Most contenders for the leadership of the Labour Party think that a failure to take a tough line on immigration cost the party the general election. They blame Labour’s inability to engage with voters’ “legitimate concerns” over the issue. Even the editor of the left-leaning Prospect magazine last week urged Labour to become the “anti‑immigration party”. For some on the left, Labour’s capitulation to anti-immigrant sentiment is inexplicable. But Labour has a long history of bending to such ideas—and it does so because of the nature of the party. Governments’ approach to immigration is often shaped by the needs of the bosses—which they describe as the needs of “the economy” or “the national interest”. Labour accepts this idea of a “national interest” and sees its role as managing the capitalist state. In reality this means backing up the bosses—and working class interests get crushed. Labour has also swallowed the argument that workers have fixed racist views, and thinks it has to be too in order to keep votes. Looking at Labour’s history shows how this plays out in terms of immigration. The ruling class has a contradictory attitude to immigration, shaped by the economy and the racism that is inherent to their system. So, following the Second World War, the British economy was in dire need of more workers. Labour governments helped to recruit thousands of people from the Commonwealth to work in the “mother country”. But by the late 1950s British capitalism’s desire for labour was abating.
The Tories and right wing press demanded immigration controls. In 1962 the Conservative government passed a law that sought to block black migration into Britain.
By accepting that black people were a problem, the Act legitimised the views of every bigot. Initially, Labour leaders promised to repeal the legislation if they returned to office. But this opposition didn’t last. Some in the Labour Party began to argue that, if they joined the anti-immigrant clamour, it would block the right from being able to mobilise around it. They also accepted the idea that anti-immigrant feeling was widespread—and worried about losing votes. During the 1964 election twice as many Labour candidates mentioned immigration in their election addresses as the Tories. One Labour candidate even issued a leaflet warning, “Large-scale immigration has occurred only under this Tory government. The Tory Immigration Act has failed to control it—immigrants of all colours and races continue to arrive here.” This gave credibility to the idea that immigration controls were a way of maintaining the “national character”. After Labour’s capitulation, the clamour for ever-tighter controls grew. Following Labour’s re-election in 1964, the party rushed through ever more restrictions—which made racists bolder.
In 1968 Tory MP Enoch Powell made an infamous speech predicting that “rivers of blood” would flow in the streets unless immigrants were repatriated. Labour’s response was to rush through a new immigration bill to stop Kenyan Asians with British passports from entering Britain. This fed prejudice and undermined the basis of Labour’s support by boosting the right—the Nazi National Front increased its vote. When Labour was in office in 1976, immigration officers at Heathrow airport secretly forced Asian women to undergo virginity tests. Labour was against the Tories’ Nationality Act from the opposition benches in the 1980s. Yet it didn’t repeal the Act when it was re-elected. And in its 13 years in office, New Labour made life harder for migrants, asylum seekers and refugees. Its 2009 Borders, Immigration and Citizenship Act aimed to “strengthen border controls to ensure that newcomers earn the right to stay”. The Act ended the right of people to apply for citizenship after five years’ residence. Gordon Brown introduced the poisonous slogan of “British jobs for British workers” and used the points‑based immigration system to make it harder for non-EU migrant workers to come here. Immigration minister Liam Byrne in 2007 said that immigration had “deeply unsettled the country”. Many Labour Party members, and some Labour MPs, are rightly disgusted at the party for caving in to racist arguments. We will work with these people in campaigning for the rights of migrants. But Labour accepts the framework of capitalism—and that’s why it fails to stand up for migrants.
