Values, Trust, Loss: The dubious case of migration and the 'progressive dilemma'
A review of the thoughts of David Goodhart on migration by Don Flynn1
David Goodhart's 'British Dream' was long in gestation, with rumours of a magnum opus in
preparation circulating soon after he entered the lists as a left-ish critic of immigration back
in the mid-noughties.
It began in 2004 when we were presented with the outline of 'the progressive dilemma'
which immigration represents for developed welfare societies in the pages of Prospect, the
current affairs magazine he had founded and edited. The fact that the liberal creed of
optimistically looking forward might have generated some problems which hadn't been
anticipated had clearly struck Goodhart like a bolt of lightning. It was after hearing a
speech by the intellectual Conservative politician David Willetts, which Goodhart has
referred to on many occasions since, that the progressive dilemma came to his attention:
once there he was riding it like the wind.
What lay at the heart of this conundrum can be briefly stated. Human societies are held
together by the values shared by those who participate in its associations and networks.
When the value of trust is strongly present then altruistic enterprises like the welfare state
can be embarked upon. Trust means that citizens can appreciate the benefits of welfare
services even when they might not be the immediate gainers. The critical element seems
to be that the welfare state is for 'people like us'. With this in place the citizen is willing to
pay tax and line up in orderly queues, consenting to forego immediate gratification in the
knowledge that those who are receiving the dole or subsidised housing, or whatever, have
in some way 'earned' the right to do so.
Immigration threatens all these relationships of trust by bringing people who are 'not like
us' onto the scene. Goodhart asks us to suspend our suspicion that we have ventured
onto the terrain of racism for just a moment – or possibly indefinitely – to dwell on the
sheer humanity of the predicament. Ordinary people who have never had much, who have
shared the little that is within their grasp when asked, are suddenly expected to be even
more generous by handing out to strangers who have just appeared on the scene, without
any assurance that they would do the same when giving was required of them. It is an
impossible ask, and the inevitable outcome is to see resentment and anger flooding across
the system, washing out the trust and fellowship that had once been present.
As the idea of this dilemma more deeply rooted itself, Goodhart found empirical evidence
for its existence in the voluminous works of the American sociologist Robert Putnam, who
had done so much to survey the changes taking place in the urban neighbourhoods of the
United States. All of this had been going on during times when ethnic diversity in American
cities seemed to be on the increase. The story went in just one direction: immigration and
its consequences in terms of greater diversity within populations were stripping out the
pro-social, trusting relationships upon which optimistic progressives depended to make
their case for compassion and welfare in our modern nations.
These are themes that our man has returned to on countless occasions over the following
years, developing with ever more confidence his conviction that the centre left needs to
assert a determination to bring immigration 'under control' in order to rescue beleaguered
1
Don Flynn is the Director of the Migrants’ Rights Network. This review was written in a personal capacity
and doesn’t necessarily represent the views of the organisation.
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British communities from its depredations. Labour, he proclaimed after the defeat in the
2010 election, must become an 'anti-immigration party'. What was alleged to be the
'default position' of liberal Britain – the interests and well-being of immigrants – needed to
be replaced by a hard-nosed assertion of the rights of those already here. This done, we
would have a fighting chance of getting back to the type of society that had built the NHS
back in earlier and happier epochs.
Since then the Goodhartian corpus has filled out to provide a vision of a new 'progressive
nationalism' which offers a re-invigorated national identity as the support for a species of
collectivism capable of supporting progress to replace the one that was lost when class
vanished from the scene. The left should stop feeling bad about being British, he tells us.
Instead it should embark on a project which would scoop up pride about nationality and
seek to fold, to the extent that it might be possible, into an embracing identify which makes
concessions to multi-ethnic realities. But there are definite limits to how far this might go
and these are likely to be defined, firstly by the volume of new arrivals at any point in
times; and secondly by their willingness to bend a knee in the direction of the aboriginal
inhabitants. Limiting the inflow of newcomers and requiring those who do come in to make
a greater effort to be British becomes the driving idea behind a thousand and one miniprojects, an awful lot of which seem to end up in the vicinity of flag-waving for British
sporting heroes.
