Parties avoid drawing attention to immigration

On the streets of East Ham, deep in London's east end, local resident Pat Garrahy wants to talk about immigration. This safe Labour seat is one of just two constituencies in the capital where foreign-born voters, who now outweigh UK natives, will determine the result of the poll.

But despite immigration being the second-most important issue to voters behind the NHS, the two main parties have said remarkably little about it throughout the election campaign, focusing instead on the economy and the cost of living.

Mr Garrahy - who moved to East Ham two years ago - says he wants politicians to "speak out and let their views be known". "We need to get immigration under control," he tells the Financial Times, looking around at the high street he describes as "more like Calcutta than London".

On May 7, he will cast his vote for the fiercely anti-immigration UK Independence party, which would take Britain out of the European Union and impose tougher restrictions for those coming from beyond Europe.

It is partly because of Ukip's emergence as a more serious contender in this election that their opponents do not want to discuss immigration at all. As Tim Bale, professor of politics at London's Queen Mary University points out, "whenever it's talked about, it's just another tick in the Ukip box".

Both the Conservatives and Labour have other good reasons to avoid drawing too much attention to this subject. The Tories have spectacularly failed to meet their target of bringing net migration down to the "tens of thousands" - it is now more than three times that figure - and Labour is still suffering from its failure to impose controls on new member states after EU expansion in 2004.

However, there are signs that despite the Tories' visa reforms throughout the parliament, the party now has as bad a record on immigration as Labour does. Polling by Ipsos Mori shows that only 27 per cent of voters think the current government's handling of immigration has been better than it was under Labour, and 26 per cent say it has been worse.

Among those currently intending to vote Tory, 45 per cent are dissatisfied with how David Cameron's party has performed on this issue, rising to 94 per cent among those who voted Tory in 2010 but now intend to switch allegiance to Ukip.

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Labour, meanwhile, has focused on its core theme of clamping down on low-skilled migrant labour, by making it illegal for employers to undercut British workers by exploiting migrants. The party has also announced a two-year wait for EU migrants wanting to claim out-of-work benefits.

But more radical policies on EU migrants would be difficult to enact, since changes to the current freedom of movement rules would require negotiation with Brussels.

Madeleine Sumption, director of the Oxford Migration Observatory suggests this difficulty could be yet another reason for the relative campaign silence on immigration. "The fact that EU migration has been such a big part of the debate - and now accounts for half or more of new migrants in the UK - has probably made it harder for the main parties to come up with a strong narrative," Ms Sumption says. "It's just a lot more difficult for any future government to act on EU migration."

Mr Bale also suggests that the relentless focus on net migration throughout the parliament could have contributed to a sense that while voters are still concerned about immigration, they are sick of hearing about it.

<>"There might be an extent to which there's a bit of immigration fatigue, because although [Ukip leader] Nigel Farage and others like to say this is an issue that's never debated, actually he's spent five years talking about little else so its lost its novelty," Prof Bale says. "It's never caught fire in the way I might have expected it to."

In East Ham, however, this does not seem to be the case. The Ukip candidate, Dan Oxley, says he finds local voters receptive to immigration discussions on the doorstep. "There's an attitude [in the other parties] that it's not polite to mention immigration in a constituency where there's such a high immigrant population," he says. "But this does matter to people".

Inside the Sri Mahalakshmi Hindu Temple, worshippers mingle after the morning blessing. Subburam Naidu, a 58 year-old who moved to the UK from India in 1987, is concerned that Labour would be too lax on future immigration, and that only the Tories would grip the issue. "Control needs to be tight," he says, clenching his fists for emphasis. "First you look after us, the people in your own country, you make sure there are jobs for them," he says. "Then you look to the people outside."

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