Gasps of faux shock greeted the parts of Jeremy Corbyn’s speech that dealt with immigration at his party’s conference last week. It shouldn’t have. In breaking with the anti-immigrant consensus he outlined an approach that will help draw much of the toxicity out of the public debate.
Jeremy Corbyn’s speech to the Labour conference last week threw a large stone into the otherwise undisturbed waters of the mainstream political consensus on immigration. His refusal to join the chorus of calls for even more draconian controls over the right to move across borders is seen by some as more evidence of how out of touch he is with the public mood.