The full-length exposition of everything Goodhartian which is 'The British Dream' rumbled
off the presses in April this year and since then has made its own significant contribution to
a somewhat more nuanced public conversation about immigration. The author has on
other occasions made the point that being 'anti-immigration' is not necessarily the same
thing as being 'anti-immigrant'. He is adamant that he is not the latter and he can
reasonably be given the benefit of any doubt him on that point. Like most London-based
journalists of a certain age Goodhart is as home on the multi-ethnic streets of the capital
city as anyone and we can be confident that many of his best friends are themselves
immigrants. But this oft-resorted to escape clause is less impressive when the loud,
hectoring message of 'anti-immigration' mobilises moods across the population which
result in harm being done to immigrant people. That is the first charge that has been
levelled against his work, and one that he has not successfully answered.
Doing harm
Goodhart does harm to immigrants by making them shoulder too vast a share of the blame
for problems which beset contemporary British society, and those who are numbered
amongst its subaltern classes in particular. The badness of the picture becomes ever more
detailed with each new report about the appearance of absolute poverty amongst the
families that are now dependent on the largess of food banks to get them through; the
decade-long stagnation of wages for one in five workers; the explosive growth of
precarious work, measured by zero-hours contracts and the churn of temporary, part-time
employment; the gross inadequacies of housing provision which is driving a growth in
homelessness in many cities; and all the inequalities that show themselves up in life
expectancy and health region by region, and life chance outcomes which more than ever,
depend on the good or lousy fortune of your birth.
For much of the past ten years, economists have poured over the statistics to see whether
migration has improved or worsened the lot of the British population. The jury came back
into the courtroom some time ago and pronounced that, on the basis of all the available
evidence, it was 'not a lot' one way or the other. Some people were better off, most just
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about the same, and a few worse off as result of the immigration that had taken place
during the high volume years of the last decade. This looks to me like an outcome typical
of just about everything that happened under the terms of the uber market-driven
capitalism which emerged across the Western world during and after the 1980s. Indeed, a
lot of policies which were pursued over these years were much more damaging but have
escaped the condemnation that has fallen on immigrants. Look at the 'right to buy' for
example, which wrecked social housing provision and produced a ratio of losers to winners
which is weighted heavily in the direction of those who have lost out. The deindustrialisation of the country is another case in point, with two-thirds of manufacturing
capacity eliminated over the past 30 years. Yes, the capital that was freed from the tedious
task of making stuff in factories was liberated and allowed to rampage across foreign
investment markets and add to the numbers of Britain's billionaire class, but the bigger
losers have been the hundreds of thousands who have lost the chance to earn decent
wages in relatively secure production line jobs.
Yet the bulk of this work was done during a decade of negative net migration, when more
people left the country than came in. The blame that can be attributed to migrants for the
hurt that was inflicted on the working class during this critical period is close to zero, but
don't expect to find anything of that sort in Goodhart's book. The critical decade of the
1980s, when so much was turned upside down in British society and the working class lost
so much of its collective grip on decent wages and secure employment, and when the
welfare state and so many public services began to be eroded by cuts and privatisation,
was also a time of negative net migration, meaning that more people were leaving the
country than coming in.
But Goodhart's dream of a newly reinvigorated progressivism needs its foundational
myths. When so much of hopes for the future are dependent on the revival of British
nationalism and British identity then anti-immigrant sentiment is a gift horse into whose
mouth you won't be keen to examine too closely. Better to saddle up and see how far it
can be ridden. The Brits have to be shown how they can feel good about themselves again
and one way to do that is to chase down the demons which supposedly deprived them of
this bit of indulgence.
At this point we get a long discussion about the misguidedness of the liberal elites who
shoved multiculturalism down the throats of the natives way back in the 'sixties and
'seventies. Goodhart develops it from an inept argument which attributes the immigration
rights made available to Commonwealth citizens under the 1948 British Nationality Act to a
mistake by the liberal elite, driven by feeling of need to expiate for the sins of empire. As
historians of the period, notably Randall Hansen have shown, the motivation had far more
to do with the realpolitik of Britain's efforts to maintain its post-war standing as a member
of the Great Power club, as the head of a political and economic bloc of 600 million
people. Liberalism was far less of a calculation than the fantasy of the country's proper
place being alongside the United States and the Soviet Union and deciding the destiny of
the world,
But the wishy-washy liberals are well and truly in the frame and Goodhart is determined
that they will accumulate a big share of the blame for all the things that were going to go
wrong in the next couple of decades. They are seen as being responsible for allowing
Commonwealth immigrants to arrive in uncontrollable numbers and thereby open the door
for the right wing reaction which Enoch Powell was eventually to lead in the late 'sixties.
