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DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Labour has been failing to speak for England, that’s according to the former Shadow Cabinet Minister, Tristram Hunt, who has put together a new book of essays about how the party can, in his words, show its affection for England.  He argues that Labour must embrace patriotism and acknowledge concerns about immigration and Tristram Hunt joins me now.  A very good morning to you Mr Hunt, now one of these quotations pulled out of this book of essays: ‘I’m a white working class Englishman who isn’t on benefits, Labour isn’t for people like me’, heard by one of Labour’s candidates on the doorstep at last year’s general election.  Did that come as a shock to you?

TRISTRAM HUNT: Well I think it spoke to a broader sense out there which somehow the Labour party is disconnecting from an English identity and what this collection of essays is about is former Labour candidates in the 2015 election, existing MPs saying how much we admire England, how much we love the heritage, the identity, the culture of England and as more and more people identify themselves as English rather than British, we have to show in the Labour party that we understand this new power of national identity and if men in Harlow or Stevenage or Portsmouth or Cumbria say I’m English and I don't think the Labour party is on my side, then we’ve got a real problem with that.

DM: So you have got to become a bit more UKIP?  

TRISTRAM HUNT: No, we are an internationalist party, we’re an anti-racist party, we’re a party that believes in the Union, we want Scotland and England to be part of Great Britain but we also have to appreciate that when it comes to issues like the devolution of power to great cities, a referendum on an English parliament, even in my view a national holiday for St George’s Day, we should be confident about that.  

DM: I didn’t say that facetiously, if we’re revisiting the general election you saw it, Ed Balls cites it as one of the reasons he lost his seat, is that Labour voters, some of them went to UKIP.

TRISTRAM HUNT: Absolutely and in communities like Hartlepool and Grimsby, my own constituency of Stoke on Trent, we are losing historically Labour communities to UKIP voters and I think that is as much about culture as it is about economics and if voters don’t think that we culturally understand and what they value about family and faith and community and country, if the Labour party looks too much like a metropolitan southern cosmopolitan party, not speaking to their values, then they are going to move away from us and that will be devastating for us in the long run, John Cruddas has pointed to that in a new report.   

DM: Isn’t the elephant in the room though, you talk about all that and maybe flying the flag of St George might address it ever so slightly, but so many people, these people on the doorstep, will have mentioned immigration as one of their key concerns.

TRISTRAM HUNT: Yes and our failure to talk about immigration was a real problem.  The challenge here is that actually our policies on immigration at the last general election were not that bad, actually they were pretty progressive good policies which dealt with …

DM: And are pretty much the ones the government is putting forward.  

TRISTRAM HUNT: The issues, exactly, but people felt we were nervous about talking about it because as soon as you talk about immigration you have the fear of being labelled racist and what we have to show is that we can talk about immigration – because it is often not about race when it comes to East European migration – but we have to talk to those communities who have faced extraordinary change over the last ten years.  We have seen this great wave of change come in to the country and if the Labour party is saying oh don’t worry about that, it’s good for the NHS, it’s good for public services, don’t worry – actually a lot of people are worrying and we do have to talk about it.  

DM: But how do you change that mind-set because when the mask slips or when they don’t realise the microphone is on – we had Gordon Brown in the 2010 general election referring to Gillian Duffy as bigoted and as recently as last week, the Shadow Europe Minister Pat Glass, talking about a horrible racist.  When the mask slips that’s how many people within the Labour party think about people when they raise concerns about immigration and immigrants.  

TRISTRAM HUNT: This is why we need a root and branch rethinking of this issue within the culture of our party because if people think we are only saying one thing in this studio but when I leave this studio I think something else, then they are not going to trust us.  It is not racist to talk about immigration, it is not racist to reflect on the changes that happen to communities but we also do that with our values.  We are an anti-racist party, we value the contribution of immigration to this country but we also know that in certain parts of the community it is having really dramatic changes and we need to speak to that and we need to have policies to deal with that so …

DM: So above and beyond … I was trying not to mention the European Union but apart from leaving the European Union, you cannot control entry into the UK from members of the European Union.  

TRISTRAM HUNT: Obviously we have got the change on benefits which the Prime Minister has negotiated, which is meant to affect some of the pull factors.  Ed Balls has once again raised this morning this issue of are we going to have to look at the free movement of labour as part of a reformed European Union in the future but what we have to do also is make sure that when it comes to depressing wages, when it comes to housing stock, when it comes to all those social conditions that can exacerbate the impact of immigration, we have a view there. So in Lincolnshire, a really big impact of immigration in lots of communities, do we now have the funds that can go specifically to those areas for the schools, the hospitals, the public services to deal with that but do we also say to people who are affected by this, we understand that you are nervous when you hear language change, when you hear culture change, in your community and we have to help you deal with and manage that.  Just to ignore it means people will turn away from the party.

DM: You know what people are going to say aren’t they, this isn’t even a coded message for Jeremy Corbyn and his cohorts, it’s a direct shot across the bows because what you describe from the last general election of course that took place under Ed Miliband so he didn’t get it, it hasn’t changed under Jeremy Corbyn has it?

TRISTRAM HUNT: Well I think it does need to change.  I think what …

DM: But you accept that Jeremy Corbyn, if Ed Miliband didn’t get it Jeremy Corbyn doesn’t either.  

TRISTRAM HUNT: Well I haven’t seen much sign of a change of view there…

DM: Any?

TRISTRAM HUNT: .. and that’s why myself, John Cruddas and others, we’re asking the difficult questions because there’s no point having lost two general elections and the issue of immigration and cultural change being a really big question for Labour voters, for us simply to say oh don’t worry, we don’t want to raise it, it’s all too complicated whether the leader is Ed Miliband or Jeremy Corbyn, I think that would be a dereliction of my duty as a Labour MP.  

DM: So you are saying to your leadership, if you don’t get this message, given the scale of the task, if Scotland’s gone given the scale of the task for Labour in England, if you don’t get this message we lose again?

TRISTRAM HUNT: Absolutely and there’s a beautiful essay by my colleague Jamie Reed from Copeland on this about how the Labour party in the north of England if it doesn’t understand the culture, the identity, the feelings of its communities will lose just like the Democrats in the American South lost and so this is as much about the material economics, it’s as much about working tax credits, it’s as much about those nuts and bolts as it is saying to these communities we understand what you value, we value it as well and part of that is a strong sense of English identity.

DM: Okay, Tristram Hunt, very good to see you, thank you very much indeed.