Labour dealt with immigration in 1965 – and it can do so again | Martin Kettle

With terrible ratings on this key issue, the party must start to engage voters – as it did under Harold Wilson, when it faced similar problems with press and public

The Labour party is not in charge of Brexit, but it has nevertheless impaled itself on a dilemma about post-Brexit immigration. It can’t escape because it doesn’t know what to say. The uncertainty is understandable – because Brexit has sharpened the choices about migration policy – and at the same time bizarre, because the issue ought not to be causing the kind of trouble it undoubtedly is.

On one side of the argument, Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell obstinately make a virtue of refusing to talk about immigration controls. They prefer to focus on labour market regulation. “It is not an objective to reduce immigration,” a Corbyn spokesman famously said this autumn. These are “fictitious debates”, McDonnell said this week.

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