I suggest to the hon. Gentleman that he speaks to the public and listens to what they had to say during the referendum campaign. If he is saying that they were not voting for change on free movement and immigration, I am afraid that he simply was not listening to them.
I have long argued for a change in the system of free movement to reflect people’s concerns. As it stands, it is not working for the more deprived parts of our country, particularly those where traditional industry has been replaced by lower-skill, lower-wage employment. My preference was to work within the EU to fix those problems, but the country, understandably, lost patience with that approach.
Free movement does not affect all places in the same way; it affects cities differently from former industrial areas. It has also made life more difficult in places where it is already hardest. These are areas that got no real hope from the Government when traditional industry left and that saw house prices collapse and whole streets bought up by absent private landlords. They are places that, alongside taking new arrivals from the EU, continue to take in the vast majority of this country’s asylum seekers and refugees. Largely they do so without any real strife or difficulty, so I do not want to hear anyone claim that people in places such as Leigh who voted to leave are in any way xenophobic or racist. They are welcoming, generous people, but they also want fairness, and they do not think that it is fair that the country’s least well-off communities should expect pressure on wages, housing, public services, primary schools and GP services without any help to manage it.