All the parties feign concern for the working classes

Quotes and headlines from Nigel Farage, the Daily Mail, Robert Jenrick, Richard Tice and Suella Braverman in response to the UK-India trade deal announced last week. If you want to see the absurdity of current debates about immigration, and the degree of cynicism with which those who claim to support British workers approach the issue, look no further.

The government trumpeted the trade deal as a “huge economic win for Britain” aimed at “raising living standards, and putting money in people’s pockets”. Some rightwing Brexiters, such as Daniel Hannan and Steve Baker, hailed it as a vindication of the decision to leave the EU. But for Farage, Tice, Jenrick, Braverman, and many others, it was a scandalous betrayal of British workers.

The controversy arose from a reciprocal arrangement by which Indian workers, normally employed by an Indian company in India, but who may be working for that company in Britain on a short-term basis, and British workers in a similar situation in India, would not have to pay national insurance (or its Indian equivalent) twice, but only to their home country. This arrangement would not apply to most Indian migrants to this country. Nor would it lead to new mass immigration or to British workers losing jobs.

Britain already has similar reciprocal deals with about 50 countries. Indeed, all temporary workers, paying tax in their home nation, are currently exempted from NI payments for at least a year.

Nevertheless, both Conservative and Reform politicians seized on an opportunity to burnish their anti-immigration credentials, incite fears about Britain being flooded by cheap Indian labour, and be seen defending British workers. Tory leader Kemi Badenoch joined in the denunciation despite, according to Indian officials, agreeing, as trade secretary in the last Tory administration, to a similar reciprocal arrangement (she denies doing so).

There has been much debate about the failure of politicians to take seriously people’s worries about immigration. The controversy over national insurance shows how unseriously self-proclaimed critics of immigration themselves take the issue.

It revealed not a genuine concern for workers’ interests, but a cynical attempt to exploit the issue for political gain. A cynical pretence that the NI exemption applies to most, or all, immigrants from India; a disingenuous claim that it would lead to tens of thousands of Indian migrants flooding into Britain; a phoney insistence that, as a result, jobs and wages of British workers are under threat.

Working class disquiet about immigration is real. But while political parties feign concern for the working class, their policies on almost every issue other than immigration suggest a very different attitude. The Tories spent 14 years savaging trade union rights, slashing benefits and imposing austerity. Reform’s manifesto (“Our Contract with You”) wants to make it easier “to hire and fire workers”. The party is hostile to legal protections for unions and opposes restrictions on zero-hour contracts.

In less than a year in power, Labour has launched assaults on the poor, the disabled and the unemployed. To claim to be championing the working class when promoting restrictive immigration policy but at the same time demanding curbs on workers’ ability to organise or take collective action, making it easier for employers to exploit them, and denying them basic benefits is, as I suggested last year, “worse than performative”. Not least when the policy criticism is itself performative.

The cynicism of the NI debate is not just disdainful of the working class. It is also corrosive of democracy. In raising specious issues, politicians turn policy making into pantomime. “When mainstream party competition matters little for the substance of decision-making,” Peter Mair wrote in his seminal work Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy, then inevitably politics will “drift towards an emphasis on theatre and spectacle”. Published before Brexit, the election of Donald Trump and the rise of politicians such as Giorgia Meloni in Italy and Marine Le Pen in France, Mair’s book explored how the disengagement of voters from the political process, and of the political class from democratic processes, had created a political void.

The realignment of voting patterns in contemporary Britain, and the success of a party such as Reform, is rooted in the loss of trust in old political institutions and the recognition by large sections of working-class voters that their needs and aspirations have been ignored. “They have nowhere else to go,” Peter Mandelson, one of the architects of New Labour, reportedly said of traditional Labour voters as the party moved away from its working-class constituencies. It is the kind of contempt that ensured that they would find somewhere else to go. Many have given up on politics. Others have embraced parties like Reform. But if Reform is a product of the political void of which Mair wrote, it is also responsible for helping sustain it.

Reform has taken advantage of political disengagement but it is as contemptuous of the electorate, and as cynical in manipulating issues, as the parties which it is attempting to displace. Whether or not Reform’s success in the English local elections heralds a permanent political realignment, the party’s opportunism and cynicism will only deepen the void.

Photograph Taylor Weidman/Bloomberg via Getty Images