But he curiously pulls his punches with regard to Powell, seeing the substance of a
genuine grievance in his complaint that too many Caribbean and Asian immigrants had
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come to the UK but meriting some criticism for the demagogic assertion of his view about
the total incompatibility of the black and white races to and their inability to share the same
space. This was unfortunate, he reasons, because it crowded out the possibility that a
moderate version of the same creed might flourish. This would be along the lines that,
although not totally incompatible it certainly did was that case that it pose immense
challenges. These could only be addressed by an absolute insistence from the onset that
blacks and Asians stop doing all the things which they had been used to in order to be less
startling to the whites.
But the liberal response was, Goodhart claims, to anathematise anything that looked like a
defence of British culture in the face of immigration and instead to insist on respect for
everyone’s right to be different. This was multiculturalism and it produced the opposite
effect to what was intended. Instead of marking out the space in which trust and mutual
respect could be built up between the ethnic groups it provided the opportunity for people
to retreat behind the walls of their differences and to become more remote from one
another. Mistrust flourished across the distances which separated these enclaves: another
example of immigrants making it worse for everyone.
This viewpoint is, unsurprisingly, deeply contested. The evidence for a Britain ghettoised
by ethnic cultural imperatives is not nearly as strong as is often claimed. The popular
literature of growing up in Britain – certainly the bits that cover the experiences of Asian
and African Caribbean people – is rather less about the desire for the comfort of one's
fellows, and more about innocent wonderment about playground and street rejections of
contact on the basis of being 'the wrong colour'. If a tendency to seek the comfort of one's
fellow ethnics emerged it was more likely driven by the petty indignities of being snubbed
or spoken down to. Okay, there was the outright racist violence too, and discrimination in
the jobs and housing markets – that probably pushed a few people back into their ethnic
redoubts.
So, Goodhart blames migrants for too much of the bad things going on in Britain today and
he misunderstands the dynamics of the period when multiculturalism was a mainstream
response to managing community cohesion. This hardly makes his work an original
contribution to the public conversation, since this is pretty well the stock in trade of every
mainstream journalist who wanders into the field. What makes him a little more out the
ordinary is the consistency of the narrative on political themes that underpins all of his
analysis of the issue. Goodhart seems to think that so much about immigration and
multiculturalism can be explained by the infinite capacity of politicians and policy makers to
make mistakes. When so much falls at the door of door of the elites in the way of error and
ineptitude then there is no real reason to look at other factors, like the state of the
economy and the new pressures being put on the post-war social model by the increased
internationalism of the movements of capital. Moreover, it is the ones at the liberal end of
the spectrum who exhibit this tendency with greater frequency than anyone else. No
Conservative, we must suppose, of a properly robust constitution would ever have fallen
into the error of thinking that we ought to be nice to migrants and considerate of their
needs and welfare. Only idealistic, humane liberals would ever have done this foolish
thing, and that goes such a long way to explaining why things have gone so badly wrong.
Second wave migration
Moving the discussion to the more recent migrations which began to pick up momentum in
the late-90s, Goodhart makes a list of all the mistakes that have been made. The primary
purpose rule, which had kept Asian families separated for close on 20 years, was
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scrapped as soon New Labour came to power in 1997. The adoption of a Human Rights
Act allowed immigration rights to be underpinned by a half-century of European
jurisprudence which, in some instances, came down on the side of the applicant and
against the national authorities. The liberalisation of work permit procedures allowed firms
to bring in larger numbers of skilled workers. Biggest of all errors, in 2004 the floodgates
were opened when the government declined to make use of its prerogative to impose
transitional controls on access to employment in the UK on the citizens of the eight central
European and Baltic states which acceded to membership of the EU in that year.
Each mistake added to the other and before long we had such an accumulation of
mistakes that four million people had entered during the years of the Labour government.
These were so much worse than the also mistakes with regard to allowing free movement
for Commonwealth citizens made after the second world war, which at least kept the level
of immigrant entry down to half of that figure. What can be done with people who make so
many mistakes?
