“Britain has always been hostile to migrants,” says Margaret Hodge. “Always.” Our interview was meant to start with an exploration of why, after 30 years in the House of Commons, her time as the MP for Barking in east London is now coming to an end. Instead, before my voice recorder has even been switched on, she starts to animatedly recall the start of her life in the UK – as a newly arrived six-year-old, born in Egypt – and the resonances it has with the government’s current crackdown on people trying to come here from abroad.
“I came here stateless,” she says. “I didn’t have a passport.”
Hodge’s maiden name is Oppenheimer; she is one of five siblings. Her father – who was Jewish, and an atheist – had relocated from Germany to Cairo in the 1920s, where he had met her Austrian-born mother. The Nazis revoked their passports; both their families lost people in the Holocaust. And in 1948, the foundation of the state of Israel exposed them to another kind of hostility: a stone was thrown through the window of her dad’s steel business, and he soon decided it was time to get out.
“He tried to get us into America and they wouldn’t have us. He tried to get us into Australia and they wouldn’t have us. The same with Canada. But the Brits took us,” she says.
They landed in RAF Northolt on the outer edge of west London, and then found themselves in a B&B. Eventually, their new home in Orpington, Kent, was visited by an immigration inspector, who doggedly quizzed her and her younger sister. “He had a black suit on, and we had cucumber sandwiches and fruitcake. And he interrogated us about how English we were.”
She lets out a peal of laughter at how grimly absurd it all was. “He was there for a bloody hour – with a six-year-old and a nine-year-old. He asked us who our friends were, what books we read, what games we played. And we got through.”
All this, she says, defines how she feels about what currently passes for the national conversation about immigration, and some of the people who have made the loudest noise on the subject. “I can’t bear it,” she says. “And I tell you what I really can’t bear – it’s [the former Conservative home secretaries] Priti Patel and Suella Braverman. I’m an immigrant. They’re second generation. And I can’t bear it that they pull up the ladder behind them.”
We soon get to the main reason I have come to her Westminster office: her departure from the Commons. “I’ve done 50 years in politics,” she says. “It’s a long time.”
We talk for nearly two hours. On the table in front of her is a boxed aubergine salad that remains largely untouched, seemingly because she has so much to say. She admits to mistakes and regrets, but there is a constant sense of someone with not only energy and enthusiasm that belie her 79 years, but staunch self-confidence and a tendency to be bracingly outspoken – one of the reasons, she suspects, she never made it into the cabinet.
After a decade as the leader of Labour-run Islington council – more of which in a moment – Hodge was elected as a Labour MP in April 1994, six weeks before Tony Blair became party leader (her Tory opponent in that year’s Barking byelection was an aspiring politician called Theresa May, who got a desultory 1,976 votes to Hodge’s 13,700). Her family and the Blairs lived on the same street. Though she had acquired a reputation for being on Labour’s left, she says she shared his belief that “social justice and economic prosperity are two sides of the same coin”, and was a convinced supporter of the New Labour project. “I was never a one-more-heave person, à la John Smith. I always thought we needed a far more radical reappraisal of who we were and what we were about.”
Once Labour was elected, she began her journey through no fewer than six ministerial posts. She first served as the parliamentary undersecretary of state for disabled people, followed by two years as the universities minister – when she oversaw the first moves from publicly funded higher education to the current system of loans and fees, abolishing maintenance grants and introducing annual student payments of just over £1,000.
That figure, of course, has since ballooned to £9,000, and plenty of UK universities are in a state of deep financial crisis. In retrospect, she says, the government should have bowed to the-then chancellor Gordon Brown’s belief in a graduate tax, but she stands by the basic thinking of moving paying for degrees away from the public purse. “I was absolutely passionate about early years, because that’s where you can make a real difference and equalise life chances. Most of the people who get higher education – and it’s still true – are the top three socioeconomic groups. So it was a subsidy to the middle classes. And I would say that today.”
She voted for the UK’s role in the invasion of Iraq – but eventually identified it as Blair’s “big mistake in foreign affairs” and an example of “moral imperialism”. Shortly after the invasion came what she now acknowledges was the lowest point of her career in politics.
In June 2003, she was made children’s minister – which returned people’s attention to a story that predated her arrival in Westminster. Just before she stood down as the leader of Islington council, the Evening Standard had broken the story of a scandal in the borough’s children’s homes. It revealed horrifying sexual abuse of vulnerable children and young people – and how it was being ignored by those in charge of their care. The clash between what had happened and Hodge’s new job meant she faced loud calls to return to the backbenches, to the point that she drafted a letter of resignation, only to receive a call from Downing Street, saying: “Tony doesn’t want you to do that.”
Hodge says that when the story broke, while she was still the council’s leader, she “didn’t try to escape it”. She called the police and held meetings with the director of social services and the director of children’s services. “We went through allegation after allegation. They all said: ‘There’s no truth in any of them.’ And I said: ‘Are you sure? Are you sure?’”
She says they told her two things: that the children and young people who said they had been abused were just “naughty kids”, and that they had been bribed by journalists from the Standard. Neither was true. “I believed them,” she says. “And what I didn’t do, which I should have done, was talk to the kids. It followed me for a long time.”
