Appeasing hard-right just repeats mistakes of Labour's plan to 'kill SNP stone dead'

Before the creation of the Scottish Parliament, Labour politician George Robertson claimed devolution would "kill the SNP stone dead". Robertson is clearly not stupid, having served as UK Defence Secretary and then Nato Secretary-General.

However, his prediction turned out to be as flawed as the suggestion by the respected political scientist Francis Fukuyama in 1992 that the triumph of liberal democracy over communism represented the “end of history”. The collapse of Russian democracy, the rise of authoritarian states and the growing global cult of populism shows how many people want human history to continue in all its inglorious chaos. Peace, prosperity and stability just aren’t that interesting.

Robertson’s argument made considerable sense at the time. In the 1992 election, the SNP got nearly 630,000 votes and many more wanted a Scottish Parliament. Devolution would meet the nationalists halfway, placating them, and satisfy most of the rest.

Scotland would have control of its own affairs while enjoying generous funding from Westminster. Why would anyone want to disrupt such a beneficial arrangement? The astonishing 2015 general election result, when the SNP won 56 out of 59 seats and 1,454,436 votes demonstrated how many wanted to.

However, looked at another way, devolution makes a lot less sense as the Union’s saviour. Hundreds of thousands of people want independence? Let’s give them their own parliament, that’ll put an end to ideas of national identity...

Devolution was and remains a good idea, overall. However, it provides a case study in how to, or how not to, influence people’s thinking that is relevant to other current issues, particularly immigration and the rise of the hard/far right. (For the avoidance of doubt, I am not comparing the social-democratic SNP to the hard-right).

Echoing David Cameron

According to Reform UK, we voted in the “immigration election” on July 4 and its leader, Nigel Farage, has talked about achieving “net-zero” immigration. Mainstream politicians don’t tend to go that far, but UK Conservative leadership contenders have suggested reducing it to tens of thousands or less in an echo of David Cameron’s rhetoric as Prime Minister. Keir Starmer said ahead of the election that "with Labour, Britain will be less reliant on migration by training more UK workers”. And, writing in the Sunday Times, former Labour PM Tony Blair argued that “we need a plan to control immigration” adding “if we don't have rules, we get prejudices”. He even called for the introduction of ID cards “so that we know precisely who has a right to be here”.

However, there is a problem with all this: almost without noticing, the UK has become an immigration nation, a country that depends on large numbers of people from overseas coming to work here. In 2004, 2.6 million people who were born abroad had jobs in the UK, 9 per cent of the workforce. Earlier this year, that number was 6.8 million, or 21 per cent of the workforce. If you are retired, more than a fifth of the people who fund your state pension were born abroad.

And, according to the Office for National Statistics, seasonally adjusted UK unemployment was 4.4 per cent between March and May. So, while there are some, there aren’t vast numbers of people looking for work who could be trained to take the jobs that migrants are currently filling.

Tories campaigned against own policy

Clearly, an increasing population brings some problems: practical issues like ensuring there are enough houses, schools and public service capacity. However, it also has benefits, chief among them a growing economy. Anger about immigration, particularly as expressed by those on the extreme right, is likely based less on practical issues and more on what might be described as ‘cultural’ ones.

In government, the Conservatives fell into a trap: talking tough about immigration while sensibly allowing in migrant workers to meet the needs of business. They were essentially campaigning against their own policy. The unsurprising result was that their vote collapsed and more than four million people backed Reform. Labour risks a similar fate.

Devolution was supposed to placate Scottish nationalism. Instead, it only encouraged it. Talking tough on immigration is meant to alleviate, or appease, anti-immigration sentiments. Instead, by shifting the ‘Overton window’, the spectrum of acceptable opinions, and fostering antipathy towards migrant workers, it is encouraging them. And this has helped to make the hard-right a serious force in British politics.

‘The song of freedom’

Perhaps politicians think they have no other option, but they do. Ronald Reagan, speaking at a Republican campaign rally in San Diego in 1988, shortly before standing down as US President, spoke in glowing terms of America’s openness to foreigners – as a home for Cuban refugees escaping Castro’s regime and immigrants from all over the world.

“How sacred is our trust, we to whom God has given the custody of the name and the song of freedom. America represents something universal in the human spirit,” he said. “I received a letter not long ago from a man who said: ‘You can go to Japan to live, but you cannot become Japanese. You can go to France, and you'd live and not become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey, and you won't become a German or a Turk.’ But then he added: ‘Anybody from any corner of the world can come to America to live and become an American.’”

The UK may never embrace this as a national credo, but liberal Britain faces a choice: start making the case for immigration – explaining why it is necessary and desirable – or end up eventually with a far-right government that deliberately chokes off the supply of a fifth of our workforce, committing an act of national self-harm that makes Brexit look like the merest scratch, and responds to the resulting economic crisis in the only way such politicians know: by scapegoating outsiders.