That mistakes have been made over the years there can be no doubt. What is to be
disputed is the presumption that we need look no further than the error-proneness of inept
politicians to explain how we got to where we are today. They very frequency of the errors,
reinforced by the fact that they were not those of British politicians alone, but could be
seen equally present, though in different form, in the governance of virtually every other
nation in the western democracies over the same period. Though some nations for easily
explainable reasons – Japan the obvious case – were outliers in their ability to maintain
relatively low levels of inward migration, the mainstream story across the 1990s to the
present day has been rising patterns of immigration from one country to the next.
There is a bigger context for understanding the frequency and ubiquity of mistakes which
requires something other than the Goodhartian belief that the politicians took their eyes off
the ball for a period. As we have mentioned above, the crisis of the liberal welfare state
model, with both its economic and public service components swept up into the turmoil,
began during an era of historically low migration, back in the mid-1970s and 1980s. There
can be little doubt that confidence in the way the system operated was ebbing during these
years, but it seems feeble in the extreme to attribute this to an alleged 'erosion of trust'
between citizens. The real reasons for this predicament is surely connected to the loss of
hegemony in economic affairs by western states which first became manifest in the energy
crises provoked by the revolt of the OPEC countries in 1973. This precipitated the end of
the 'Fordian' epoch in the west, as manufacturing industry, for decades the great pull factor
for migration, began to either downsize or migrate to other low production cost regions.
The German political scientist, Claus Offe, began his analysis of the contradictions of the
modern welfare state during this period, pointed out that as the sort of medium skill, decent
wage earning jobs which had been the staple of mass employment, assembly line-based
industries dried up, so the rationale for the family welfare and education services which
had conditioned and socialised several generations of citizens into the discipline of the
mega-workplace was also eroded. If trust had ever been needed to account for the
expenditures which the welfare state of this period required it had less to do with relations
between citizens and more importantly involved what the corporations were prepared to
cough up in order to ensure that hundreds of thousands of factory ready workers were
delivered up by the state each year into acceptance of the discipline of the fast-track and
the inducements of the hour-and-a-half overtime rate. By the end of the 1970s this steady
supply of moderately-well educated workers was no longer needed in anything like the
same volume. Trust in the ability of the welfare state to produce them was not even the
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issue any longer, and the steady process of pulling up the rug had begun.
The 1980s was the decade in which workers fought for the jobs that were fast vanishing.
The parts of the welfare state that were closest to democratic accountability – namely
those bits were local government either provided the services directly (housing and
education) or were influential in the business of their delivery (health) also dug and used
the language of working class consciousness to rally their supporters. Maybe some one
has done research on this, but purely from my own recollection as a participant in some of
these battles, I can recall no one who had the temerity to question the commitment of
black and Asian people to the cause; indeed the rather loud loud voices of tens of
thousands of African Caribbean and Asian car plant workers, postal workers, NHS staff, as
well as those from the iconic sweatshop struggles at Grunwicks and other places, were
amongst the most prominent features of those times.
Goodhart tells us that ethnic diversity is sufficient grounds for accounting for lower levels of
trust between citizens. But something at least has to be said about the losses that were
suffered when workplace solidarity went the way of history and tenants were told it was no
use banding together to bring about housing improvements, because the council had been
rate-capped into impotence and the only way out the jam was to exercise your right to buy.
The national mood for gambling was hiked up as we were told that the only way to secure
ourselves against the risks of life was to take a punt on this or that dubious financial deal
or pension scheme, or follow Sid's advice to buy shares in the privatised industries. It was
a decade in which even the public house ceased to be a place for cheap, mindless
bonhomie, as the guy who sidled up on the stool besides you seem less keen to talk about
the fortunes of the local football team, and more about the opportunity he could offer to
furnish you with a new credit card or a time share in the Canaries.
Trust was in the doldrums in the 1980s, but at least we didn't have to put up with the
immigrants coming over. Every year for more than a decade people were leaving the UK in
droves and our cities hollowed out as working class communities in the innerneighbourhoods were chiselled out by gentrifiers and the wastefulness of middle class lifestyles. The old industries and a large section of the services which had been the pull
factors for migration were a pale shadow of their former selves. The lower wage, flexible
workforce businesses which would provide the new forms of employment were still in their
infancy and still had to pick their way across a decade of boom and bust before they
acquired sufficient momentum to signal a need for fresh tranches of migrant labour; but it
would come.