Showing posts with label immigration. Show all posts
Showing posts with label immigration. Show all posts
Wednesday, 26 May 2010
Wednesday, 5 May 2010
Noxious election campaign stirs up racial division
This general election has been the one most dominated by immigration since 1979. Consider the two most important incidents of the past month.The first was hapless Gordon Brown’s encounter with Gillian Duffy in Rochdale. Brown’s behaviour—polite and patient to her face, calling her “a bigoted woman” behind her back—played into a favourite myth peddled by the tabloids and the British National Party (BNP). This is that “liberal elites” are happy to see Britain flooded by migrants and refuse to acknowledge the legitimate concerns of “ordinary people” about immigration.Brown himself clearly subscribes to a version of this myth. Having been caught out, he rushed to apologise to Mrs Duffy. This no doubt reflected a conviction that “ordinary people” are generally “bigoted” and that all Labour leaders can do is pander to anti-immigrant prejudice, however much they may privately dislike it. This is a longstanding attitude. The diaries of Richard Crossman, Labour cabinet minister in the 1960s, repeatedly express the belief that his working class voters in Coventry were racists who wanted tighter immigration controls.The second key event for Brown was, of course, the final television debate between the leaders of the three main parties. This was descending into tedium until immigration came up. We were treated to the spectacle of Brown and David Cameron rounding on Nick Clegg to denounce the Liberal Democrats’ proposal to offer an amnesty to some illegal immigrants. This was partly about the representatives of the old two-party system whacking the new kid on the block.
But Cameron and Brown were also trying to signal that they were hard on immigration. The anger that Clegg displayed in his clashes with Cameron on this issue no doubt reflected anxiety that he was being portrayed as “soft” on migrants.The irruption of immigration in the final stages of the election has almost certainly worked to the Tories’ advantage. The Financial Times newspaper carried a piece on the subject last Saturday. Apparently Cameron initially resisted considerable pressure to make immigration central to the Tory election campaign, “fearful that the anti-immigration message peddled by his predecessor Michael Howard would spoil his attempts to detoxify the Tory brand. “Mr Brown’s travails and the debate questions have done Mr Cameron’s job for him, pushing immigration to the centre of the campaign without forcing him to look like the ‘nasty party’ of old. The subject was one of the hottest topics on Twitter on Friday.Tim Montgomerie, editor of the ConservativeHome website and voice of the party’s grassroots, was among those pushing for more aggression at the start of the campaign. But on Friday he told the Financial Times he was now ‘much happier’ with Mr Cameron’s strategy. It’s very interesting that the issue came up in all three debates and Cameron hit the issue very hard in the last one.’”Cameron’s strategy bears some resemblance to Margaret Thatcher’s in 1979. Immigration wasn’t formally central to the Tory campaign then either. But Thatcher had already, in her notorious World in Action interview of January 1978, made it clear where she stood: “People are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture.”
This phrase—and particularly the use of the word “swamped”—was enough to signal to anyone hostile to migrants that Thatcher was one of them. It remains to be seen whether the way the election has tilted towards immigration will help to scrape Cameron together a parliamentary majority. Almost certainly it will benefit the hard anti-migrant parties—the BNP, but also UKIP. At 1979 general election, the Anti Nazi League had reversed the advance of the National Front. Alas, the BNP and the EDL are still on the offensive. Whoever forms the next government, anti-fascists will have plenty to do to undo the damage caused by this noxious election campaign.
But Cameron and Brown were also trying to signal that they were hard on immigration. The anger that Clegg displayed in his clashes with Cameron on this issue no doubt reflected anxiety that he was being portrayed as “soft” on migrants.The irruption of immigration in the final stages of the election has almost certainly worked to the Tories’ advantage. The Financial Times newspaper carried a piece on the subject last Saturday. Apparently Cameron initially resisted considerable pressure to make immigration central to the Tory election campaign, “fearful that the anti-immigration message peddled by his predecessor Michael Howard would spoil his attempts to detoxify the Tory brand. “Mr Brown’s travails and the debate questions have done Mr Cameron’s job for him, pushing immigration to the centre of the campaign without forcing him to look like the ‘nasty party’ of old. The subject was one of the hottest topics on Twitter on Friday.Tim Montgomerie, editor of the ConservativeHome website and voice of the party’s grassroots, was among those pushing for more aggression at the start of the campaign. But on Friday he told the Financial Times he was now ‘much happier’ with Mr Cameron’s strategy. It’s very interesting that the issue came up in all three debates and Cameron hit the issue very hard in the last one.’”Cameron’s strategy bears some resemblance to Margaret Thatcher’s in 1979. Immigration wasn’t formally central to the Tory campaign then either. But Thatcher had already, in her notorious World in Action interview of January 1978, made it clear where she stood: “People are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture.”
