Blaming immigrants is the oldest right-wing game in history says Former Europe Minister.

Denis MacShane is a former journalist and MP. He was the youngest president of the NUJ in 1979 and went into exile when Margaret Thatcher was elected to work for the international trade union movements helping the Solidarity union in Poland, black trade unions in South Africa, Lula’s metalworkers in Brazil and the unions whose general strike in South Korea toppled the military dictatorship in 1987. He is unusal amongst British political activists in speaking European languages.

While an MP he was Minister of state for Europe. An active campaigner against antj-semitism while in Parliament, the former Rotherham MP who left the Common in 2012 was once chair of an anti-Semitism think tank called The European institute for the study of contemporary Antisemitism.  He wrote a book Globalising Hatred: the New Antisemitism in 2008. The BNP targeted him for attacks because of a chapter exposing its leader anti-semitic record. Since leaving office Dr MacShane is working “pretty much all the time on Brexit”. He says he writes or speaks on Brexit almost every day and has spoken on the subject all over the world from Washington to Tel Aviv. In January 2015 he published his book Brexit: How Britain Will Leave Europe, which predicted the outcome of the June 2016 referendum. He has written a new book on what happens next, which will be published in June 2017, on the anniversary of the referendum.

As a respected authority on the EU and Brexit, MacShane is well placed to answer the questions I put to him;

Was immigration the biggest factor in the Brexit vote? I asked.

“Yes. The focus of the anti-Europeans was on the number of European workers in the UK. The slogan “taking back control’ was direct from the UKIP line that the UK and to “take back control’ of its frontiers. At the Tory Party conference in October 2015, Theresa May, then the Home Secretary said “The number of immigrants coming in from Europe is unsustainable’ to thunderous applause. Staring with William Hague in 2001, then Michael Howard in 2005 and David Cameron in 2010, the Conservatives took the old language of Enoch Powell and updated it against European who came to work in the UK. There were some who genuinely did not like the EU and saw the problem as one of sovereignty but the dominant issue in every meeting and on every doorstep or in every radio phone-in was immigration”.

I asked if the referendum result had led to genuine rise in race related hate crimes or if the reports were being exaggerated? He told me “The police have stated quite clearly that the up to 100 per cent rise in hate crimes have clearly linked these attacks to the xenophobic attacks on the presence of Europeans in the UK which was at the core of the Brexit campaign. The Community Security Trust which reports on anti-Semitic attacks in the UK has also noted a major increase in anti-Jewish attacks since the referendum campaign with its focus on xenophobic themes”.

But did the electorate really understand the consequences when they voted to leave the EU and did they think that the cost (yet to be seen) a price worth paying or were they mislead into voting for something different to what they will end up with? Not according to Macshane, he says “the plebiscite it is now widely acknowledged was won on the biggest lies ever seen in a national vote - that £350 million a week would be available for the NHS, that 75 million Turks were about to arrive, that the Queen’s Speech was mainly written in Brussels or that a European Army was about to be formed. There was no effective discussion on the costs because we will not now these until the middle 2020s. The referendum was lost 15-20 years ago when a well-funded political campaign was launched with support from the Conservative leadership - forget UKIP – and powerful off-shore owned media networks to rubbish the EU and create the climate which made Brexit inevitable”.

The Labour party recently managed to hold on to Stoke on Trent in a bi-election, where UKIP’s new leader Paul Nuttall was a candidate. I asked the former member of Tony Blair’s cabinet if the victory signalled a change of heart and the beginning of the end for UKIP. He told me “Ukip is finished in March 2019 assuming that a political Brexit is unavoidable and the UK will elect no more MEPs to the European Parliament. UKIP is a one pony party. It has no programme for national or local government. It is simply an anti-European party with two linked demands - to win a plebiscite and to use it to amputate the UK from Europe. David Cameron conceded the former and UKIP fellow travellers like Boris Johnson, Liam Fox, David Davis and Michael Gove are hoping deliver the latter”.

Are we yet to see the consequences touted before Brexit around the stock markets crashing and the pound falling or were the claims just scare mongering?

Dr MacShane says “We have not left the EU so Brexit has not happened and the economic impact will not be known until the middle 2020s. But the announcements about moving work to Europe to guarantee access to the Single Market are not scare-mongering but cold reality. The Brexit devaluation is feeding into higher prices and inflation and the Government has had to abandon its economic programmes to increase debt and deficits to keep the economy afloat. Brexit is causing uncertainty in all sectors of economic activity and above all in FDI which only comes to the UK on the promise that any firm investing in Britain would have full, unfettered access to 450 million middle class consumers in Europe. Brexit breaks that promise”.

If UKIP are finished, I asked Can Labour win back the voters from UKIP or are they likely to go to other parties such as Conservative or more far right groups?

“Labour won back voters tempted by anti-immigration populism from Enoch Powell and Margaret Thatcher. Labour needs a convincing offer for many who feel with justification they are losers in the modern economy. Blaming immigrants is the oldest right-wing game in history - Jews in the 1930s, West Indians in the 1950s, Indians and Pakistanis in the 1970s and 1980s, Kosovan and asylum seekers in the 1990s, Poles, Slovaks, and other citizens of new EU member states in the last 15 years. When Labour has convincing policies and convincing spokespersons it will start to do well again!”