Trust was on its last legs by the time Tony Blair came to form his first government in May
1997. The fragmentation of British society under the hammer blows of market forces and
its emergence as a harsher and more cruelly individualistic place, had seen it off, and not
the straw man of multiculturalism. By the time Goodhart's second phase of migration had
got under way its sickly condition was so bad that almost any notable event in the life of
the nation was seen as evidence of how low we had sunk, from the petty expense account
fiddling of Members of Parliament, the moral turpitude of the national press, and even the
performances of the home national football teams. Working class community life, which
had once, if the legends are to be believed, been a constant stream of neighbours popping
in to check whether you needed anything, could now be represented as the nasty feral
thing that limped along because of its capacity to skive and game the social security
system. It was, in other words, exactly where it was supposed to be; in the ditch and
wallowing in wretchedness.
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Liberal elites
But Goodhart has another low blow to offer up as an explanation as to how things got so
bad. It comes as no surprise to find out that it was largely the fault of the immigrants and
their liberal supporters, who had decided to line up with capitalist interests in order that the
sort of low wage, poor conditions jobs which migrants relished doing could be ushered into
existence. This was another mistake apparently, because the alternative to what had come
to be called McJobs was so obviously near at hand in the form of good jobs which offered
decent wages with a nice pension at the end. How foolish of the politicians not to have
noticed! If only they had closed down the easy option of bringing in the low cost foreigners
then capital would have cottoned onto the fact that the game was up and the only way they
a profit could be made was through investment in the skills and productivity of its native
workforce.
What actually happened has less to do with bad decisions taken by a liberal political elite
that had closed its mind to better options and was more closely connected to the fit
between the economic space which firms found themselves operating on and the limited
range of business plans which had a chance of being successful in the face of such
external restraints. The collection of studies edited by Bridget Anderson and Martin Ruhs,
published as Who Needs Migrant Workers? is most informative on this point, finding that
across all the main sectors of migrant employment path dependency determined the
business options of firms operating in competitive markets in which the edge went to those
who were able to most efficiently exploit the labour resources available to them.
A more robust way of thinking about the predicament requires recognition of the fact that,
by the end of the 1990s, capitalism in the type of market economy that Britain had become
required a new working class to replace the one that had been beaten and discarded in
the 1980s. The struggle for business survival in a large number of sectors meant utilising a
'just-in-time' workforce, with contracts of employment which committed employers to
payment for that portion of labour time which was strictly associated with being on the job
during the hours when the business required it. As the busy period slackened off, so the
paid workforce contracted minute by minute with the intensity of work remained the same
for the smaller numbers who had been permitted to remain on the job. Employers were
aided in the shift to this type of human resource management both by the arrival of IT
packages that predicted the amount of labour needed across a 24 hour time cycle, and
also by the emergence of a stronger and more innovative species of business agency
which herded and corralled the available labour force and directed it towards businesses
as and when their needs arose. Through the natural selection processes that permit
survival in competitive markets, the companies which learnt the knack of managing labour
resources by these means edged out those who fell below the mark, and soon set the
standards which prevailed across entire sectors.
It is an approach to labour force management which in a very real sense makes migrants
out of everyone who is confined to making their living in those sectors. Travelling between
the several jobs which make a call on the individual's labour power becomes a feature of
life for more and more people, increasingly requiring stays beyond the family home when
this can be financed at a cost proportionate to the value produced by the worker. A larger
part of the risk of slack periods, when the demand for goods and services falls below
normal times, is shifted from the company to the workforce, whose zero-hours or other
versions of part-time contracts, allows them to be sent home without any cost to the
employer.
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Free markets create the delusion that all of this results from the exercise of individual
choice and the element of coercion is entirely absent. The sort of liberal leftist that
Goodhart is can see the flaw in that argument easily enough, though they are inclined to
believe – perhaps because a suspicion about the foreign 'values' they cling to, that it does
not apply quite so strictly to migrants. It seems that they truly are the free agents selling
the labour power which is the natural property of their physical and intellectual
musculature, 'happy' to accept the sort of jobs which others could be induced to take only
under the threat of a metaphorical lash. Once again its the migrants fault boys and girls,
and they are making it worse for all of us.