This phrase—and particularly the use of the word “swamped”—was enough to signal to anyone hostile to migrants that Thatcher was one of them. It remains to be seen whether the way the election has tilted towards immigration will help to scrape Cameron together a parliamentary majority. Almost certainly it will benefit the hard anti-migrant parties—the BNP, but also UKIP. At 1979 general election, the Anti Nazi League had reversed the advance of the National Front. Alas, the BNP and the EDL are still on the offensive. Whoever forms the next government, anti-fascists will have plenty to do to undo the damage caused by this noxious election campaign.
Thursday, 29 April 2010
Home truths about immigration
The havoc created by the recent storm of racial tension has been loosed by the same pack of dogs who unleashed war abroad and the shredding of civil liberties at home. Thirteen years of new Labour rule has left social democracy in this country so enfeebled that, when Michael Howard - who can't see a belt without wanting to hit below it - predictably scraped the barrel on immigration and asylum, all that the Blairites could field as a defence was that his goals were impossible within the budget constraints that he'd set himself. New Labour could scarcely start arguing against Howard's central argument - that immigrants and minorities were a "problem" or even a "crisis" - because they, themselves, have embraced this thesis from the "new dawn" of May 1 1997. David Blunkett himself had used the Thatcher S-word - "swamped" - when talking about the "problem" of asylum family children in schools, had said that immigrants should use English, even in their own kitchens, lest they become "schizophrenic," had locked up asylum-seekers behind barbed wire guarded by savage dogs, invented new tests of "citizenship," piloted ID cards and driven through rafts of "anti-terrorism" legislation, leading to Britian's Guantanamo at Belmarsh.
It was he, the new Labour Home Secretary, who threatened to take asylum-seekers' children hostage, to be exchanged at the foot of the aircraft steps for their parents' agreement to be deported. It was Blairite Foreign Minister Denis MacShane, who said that British Muslims would "have to choose ... between the 'British way' of non-violence and peaceful dialogue ... and terrorism." If you don't run, of course, they can't chase you. But new Labour has been on the run on these issues from the start. And the dogs of racism and war are fast catching them up. A principled stand on issues of race, asylum, immigration and nationality would have looked like this. Every country must have control of its borders - no-one serious is advocating the scrapping of immigration controls. In any case, there is nothing "left-wing" about urging all the most accomplished and determined people to leave the poor countries of the world and come to the richest - this would make the poor countries poorer and the rich countries richer. But immigration controls must be colour-blind or else they are racist. A system which welcomes rich US citizens and blonde blue-eyed Australians but brands those who look different from the majority as a "problem" consisting of people who must continuously "prove themselves" to the satisfaction of rabid - foreign-owned - tabloids feeds the insatiable apetites of the racists.
Second, the case would be made that, if immigration were a bad thing, then the US would be the poorest country in the world and India would be the richest. We are a country which sent its people to the far corners of the earth not only to live in but colonise countries, whole continents even, over at least two centuries. Immigrants usually work harder than host communities and have an above average track record of creating net economic benefits in the countries that they move to. Whole sectors of the British economy would collapse or be seriously undermined without the presence of immigrants. Agriculture, catering, hospitality, the health service, public transport, retailing - even the priesthood - would have critical labour shortages without the contribution of immigrants. Over the last six decades the average British family size has declined from 2.4 children to 1.1 children - and that figure is inflated by the above average family size among immigrants. At this rate, Britain faces a demographic timebomb, with an elderly population creakily supported by declining numbers of wealth creators. In short, Britain needs new people and, short of an explosion of the birth rate, the only way to get them is to encourage new immigrants.
