It is a fact curiously overlooked by many Conservatives today that Margaret Thatcher did more than almost any European leader to embed the free movement of people across the continent.
In 1988 she told British business to seize the opportunity of a Single Market with ‘direct and unhindered access’ to more than 300 million consumers – underpinned by the four freedoms of goods, services, capital and people. To Mrs Thatcher, and to Lord Cockfield, its great architect, the project was a machine for competition, growth and enterprise.
That view was not shared by much of the old Labour movement. For many trade unionists, the Common Market looked like a bosses’ project: a way of exposing British workers to the relentless march of multinational capital.
On factory floors, the EEC was dismissed as a ‘rich man’s club’. Frances O’Grady later recalled that her father, a Cowley shop steward, carried a sticker with that slogan on his moped because he did not believe what was good for business automatically trickled down to workers. Dennis Skinner concluded that the market was ‘deliberately designed… to transfer cheap labour across national borders.’
The pivot came in 1988, when Jacques Delors told the TUC that ‘no one ever fell in love with a market.’ His offer was twofold: accept the market, and Europe would wrap it in a social settlement of workers’ rights, public services and collective bargaining.
But by the time of the 2016 referendum, the polarity had flipped once again, giving last week’s announcement by Reform a peculiar echo.
Robert Jenrick’s proposal contained themes familiar to what has been termed the ‘Lexit’ tradition: British workers first, migrant workers second; employers forced to pay more if they default to imported labour; a state willing to distinguish between the interests of its citizens and the interests of big business.
This follows a striking shift in union politics. A recent JL Partners poll found Reform and Labour tied among trade union members, with the insurgent party ahead among Unite and GMB members. Nigel Farage has invited unions to break with Labour, while Reform has made advances with industrial workers through attacks on net zero and promises of redress for steelworkers.
Reform’s pitch is simple enough: cut employer National Insurance for British workers, keep it at the current rate for foreign workers, and replace the Immigration Skills Charge with an annual levy on firms employing migrant labour.
But its significance lies in the true target, a model Whitehall has relied on for years to mask much deeper problems in the labour market.
Migration has become a kind of economic methadone, dulling the symptoms of low productivity, weak training and rising worklessness, while allowing ministers to avoid withdrawal. More working-age adults have been assumed to mean higher headline GDP and therefore, in the short term, more fiscal ‘headroom’. In government I saw how OBR assumptions about migration could move the borrowing picture while doing little to capture the enormous longer-term costs.
The addiction has taken a profound toll: downward pressure on wages, higher rents, billions in new welfare liabilities and a state less willing to ask why its own citizens are parked on the margins. The habit reached its peak in 2023 as the free movement of Europe, rejected so emphatically by voters, was replaced by the free movement of the world as part of a euphoric liberal dream of ‘Global Britain’ – egged on, according to Boris Johnson, by a Treasury explicitly seeking to hold down pay.
Reform now argues these are all symptoms of the same broken model, and that you cannot fix one without sorting out the others.
The timing is important. Britain now has more than one million young people aged under 25 not in education, employment or training. Alan Milburn’s review has warned of a generation at risk of being lost to work altogether. Meanwhile analysis by the Centre for Social Justice reveals that while the young non-EU workforce rose by around 290,000 since 2020, young UK nationals on payrolls rose by just 11,000 amid soaring youth inactivity.
Andy Burnham’s victory in Makerfield will be picked over for what it says about a future contest between the two parties in Labour’s old heartlands. But the deeper question remains unresolved. Must Britain keep importing labour for jobs that, in a healthier economy, would be filled by young Britons being trained, supported and expected to work?
The obvious objections will come. Employers will warn that prices will rise to pay higher wages. This is quite possible. Every addiction has withdrawal symptoms. Many people on benefits are a long way from work. Some will never work again; others need help with skills, confidence, transport and childcare. But this strengthens the case for joining the policies together. If firms lean on the visa system because it is easier than investing in local workers or productivity, the incentives – from tax to welfare to wages – must change.
Finally, this is where Reform’s constitutional agenda becomes more critical. National preference in the labour market cannot be delivered while ministers are straitjacketed, legally and bureaucratically, from putting British workers first. The Human Rights Act and Equality Act are part of the machinery that determines what, and whom, the state is allowed to prefer.
It has been a long time since the Labour left argued against the free movement of people, and almost 20 years since Gordon Brown’s doomed attempt to revive ‘British jobs for British workers’. Farage’s bet is that this message is as compelling to millions of voters as it has always been.
Even as the King of the North takes one step closer to No. 10, the revival of old arguments in new colours suggests that the next chapter in this debate is only just getting started.