Yet the truth is that migrants (and at the danger of flattering ourselves, those committed to
supporting the rights of migrants) have a great deal more to offer in the fight against the
ever-worsening condition of life of a large swathe of the wage-earning portion of the
population than Goodhart is prepared to acknowledge. Sneered at as being the sort of
liberals who have naively aided and abetted things going to hell in a handcart, it is more
accurate to say that we have been amongst the most advanced observers of the advance
of stultifying, life-narrow necessity there is on the face of the planet. Across the globe
supporters of the rights of migrants have been there when the subsistence farmer in the
remotest regions have woken up one morning to find the use to which they put their land is
no longer the sole concern of their families, but the economic actors who lament the loss
of opportunities to more intensively farm crops that can be sold on world markets, rather
than go into the bellies of the producers. Necessity pushes the former peasant from the
land and into the city, to participate for the first time in an economy which does everything
through the medium of money, and the people who once hoed vegetables now wheel and
deal as small time traders. They learn to read markets tolerably well and anticipate
possibilities where larger gains might be made, and find they have to move once again to
get to the places of advantage. Cravings for security prompt some to invest in their skills in
the hope that it will make them a more attractive proposition for a proper contract. More
skills mean more options and casting eyes to the wider horizon to see what might be got
from over there, and bags are packed once again.
Through these means capitalism creates the proletariat it needs for its contemporary age,
conditioned and disciplined into playing its role in supporting the accumulation of the
circulating medium. No criticism can be levelled at the migrant for being there and doing
thus in the service of capital – if we are not in open revolt against the system then we are
each of us serving it in our own particular way. It is exactly the same journey which wageearners in the economically advanced countries are on, as they have to adjust to the
increased demands for flexibility and the assumption of a greater share of the risk which
arises from the operation of competitive markets. The fact that they are learning to live like
this alongside migrant workers, who have been doing this sort of stuff for years, means
nothing. They are neither worse nor better off from the simple fact that there are a lot more
foreign languages spoken in their workplaces than ever before.
Goodhart thinks they are worse off, perhaps not material terms, but because the presence
of immigrants seems to have deterred the emergence of the relatively benign modern
nationalism which he thinks is needed to sustain a welfare state. We learn more about this
in the final chapter of his book when the fabric of his British dream takes its fullest shape in
the form of a Britain ten years into the future, after Labour won the 2015 general election,
brought the stop to immigration that he is demanding, and opened up the space for the
public services which had been jeopardised by the loss of trust to come back on the
scene. A measure of this seems to be that the political elites fill out at the top with the sort
of ethnic minority people who Goodhart obviously approves, the ones who have accepted
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the need to make their lives on the terms offered by his version of stern liberalism, and
have been allowed by the rest of us to start calling the shots without demur. One burns
with the need to ask exactly how this state of affairs has stabilised the ship and got it back
onto course it had been set for in the 1950s, before the immigrants came along and
wrecked things. This feeble account of a Britain effectively mended by the magic bullet of
cutting back on newcomers and fast-tracking the sons and daughters of the ones judged to
be ‘good’ certainly seems to ignore the facts of more deeply-entrenched factors of
economic decline. But maybe we can take it on trust that once the liberals have got their
act together then all this bad stuff will vanish like a puff of smoke?
It might be very liberal of us to spoil this idyll by suggesting that the ditch we are in is
deeper and murkier than that. The solutions needed to get us out of it require more than
the country’s liberal elites recovering their capacity for sensible judgement. If Goodhart’s
yardstick for our current predicament is the plight of the wage-earning people of Britain the
why don’t we take a longer and more forensic look at what will be required to turn the tide
back in their favour in the future? It is worth asking whether the common experience of
exploitation, felt both by migrants and native workers, might once again be the grounds for
the growth of solidarity between them. Have the things we have each learnt about the
world put is in a better position to influence and control the forward rush of events, rather
than be its eternal victims? Can we finally get to that point where solidarity and knowledge
have furnished us with the means to cease being the servants of capital, and become
instead the builders of a new civilisation and society?
If the answer to any of these questions is ever to be yes, maybe we'll finally have good
cause to blame the immigrants.
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