Our culinary, cultural, economic, sartorial, educational and social lives would be incomparably poorer, more bland, and less exciting without the presence of those immigrant communities already here, as anyone who lived in 1950s Britain could testify. They are not a "problem" to be solved, but a great asset whom we should celebrate. We must strangle the false dichotomy between asylum-seekers and economic migrants. Most people who come here do so for a mixture of reasons. Did the large number of people fleeing the imperialist attacks on Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq come here for political or economic reasons? Both, in most cases, just like my grandparents, who arrived barefoot in cattle boats from Ireland - and were greeted with the same kind of racist sectarian hatred as many of today's arrivals. My great grandmother must have been one of the few people in the 19th century to emigrate from the US to Scotland. She may have just got on the wrong boat, she may have come for any number of reasons, but did Scotland lose anything from her arrival? It should be clear that, when the racists talk of asylum-seekers, they really mean immigrants. And, when they talk about immigrants, they really mean ethnic minorities - most of them British born and bred. If there were no asylum-seekers and an end of all immigration, racism would merely turn its sights on those who just looked, sounded, ate, dressed or prayed differently to the rest of us.
We on the left have, traditionally and correctly, dismissed calls for curbs on immigration and asylum-seekers as little more than a fig leaf for racism. However, a simplistic, knee-jerk reaction to genuine concerns or worries about immigration and asylum simply dodges the underlying malaise and does nothing to allay fears, be they justified, exaggerated or based on ignorance and rumour. Most people in this country are not died-in-the-wool racists or bigots and Britain has some of the most enlightened anti-racist legislation and policies of any country, even if the practice often falls short of the goals. So why do so many ordinary people apparently see this issue as important? Has it simply been whipped up by the media? Well, yes it has. But the media can only whip up something where a potential already exists. In its post-empire and post-colonial era, Britain had lost its sense of identity as a world power. More recently, under Thatcher and Major, it witnessed the destruction of its working-class communities and this compounded that loss of identity, particularly for working class people who identified closely with the communities in which they lived and worked. It was Thatcher's boot-boy Norman Tebbitt who encouraged workers to "get on their bikes" and look for work.
Many were forced to up sticks and move elsewhere in their attempt to find those elusive jobs. Then there is the widespread alienation from politics. People see their political leaders indulging in lying, hypocrisy and opportunism and are, increasingly, turning away from the wider political process, believing that their views are unrepresented. Young people are virtually excluded from the housing market by the obscenely high prices, older people see their pensions threatened and there is no guarantee of genuine free health care or an adequate welfare support system. All these factors have led to insidious and creeping alienation, social instability and insecurity. In such situations, scapegoats in the form of an identifiable minority group are easily picked on and blamed. Immigrants, foreigners and asylum-seekers, particularly black ones, become easy targets and the BNP is exploiting this. Many groups of post-war immigrants have come from very different cultural backgrounds to those of British communities and, particularly in larger groups, they can be seen as a challenge to indigenous culture. It is true that immigrants have brought new ideas, new colour and innovation to the country. But they have also brought new challenges in terms of religion, culture and way of life, challenges to what the indigenous population saw or see as "their own way of life." Without sensitive and proactive integration policies, these challenges can easily develop into animosities and strife. To ignore this aspect is to ignore day-to-day reality.
