Amber Rudd’s Wenger task: convincing people she isn’t the problem

One of the more divisive debates in football is how well Arsenal Football Club should be doing. For some supporters (I include myself in this category), three FA Cups and a European semi-final in four years isn’t failure in any way, shape or form. For others, considering the outlay on players of debatable merit such as Granit Xhaka or Shkodran Mustafi, failing to finish in the Champions League places for two years in a row and no league title for more than a decade is inexcusable for a club of Arsenal’s stature.

A similar debate is raging at Westminster about Amber Rudd, the embattled Home Secretary. Rudd has endured a week far worse than anything Arsenal have had to put up with under Arsène Wenger: a grilling in front of the home affairs select committee in which she came close to misleading Parliament, more horror stories about her department and its treatment of Commonwealth Britons, and a gaffe about whether or not the United Kingdom will remain in a customs union after Brexit.

No one doubts that Rudd has had a bad week. The question is whether she could have had a better one. On the Conservative right, Rudd has plenty of enemies so it is in their interest to believe the problem is all her. But the reality is that, thanks to the disastrous immigration policy inherited from Theresa May, which she cannot change or criticise, thanks to the undeliverable Brexit she opposed, it is hard to see how the week could have gone better.

In fact, it could and should have gone worse. One reason for Rudd’s woes is that voters want two things, which can’t be reconciled with one another: the first is an immigration system that ensnares everyone who is here illegally, the second is an immigration system which doesn’t make life more difficult for people who have been here legally in times gone past, when citizens of the former Commonwealth and Empire could come and go freely.

Toothless Labour leadership

That contradiction can and should have been exposed more effectively by Labour, but it failed to do so. The problem is that the Opposition has a lot in common with the electorate: they aren’t sure if they oppose the Government’s immigration policies in general, or merely when they affect a group of immigrants who command public sympathy. One of the few politicians who knows for sure is David Lammy, the Labour MP for Tottenham, one of the handful of politicians who voted against the policies that led to the Windrush mess to begin with. In his heart, Jeremy Corbyn, his leader, agrees with him: he, too, was one of the few politicians to oppose the Immigration Act of 2014, which started the whole sorry mess.

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But Corbyn is not a natural performer in the House of Commons, the arena where Rudd and May would have something to fear from a sharper parliamentary operator. Corbyn’s political talents lie in other arenas: at rallies, on the campaign trail and within the field of Labour’s internal politics.

That means the task falls to other politicians who are better parliamentary operators but are less committed as far as the party’s official position – opposition to the policies that made the mess in the first place – go.

In the absence of a quick-footed Labour leader, the chair of the home affairs select committee, Labour’s Yvette Cooper, would usually be the next most effective line of opposition. But Cooper supported the Immigration Act in 2014 and her scrutiny of May and Rudd focuses very narrowly on the Government’s net migration target.

The Conservative aspiration to get immigration down to “the tens of thousands” has little to do with the Windrush crisis: the problem isn’t the target, but a system that requires British citizens who have been here 30 years to comply with a ridiculously high level of proof.

Scrapping the migration target might make it easier for Windrush Britons to avoid deportation – but it wouldn’t save them from the other unintended consequences of the Immigration Act, which is that because the requirements it places on landlords and small businesses are so difficult to navigate, many are starting to discriminate against those with unusual names or dark skin in order to avoid the hassle.

The average Labour MP is somewhere roughly between the Corbyn position and the Cooper one: they know that there can be no meaningful respite without dismantling the Immigration Act en bloc but they feel nervous about articulating that. So between a Labour leader in the right position without the ability to take advantage of it and a senior backbencher with the right ability but the wrong policy, Amber Rudd survives. Which is more than you can say for Wenger.

Stephen Bush is special correspondent at the New Statesman

@stephenkb

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