By David Osland

“No more bloody immigrants whatever happens,” the Home Secretary told those assembled round the cabinet table. “We won’t increase the immigration quota.”

No, not Suella Braverman. Not Priti Patel. That was James Callaghan – a future Labour prime minister – addressing colleagues in 1969, less than six months after Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech the previous year.

The quote is retailed in Richard Crossman’s insider account of the period, The Crossman Diaries. Crossman was obviously not outraged; the context is clearly approving.

The future New Statesman editor was an intellectual, and not on what would have been taken as on the right of the Party at the time. He would surely have denied the accusation of being racially prejudiced, although modern readers of the book will find that conclusion ineluctable.

His concern, you understand, was limited to the impact the new arrivals might have on Labour’s fortunes at the ballot box.

“Immigration,” he insisted, “can be the greatest potential vote loser for the Labour Party if we are seen to be permitting a flood of immigrants to come in and blight the central areas of all our cities.”

Nobody talks like that anymore. Well, not in print, anyway. But Crossman’s words exemplify a perceived dilemma that sections of the Party have never quite escaped.

For the last half a century, the debate over immigration has remained a constant in British politics, and Labour has not unflinchingly been on the side of the anti-racist angels.

David Blunkett was the first Home Secretary to weaponise Channel crossing, with his hardline fulminations on Sangatte frequently providing copy for the Daily Telegraph in the late New Labour era.

The symbolism of Ed Miliband’s ‘Controls on Immigration’ coffee mugs will not have been lost on the target demographic either.

The row has now taken on renewed vehemence, as the Tories scramble to exploit the opportunities they think of as emanating from the 40,000 asylum seekers who have crossed the Channel so far this year.

So it was that just one day after the far right firebomb attack on a Dover Immigration Detention Centre last month, the Tory benches came to smell “of pubs and Wormwood Scrubs and too many rightwing meetings.”

Incendiary rhetoric – from Braverman’s invocation of “invasion” to Sir Edward Leigh’s conscious or unconscious repetition of the 1970s National Front slogan “send them back” – is no less shocking by dint of having been trotted out numerous times before.

Immigration, framed as ‘the small boat crisis’ and ‘taking back control of our borders’, is shaping up as one of the big Tory themes ahead of the next general election. They are perfectly prepared to stoop to what Tory peer Lord Lansley once openly described as “playing the race card”.

This is not a card Labour can trump. Nor is race something Labour can dodge, duck, sidestep, swerve or deflect, or take a nuanced line on, as suits its incidental political convenience.

For an avowedly anti-racist Party, opposition to racism boils down to basic principle. The only viable response is to call out the Tories head on.

It’s not enough to condemn Braverman’s dream of getting asylum seekers on deportation flights to Rwanda by Christmas as an inefficient use of taxpayers’ money. It’s vital to stress that the scheme itself is cruel, inhumane and ethically unacceptable.

Callaghan got it diametrically wrong. There will be more immigrants, whatever happens.

From that starting point, it is essential to allow asylum seekers safe and legal routes into Britain, and accept that this country has a responsibility to house them in conditions not conducive to the spread of diphtheria. Spoiler alert: this will cost money.

It’s also a mistake for Keir Starmer to make a case that boils down to ‘British NHS jobs for British NHS workers’. Some 85% of NHS staff are British nationals; in the current conjuncture, comments that seemingly devalue the contribution of the 190,000 that are not have widely been read as a sotto voce concession to racist sentiment.

Ultimately the Labour Party of today should not buy into Crossman’s contention that bravery will cost it support.

Even those whose moral compass does not reach much beyond electoral imperatives should not be blindsided by the hundreds of thousands of votes that prevarication could potentially win.

Hundreds of thousands of anti-racist votes, not least among the first, second and third generation immigrants that make up a big part of its coalition, are there to be lost as well.

David Osland is a member of Hackney North & Stoke Newington CLP and a long-time left wing journalist and author. Follow him on Twitter at @David__Osland

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