Don’t blame Corbyn for Labours voters backing Brexit

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.