One of the crueller caricatures in the 2004 satirical film ‘Team America: World Police’ is a little puppet of Matt Damon who is only able to say ‘Matt Damon’ in a rather feeble and pointless fashion. The actor himself felt he was being cruelly parodied because of his opposition to the Iraq War, and was ‘bewildered’ by the suggestion that he was barely able to say his own name when he was able to learn entire scripts. But the point from the screenwriters seemed to be that beyond his own name, Damon wasn’t really offering anything to the debate about the war.

Labour has a Matt Damon problem on immigration at the moment. It knows that its voters are very upset about the issue - seven in ten Labour constituencies voted to leave the European Union in June - and it knows that Ukip is now in a much better position to tempt these voters away with the election of Paul Nuttall as leader. It knows it needs to address this dissatisfaction one way or another. But so far, its main attempt to address this problem is no stronger than saying ‘Matt Damon’ over and over again.

Ever since 2011, when Ed Miliband started giving speeches about national identity and immigration, the party has been telling its voters that it needs to talk about immigration. But five years later, it still hasn’t got beyond that opening statement. It doesn’t know what an honest dialogue with voters means beyond saying ‘immigration’ in a rather feeble and pointless fashion. A little reassurance that you’re not a racist if you worry about the impact of immigration here, and a feeble reference to the Migration Impact Fund, introduced under the last Labour government. That fund was only worth £35 million year, which means its attempts to alleviate the pressure on local services were far less visible to the public than Matt Damon.

Now, figures such as Dan Jarvis are rightly warning that unless the party pays attention to Ukip and talks about immigration, its heartlands are under threat. But Jarvis and others still haven’t managed to propose much more than stopping sneering at voters, and ensuring that Labour talks about immigration. But, again, this sounds a but like the party repeatedly saying ‘immigration’ in a rather feeble and pointless fashion that doesn’t change the debate materially. It almost seems upset that once it has said 'immigration' enough times, people are still quite angry.

Fighting the appeal of Ukip is about far more than just talking about immigration. Voters in constituencies that have seen very little immigration also backed Leave, so it cannot simply be the case that a larger Migration Impact Fund would help. Many communities, like Stoke-on-Trent, have lost much of their core industry, and are trying to work out a new reason to exist. And Paul Nuttall himself identified a sense of disconnect between the party and its core vote in his speech to the Ukip conference in 2013, saying:

“ ‘[Labour voters] have given up. And why? It’s because Labour MPs don’t represent them any more. In the days of Clement Attlee the Labour MPs came from the mills, the mines and the factories. Labour MPs today follow the same routes as the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. They go to private school, they go to Oxbridge, they get a job in an MP’s office, and they become an MP. None of them ladies and gentlemen, would know what it’s like in a working man’s club. None of them would know a council estate if it fell out the sky. And Labour’s policies do not reflect life in working class constituencies.’

Labour’s response to Nuttall’s election was to point out that he has previously backed calls for privatisation of the NHS. The health service has become the party’s comfort blanket to which it retreats when it is scared of something. It is pointless to use the NHS, though, when Labour is already strong on this matter yet still losing the trust of its voters overall, as yesterday’s totally dire polls showed.

For the party to beat Ukip requires a great deal of thought about its core purpose and about the sort of policies that could really transform communities that feel left behind, whether or not they have experienced high levels of migration. Until it is able to have a conversation of that level, it will just be stuck impersonating Matt Damon.