When MPs oppose what voters want, only one side will win

Andy Burnham’s speech in Manchester this morning was impressive, despite raising a number of unanswered questions. I wrote about it here for The Telegraph.

Our presumptive prime minister, naturally enough, wants to have a controversy-free three-week period between now and his triumphant entry into Downing Street on July 20. Which is why, in today’s speech, he avoided two reasonably high-profile issues that will demand his attention as soon as he walks across the threshold of that famous building.

The first and most obvious one is immigration. It’s a bit odd that Andy thinks he can avoid this one, because it is, in some ways, the reason he is where he is. He was chosen (perhaps “chosen” is the wrong word; “emerged” might be better) as Labour’s new leader because he is seen as having the best chance of defeating the Reform challenge. And Nigel Farage’s party has been leading the polls for more than a year specifically because of voters’ unhappiness with mass immigration.

But Andy avoided talking about that today because he knows that his primary audience, Labour MPs, who could yet choose to nominate a candidate to stand against him when nominations open the week after next (even though they won’t), would prefer to talk about almost anything else. Most Labour MPs have no problem with nearly a million new arrivals heading to the UK every year; if anything, they view pre-1997 levels of net immigration, which was about 45,000 a year, as immoral or even racist.

Yet Andy, being human and realistic and having just finished a gruelling month-long by-election campaign will be in no doubt about how voters, especially working class voters of the kind Labour used to represent, feel about mass immigration and the impact it has on their communities. And it is not positive.