There is also the objective factor of finite limits to our population. Britain is the most densely populated country in Europe and a small island only has a fixed amount of resources. Government statisticians say that the "UK population has grown nearly 20 per cent since 1950 and is still rising by the equivalent of one whole city - more than 200,000 people - every year. Continuous national population growth is fuelling internal population movement and adding development pressures and environmental degradation to almost all local areas." While there is no serious number crisis at the moment, I think that few of us would seriously argue that the country can easily accept unlimited numbers of new immigrants, on a continuous basis, without serious repercussions on social relations and resources. Although many would argue that there is, at present, no undue pressure and that the immigration "influx" has been greatly exaggerated, few would doubt that, if the rampages of the US and its allies continue, there will be increasing numbers of people fleeing their countries and putting pressure on the receiving nations. This is why the the dangerous immigration hysteria needs to be answered with more than a simple rejection of the issue as a whole. There has to be a joined-up and international consensus on all aspects of asylum and immigration.
The left needs to address people's concerns without pandering to racism or xenophobia. It can do that only by using facts in a sober and unemotional manner, countering media lies, hatred and exaggerations. It is good to see that the refugee charities have united to counter the widespread myths on immigration by publishing a booklet called Tell It Like It Is, which provides the true facts. We need to emphasise that there are very few people who willingly leave their country, their home, friends and relatives to move to an alien country without pressing reasons. These reasons are also varied but, for 99 per cent of these people, there are two main ones - oppression and economic poverty. Most people would like to see a solution which allows them to stay in their own country and we need to stress that this should be our joint aim - to assist all developing nations in dealing with the problems of tyranny and poverty so that people can stay, and will want to stay, in their own countries. This, of course, is hardly possible without a change to the rampant neoliberal economic polices of the US, the World Bank and IMF which has bolstered tyrants, fomented wars and created the economic devastation that forces tens of thousands to flee their homes in search of dignity and survival. Only by changing the roles of the World Bank and IMF, investing in the infrastructures of the poorer countries and combating corruption can the refugee problem be tackled properly and in the interests of those refugees.
Britain is not full up. There are hundreds of thousands of job vacancies and empty council houses. In whole areas of the country, like Scotland, populations are actually declining. There should be an amnesty of all exisiting asylum-seekers - these people want to be here and we need them. Bingo! The same goes for those who are living here in the twighlight world as "illegals," exploited and hunted. Then, we should publish an economic social demographic plan for population growth based on a points system and our own needs. No immigrant should be told that he must live separated from his wife and children - family unity is a moral imperative. And if we stopped bombing large numbers of refugees out of their own countries, fought for an economic system of global trade and economic justice, stopped propping up tinpot tyrannies throughout the poor world and distributed the resources of the world more fairly, we'd miraculously discover that, for the most part, people would, if they could, prefer to continue living in their own countries - visiting us as tourists, as we visit them.
It was he, the new Labour Home Secretary, who threatened to take asylum-seekers' children hostage, to be exchanged at the foot of the aircraft steps for their parents' agreement to be deported. It was Blairite Foreign Minister Denis MacShane, who said that British Muslims would "have to choose ... between the 'British way' of non-violence and peaceful dialogue ... and terrorism." If you don't run, of course, they can't chase you. But new Labour has been on the run on these issues from the start. And the dogs of racism and war are fast catching them up. A principled stand on issues of race, asylum, immigration and nationality would have looked like this. Every country must have control of its borders - no-one serious is advocating the scrapping of immigration controls. In any case, there is nothing "left-wing" about urging all the most accomplished and determined people to leave the poor countries of the world and come to the richest - this would make the poor countries poorer and the rich countries richer. But immigration controls must be colour-blind or else they are racist. A system which welcomes rich US citizens and blonde blue-eyed Australians but brands those who look different from the majority as a "problem" consisting of people who must continuously "prove themselves" to the satisfaction of rabid - foreign-owned - tabloids feeds the insatiable apetites of the racists.
