Labour facing 'bloodbath' at 2020 election over immigration policy, says donor
Labour is facing a "bloodbath" at the 2020 general election unless it
adopts immigration policies more in tune with its traditional working-class
support in the North and the Midlands, a major party donor has
warned.
John Mills, who chaired the Labour Leave campaign in the EU referendum,
warned that the party's splits over immigration and Europe threaten to create a
"huge inbuilt majority" for a Conservative government in the years to
come.
Mr Mills said he feared figures such as leader Jeremy Corbyn and shadow
home secretary Diane Abbott were too personally wedded to "ideological purity"
on freedom of movement to respond to voters' desire for greater
controls.
Mr Corbyn himself was among a group of "idealists who aren't that
bothered about winning elections but are worried about the purity of the Labour
Party and its integrity", he said.
The party may have to wait for a new generation of more pragmatic leaders
- such as Sir Keir Starmer, Clive Lewis or Dan Jarvis - to be ready to make the
kind of compromises needed to build the kind of coalition which could bring
Labour back to power, Mr Mills suggested.
In the short term, it risks being squeezed at the 2020 election by Ukip
taking anti-immigrant votes and Liberal Democrats luring its europhile
metropolitan supporters, he said.
Meanwhile, Labour MPs trying to avoid deselection are coming under
pressure to adopt the pro-immigrant stance preferred by activists, even while
voters are "swinging in the other direction", he added.
"The danger is that the onslaught from all these various factors is so
great that there will be a real bloodbath in 2020 from which the Labour Party
will struggle to recover," said Mr Mills.
"Whether it will be possible to get the show on the road to a sufficient
extent to avoid bloodbath in 2020 remains to be seen."
Home shopping tycoon Mr Mills - who gave shares in his JML company to
Labour - told reporters he believed most of the support for immigration control
was driven not by racism or bigotry, but by concerns over competition for
low-paid jobs and pressure on public services.
Many of Labour's working-class supporters would back a work permit system
which allowed highly trained professionals such as doctors and scientists to
continue to come to the UK, but cut back on unskilled migration from eastern
Europe, he suggested.
Prominent Labour backbenchers such as Rachel Reeves and Jonathan Reynolds
had responded to the public mood, he said.
But he added: "People like Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott come from a
very ideologically fixed firmament and have had some difficulty in adjusting to
where the political realities are.
"I think their judgment is they would rather stick to some measure of
ideological purity rather than compromise by swaying with the
wind.
"You may say that doesn't work very well electorally, and I think you are
very probably right, but I think that's where they come
from."
Mr Mills warned that polls suggest Labour could "haemorrhage" voters who
supported it in 2015 but backed Leave in the referendum - half of whom say they
will not vote Labour again.
Some 70% of Labour-held seats - and 90% outside London and other
metropolitan areas - had majorities for Leave at the referendum, he pointed
out.
"This is such an electoral imperative that it is very difficult for
people in the Labour Party to just push it to one side," said Mr
Mills.
"There's a huge divide between the nativist approach of large numbers of
Labour's working-class supporters and the more idealistic approach of their
metropolitan voters." Huff
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