Britain rejoined the EU
“If the UK were to rejoin the EU, do you think it would lead to a higher or lower level of immigration compared to recent years, or would it make no real difference?” (All Britons)
Mr Farage has spent the better part of his political journey building an identity around a single argument: that Britain is better governed from Westminster than from Brussels.
Put him in front of a camera on the subject, and he is fluent, relaxed and very much at home. It is the one debate he has rehearsed his entire adult life.
The contortions of this Prime Minister on this subject expose a deep miscalculation that could cost Mr Burnham his job. Yes, the majority of Britons do believe Brexit has not been delivered. But it cannot be said to follow that they wish for the clock to be reversed, and even less do they demand open borders.
Disappointment with how a decision was implemented is not the same as regret for the decision itself, and to treat the two as interchangeable is to misread the public.
Rejoining the European Union would not fix the NHS, nor would it unclog court waiting times or open up housing. Those salient and real failures belong to Westminster and not Brussels – and British voters know it well.
They are unlikely to tolerate the suggestion that the answer to high immigration is a system designed to allow more of it.
News that Mr Burnham may plan to hold an election on those grounds will have been welcomed at Reform HQ. Mr Farage no longer needs to invent an election strategy – Mr Burnham has kindly drafted one for him.
We now stand in a position where the next general election will be framed as a simple choice. On one side, Britain controls its own borders, outside the European Convention on Human Rights and outside Brussels’ orbit.
On the other, it edges back towards the bloc it voted to leave, free movement and all. It is not hard to guess which side the British public will nudge towards.
Mr Farage has spent a career making the case for Britain outside the EU, yet he may never have expected a prime minister to hand him the chance to make it again, at the very moment the public mood on immigration has swung his way. Andy Burnham has done exactly that.