Jeremy Corbyn’s position is clearly untenable, though one wonders if it was any business of David Cameron at Prime Minister’s Questions yesterday to advise him in rather brutal terms to resign.
If a leader has lost the confidence of 80 per cent of his parliamentary colleagues, it is surely obvious that he must stand aside. Corbyn may still enjoy the support of most activists, but a party which can’t function in Parliament is scarcely a party at all.
Yet it nonetheless seems to me that the central accusation against the Labour leader is utterly misguided. The charge is that it was his lukewarm support for Remain which contributed to so many Labour voters backing Leave.
There is absolutely no evidence that this was the case. On the contrary, I believe that even if Jeremy Corbyn had campaigned enthusiastically for Remain, millions of Labour voters in the North, the Midlands and South Wales would have ignored him and still voted to leave the EU.
The reason they did so is that they feel let down by successive governments which have allowed mass immigration to run out of control, with consequent pressure on public services such as schools and hospitals, a downward effect on wages and, in some cases, the transformation of communities.
No doubt these Labour voters partly blame David Cameron, who has completely failed to make good his pledge to reduce immigration to the ‘tens of thousands’ (and, according to his former adviser Steve Hilton, was told by senior civil servants in 2012 that this was impossible as long as there was free movement of labour within the EU).
But these understandably disgruntled people above all hold responsible the party they vote for, if they vote: Labour. It was Labour — or, more precisely, New Labour — which deliberately opened the floodgates to mass migration and turned a deaf ear when its own supporters began to complain.
This is one of the most disgraceful political betrayals of modern times. A metropolitan political elite based in a booming London and the South-East displayed Olympian indifference to the poorer remainder of the country where most of their supporters lived.
According to Andrew Neather, a former adviser to Tony Blair and Jack Straw, New Labour threw open Britain’s borders to mass immigration to help socially engineer ‘a truly multicultural country’. The plan was to encourage immigrants to come here, as they were considered likely to vote Labour.
Of course, one should never underestimate the part that incompetence plays. When Poland and other East European countries joined the EU in 2004, the Labour government might genuinely have believed an academic report which forecast that the level of immigration to the UK would increase by between 5,000 and 13,000 a year.
Under EU rules, the Government could have limited Eastern European immigration for seven years but didn’t bother to. Within five years, more than a million East Europeans had arrived in this country, an annual average of 200,000.
Journalists who pointed out the effects that uncontrolled immigration was having on some communities were liable to be dismissed as racist. So were Labour voters. In 2010, Gordon Brown called Labour voter Gillian Duffy, who had expressed some perfectly reasonable anxieties about immigration, ‘bigoted’, unaware that a microphone had not been turned off.
It is true that throughout this period, Jeremy Corbyn and his hard-Left ally John McDonnell didn’t raise a squeak of protest. They were in favour of mass immigration and apparently still are. But they were obscure, unregarded backbench MPs.
The true villains of the piece are Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson. They both held staunchly Labour seats in the North-East — Blair in Sedgefield and Mandelson in nearby Hartlepool. Did two politicians ever show less concern for the welfare of their constituents?
Last Thursday the North-East, outside the university cities of Newcastle and Durham, voted by more than two to one in favour of Leave. In Hartlepool the vote was 70 per cent in favour.
Sedgefield’s results were lumped in with those of neighbouring towns, but it is a reasonable assumption that the proportions were similar to Hartlepool’s.
As it happens, the percentage of immigrants in both places is below the national average, presumably because they are so economically depressed that most immigrants don’t want to go there. Nevertheless, in two articles I have read, local people cited immigration as their main reason for voting Leave.
These once proud industrial areas, and many like them, were allowed to wither during the New Labour years as London and the South-East grew fat on City money until the bubble burst.
Blair and Mandelson have long been dazzled by riches, and drawn to unsavoury billionaires as flies to a dung-heap. For example, Mandelson, who as far back as 1998 said he was ‘intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich, so long as they pay their taxes’, befriended an aluminium magnate called Oleg Deripaska.
In 2008 he spent time on the Russian oligarch’s yacht while he was an EU Commissioner, not long after he had been partly responsible for a reduction of EU tariffs on aluminium, a development that had benefited Deripaska.
As for Blair, the list of bizarre billionaires he has befriended in his pathological pursuit of enormous wealth is endless.
He is estimated to have pocketed up to £20million by providing advice for just one man — the president of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, one of the nastiest tyrants on God’s earth.
How far are the lives of these two mercenary founders of New Labour from the experience of the working-class people whom they were supposed to serve, and whose interests they have so lamentably betrayed!
The third member of the founding trio, Alastair Campbell, though a relative minnow in the greed stakes, has done lucrative PR work for Nursultan Nazarbayev. I wonder what they make of that up in Burnley, whose football team he is so loud in supporting, and where residents voted by a 33 per cent majority to Leave.
Is it any surprise that millions of Labour voters should have expressly disobeyed the instruction to vote Remain which the successors to Blair and Mandelson, as usual taking their support for granted, issued? It would have made no difference if Jeremy Corbyn had inveighed against the EU.
With depressing predictability, Blair and Mandelson are plotting behind the scenes to call a second referendum, thereby exhibiting the same contempt for the opinions of these Labour supporters that they showed when they were in office.
To judge by his comments in Brussels on Tuesday evening, David Cameron has belatedly understood the importance of immigration in the referendum. If only he had grasped it before, he would not have accepted the paltry deal the EU offered him on free movement of labour — and might have saved his skin.
For its part, whether the Labour Party has at last woken up to the alienation felt by its traditional supporters remains to be seen. It is also impossible to say how many of these disaffected voters will return to the fold at the next election.
What is irrefutable is that without them we would not have regained our independence.
They have been endlessly tolerant. They are, I believe, the least racist people in the world, and probably the most patriotic. Last Thursday, they finally spoke.