Second, the case would be made that, if immigration were a bad thing, then the US would be the poorest country in the world and India would be the richest. We are a country which sent its people to the far corners of the earth not only to live in but colonise countries, whole continents even, over at least two centuries. Immigrants usually work harder than host communities and have an above average track record of creating net economic benefits in the countries that they move to. Whole sectors of the British economy would collapse or be seriously undermined without the presence of immigrants. Agriculture, catering, hospitality, the health service, public transport, retailing - even the priesthood - would have critical labour shortages without the contribution of immigrants. Over the last six decades the average British family size has declined from 2.4 children to 1.1 children - and that figure is inflated by the above average family size among immigrants. At this rate, Britain faces a demographic timebomb, with an elderly population creakily supported by declining numbers of wealth creators. In short, Britain needs new people and, short of an explosion of the birth rate, the only way to get them is to encourage new immigrants.
Our culinary, cultural, economic, sartorial, educational and social lives would be incomparably poorer, more bland, and less exciting without the presence of those immigrant communities already here, as anyone who lived in 1950s Britain could testify. They are not a "problem" to be solved, but a great asset whom we should celebrate. We must strangle the false dichotomy between asylum-seekers and economic migrants. Most people who come here do so for a mixture of reasons. Did the large number of people fleeing the imperialist attacks on Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq come here for political or economic reasons? Both, in most cases, just like my grandparents, who arrived barefoot in cattle boats from Ireland - and were greeted with the same kind of racist sectarian hatred as many of today's arrivals. My great grandmother must have been one of the few people in the 19th century to emigrate from the US to Scotland. She may have just got on the wrong boat, she may have come for any number of reasons, but did Scotland lose anything from her arrival? It should be clear that, when the racists talk of asylum-seekers, they really mean immigrants. And, when they talk about immigrants, they really mean ethnic minorities - most of them British born and bred. If there were no asylum-seekers and an end of all immigration, racism would merely turn its sights on those who just looked, sounded, ate, dressed or prayed differently to the rest of us.
We on the left have, traditionally and correctly, dismissed calls for curbs on immigration and asylum-seekers as little more than a fig leaf for racism. However, a simplistic, knee-jerk reaction to genuine concerns or worries about immigration and asylum simply dodges the underlying malaise and does nothing to allay fears, be they justified, exaggerated or based on ignorance and rumour. Most people in this country are not died-in-the-wool racists or bigots and Britain has some of the most enlightened anti-racist legislation and policies of any country, even if the practice often falls short of the goals. So why do so many ordinary people apparently see this issue as important? Has it simply been whipped up by the media? Well, yes it has. But the media can only whip up something where a potential already exists. In its post-empire and post-colonial era, Britain had lost its sense of identity as a world power. More recently, under Thatcher and Major, it witnessed the destruction of its working-class communities and this compounded that loss of identity, particularly for working class people who identified closely with the communities in which they lived and worked. It was Thatcher's boot-boy Norman Tebbitt who encouraged workers to "get on their bikes" and look for work.
Many were forced to up sticks and move elsewhere in their attempt to find those elusive jobs. Then there is the widespread alienation from politics. People see their political leaders indulging in lying, hypocrisy and opportunism and are, increasingly, turning away from the wider political process, believing that their views are unrepresented. Young people are virtually excluded from the housing market by the obscenely high prices, older people see their pensions threatened and there is no guarantee of genuine free health care or an adequate welfare support system. All these factors have led to insidious and creeping alienation, social instability and insecurity. In such situations, scapegoats in the form of an identifiable minority group are easily picked on and blamed. Immigrants, foreigners and asylum-seekers, particularly black ones, become easy targets and the BNP is exploiting this. Many groups of post-war immigrants have come from very different cultural backgrounds to those of British communities and, particularly in larger groups, they can be seen as a challenge to indigenous culture. It is true that immigrants have brought new ideas, new colour and innovation to the country. But they have also brought new challenges in terms of religion, culture and way of life, challenges to what the indigenous population saw or see as "their own way of life." Without sensitive and proactive integration policies, these challenges can easily develop into animosities and strife. To ignore this aspect is to ignore day-to-day reality.