In November 2003, I remind her, she wrote to the BBC chairman trying to stop a new investigation into the scandal by the Today programme, and claiming that Demetrious Panton, an abuse victim who said he had tried to tell her about his experiences, was “an extremely disturbed person” (he took legal action; she apologised and made a £10,000 donation to charity). How does she feel about what she said now?
“Terrible. I was advised to do that, and that was a shitty bit of advice.” Who advised her to do it? “I’m not going to tell you. I haven’t taken advice from them since.”
As children’s minister, she was also at the heart of the Sure Start programme – which aimed to begin addressing issues of inequality by focusing on children and their families’ lives in the preschool years. “It was so uplifting,” she says. “We had money. It was just brilliant. There were favourite places I used to go to, which were just out of this world with what they were doing with the kids.”
How did it feel watching it being dismantled by David Cameron and George Osborne? “Awful. And then you think: ‘What did we do wrong?’ Maybe we should have focused it on areas of greatest deprivation. We were still developing it when the election came.”
That election was held in 2010 – and for her, it was notable for two key reasons: the arrival in power of the Tory-Lib Dem coalition government, and the arrival of the neo-fascist BNP in her constituency. Buoyed up by winning 12 seats on Barking council in the local elections, the BNP’s leader, Nick Griffin, then ran against Hodge for parliament, which triggered an experience made all the more arduous by the fact that her husband was dying of leukaemia.
Though she stuck to her belief that immigration is an inbuilt aspect of the modern world, some of the tactics Hodge used against Griffin drew criticism from her colleagues. When she suggested that housing allocations should be tilted in favour of people with local roots, one cabinet minister, Alan Johnson, accused her of using “the language of the BNP”. But she and a rejuvenated local Labour machine (“You’ve got to connect to your voters and build trust – it’s not rocket science”) saw Griffin and his party off.
With Labour in opposition, she started a new parliamentary job, as the chair of the House of Commons public accounts committee, the body of MPs that oversees public spending and other aspects of the government’s financial activities. Over the four years in the role, she had one favourite line of inquiry: tax, and how little big corporations were paying.
Hodge and her New Labour comrades had believed in a mixture of economic success and social justice. In this area, the latter had long overshadowed the former. She and the committee doggedly quizzed executives from Google, Amazon and Starbucks. “It was completely new to me,” she says. “It was [the Tory MP] David Davis who said to me: ‘You’ve got to look at Vodafone’s tax affairs.’ And I thought: ‘What the hell is he talking about?’ Now I do understand it. But in those early days, one of the people who worked for me had to draw me pictures so that I could understand how the hell all this money was flowing around.”
All that said, she often exaggerated her sense of righteous bafflement. “I did use theatre. Of course I used theatre. Because if you’re talking about complex and important issues, you want to connect.” She affects a puzzled expression and emits a laugh. “‘I don’t understand – can you explain that to me?’ That was the sort of thing I’d say.
“Sometimes I used to feel I was more effective changing the world in that role than when I was a minister,” she says. “I think we took tax out of the professionals’ bubble and into the public domain. When I started, I think it was cool to avoid tax. And I think that changed.”
Hodge’s role as chair of the committee came to an end in March 2015, a few months before Jeremy Corbyn became Labour leader. She knew him from Islington’s Labour party: “Our politics were never the same, but we were perfectly civil: we’d sit and talk about Arsenal.” Then things started to darken. “My Jewish identity had never been part of my political identity,” she says. “Ever. I’m secular; I’m an atheist. Then, in about 2016, I just started getting absolute shite on my social media: antisemitic shite. I thought, what’s happening here? Ken Livingstone was the baddie at that point.” This is when he was talking about Hitler supposedly being a Zionist? “Yeah. And then all this stuff came out about Corbyn, which is why I changed my view about him.”
In July 2018, after a run of controversy that had begun with the discovery that he had supported the creator of an antisemitic mural, Labour refused to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s full definition of antisemitism. Hodge confronted Corbyn about it: what she said famously concluded with the accusation that he was “an antisemite and a racist”.
“What made him think that he was the guy who could come up with better words?” she says. “I was tired, and we were there voting endlessly on Brexit, and I was furious.” She was soon threatened with disciplinary action by her party, but this idea was quickly dropped. “There was me: an immigrant,” she says. “I’d had to fight racism. And when it was personal, it became even bigger.” She has since said that Corbyn “succeeded in turning me into a Jew”.
“As part of all that campaigning,” she says, “I now get asked to go to synagogues to speak. The first synagogue I went to – and this is quite weird – it reminded me of my dad. It felt comfortable.”
So we return to where we started: her origins as an outsider. The governments led by Blair and Brown, she insists, managed to turn round the Thatcherite idea that there was no such thing as society, but toxic ideas about immigration were left to fester. “Being an immigrant put me in the Labour party, it made me anti-racist, it’s driven my politics,” she says. “But the one thing I really regret … well, I think politicians have a voice, and we need to use our voice to tackle tricky issues.
“Immigration is simply a feature of today’s global world, for all sorts of reasons,” she says. “I still think somebody in politics has got to grasp that. Because the reality is – well, our birthrate is 1.6. We’re an ageing society. And there’s conflict around the world, and people will want to escape it. Like I did.”
