A few years ago, it would have been unthinkable for a Labour frontbencher to use a statement about the kind of unrest seen in Dover and Portsmouth over the weekend to talk about the ‘valid concerns’ that people have about immigration. That the Policing Minister Sarah Jones did that today shows how far the debate has moved: Labour knows that it cannot lump everyone who is angry about the scale of illegal immigration into the same ‘racist’ bucket. She made clear in the first few minutes of her statement to MPs this afternoon that ‘there can be no excuse for threatening behaviour or serious disruption’, and that ‘this government condemns the intimidating and thuggish behaviour shown by some of the protesters this weekend’. But she then moved to say:
None of that is in any way to minimise the very valid concerns of law-abiding people when they see vile criminal gangs exploiting our nation’s generosity, and people making illegal and unnecessary journeys to reach this country.
She added: ‘The frustration we see in our communities today is a product of chaos and crisis in the years that preceded the general election of 2024’. Only when describing one of the groups that organised one of the protests did she use the word ‘racist’, saying that ‘one was clearly organised by a group called the South East Patriots, which I think is part of Patriot Platform, which is a kind of far-right, racist platform’. She then told Portsmouth MP Amanda Martin that she was ‘absolutely right that there were people who were concerned about what they are seeing, but they are very different from the kind of racist, far-right thugs that we also saw over the weekend.’
Jones knows that both her party and the Conservatives are fighting not one another on this, but Reform. The Tories are trying to shrug off the legacy of the Boris-wave, which arguably has left a much deeper scar on the party than the Liz Truss mini-Budget that Labour likes to talk about so much. Labour has only recently managed to find a way of talking about immigration at all, and that is largely because it knows it has to, rather than because it wants to. Neither party, though, has managed to stop the boats or smash the gangs, or live up to any slogan that its leaders have produced over the past decade. And that’s why Jones had to say in response to Reform’s Suella Braverman that ‘of course people are scared and angry about the fact that, as they see it, the borders are not secure’.
She tried once again to point to Braverman’s own time in office as a Conservative as the source of that failed security. She was later accused by SNP MP Pete Wishart of ‘pandering’ to a ‘right wing agenda’, which she denied. But she and her party are having to respond to a much wider reaction in the public that means she cannot talk about these protests in isolation: she has to acknowledge that while there are far-right groups among the protestors, there are many, many more voters who are still highly agitated about the inability to secure the UK border.
