Elections come with their own logic, a sort of sports analysis. It’s a time that doesn’t naturally lend itself to discussing events or agendas in terms of whether things are correct or decent, but whether they are tactically useful. When the election is between a Labour party trying to unseat a Conservative one after what it considers to be its own failed leftwing experiment, that tendency to strip politics of all values, reduce it to gamesmanship and purge the sources of previous defeat becomes even more pronounced. The result is that by hewing as close as possible to established economic and cultural norms as set by the Tories in order to win back voters, Labour disfranchises others and makes a calculation that they don’t matter.
How else should you view Labour’s pronouncements on migration? “Read my lips – I will bring immigration numbers down,” Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, told the Sun on Sunday. We won’t rule out sending asylum seekers abroad to have their claims processed, Yvette Cooper told the BBC: “We look at what works.”