There is also the objective factor of finite limits to our population. Britain is the most densely populated country in Europe and a small island only has a fixed amount of resources. Government statisticians say that the "UK population has grown nearly 20 per cent since 1950 and is still rising by the equivalent of one whole city - more than 200,000 people - every year. Continuous national population growth is fuelling internal population movement and adding development pressures and environmental degradation to almost all local areas." While there is no serious number crisis at the moment, I think that few of us would seriously argue that the country can easily accept unlimited numbers of new immigrants, on a continuous basis, without serious repercussions on social relations and resources. Although many would argue that there is, at present, no undue pressure and that the immigration "influx" has been greatly exaggerated, few would doubt that, if the rampages of the US and its allies continue, there will be increasing numbers of people fleeing their countries and putting pressure on the receiving nations. This is why the the dangerous immigration hysteria needs to be answered with more than a simple rejection of the issue as a whole. There has to be a joined-up and international consensus on all aspects of asylum and immigration.
The left needs to address people's concerns without pandering to racism or xenophobia. It can do that only by using facts in a sober and unemotional manner, countering media lies, hatred and exaggerations. It is good to see that the refugee charities have united to counter the widespread myths on immigration by publishing a booklet called Tell It Like It Is, which provides the true facts. We need to emphasise that there are very few people who willingly leave their country, their home, friends and relatives to move to an alien country without pressing reasons. These reasons are also varied but, for 99 per cent of these people, there are two main ones - oppression and economic poverty. Most people would like to see a solution which allows them to stay in their own country and we need to stress that this should be our joint aim - to assist all developing nations in dealing with the problems of tyranny and poverty so that people can stay, and will want to stay, in their own countries. This, of course, is hardly possible without a change to the rampant neoliberal economic polices of the US, the World Bank and IMF which has bolstered tyrants, fomented wars and created the economic devastation that forces tens of thousands to flee their homes in search of dignity and survival. Only by changing the roles of the World Bank and IMF, investing in the infrastructures of the poorer countries and combating corruption can the refugee problem be tackled properly and in the interests of those refugees.
Britain is not full up. There are hundreds of thousands of job vacancies and empty council houses. In whole areas of the country, like Scotland, populations are actually declining. There should be an amnesty of all exisiting asylum-seekers - these people want to be here and we need them. Bingo! The same goes for those who are living here in the twighlight world as "illegals," exploited and hunted. Then, we should publish an economic social demographic plan for population growth based on a points system and our own needs. No immigrant should be told that he must live separated from his wife and children - family unity is a moral imperative. And if we stopped bombing large numbers of refugees out of their own countries, fought for an economic system of global trade and economic justice, stopped propping up tinpot tyrannies throughout the poor world and distributed the resources of the world more fairly, we'd miraculously discover that, for the most part, people would, if they could, prefer to continue living in their own countries - visiting us as tourists, as we visit them.
Wednesday, 21 April 2010
Unions need to build among migrant workers
To read the newspapers you would think that migrant workers were a new phenomenon – and a problematic one at that. What concerns the media though is a certain kind of migration. No one rages against the “flood” of foreign tourists or worries about being “swamped” by overseas students – although these are two of the largest categories of migrants to Britain. It is migrant workers who are supposedly overloading public services, driving down wages and taking the British jobs that Gordon Brown infamously promised to British workers. This hostility is nothing new. Our rulers have always tried to blame migrants for taking housing and overcrowding schools. But migrants have played a key role in the British labour movement. Chartist leader William Cuffay, who founded a tailors’ union in 1839, was the son of a slave from St Kitts in the Caribbean. The matchgirls and dockers who were at the forefront of establishing general unions in the 1890s included many Irish workers. The women who fought for union rights in the Grunwick photo processing plant in 1976 were largely East African Asians. Now people come from a widening variety of places and often go to areas with little experience of migration. Figures published by the regional TUC showed that in three months in 2004, job centres in Cornwall issued national insurance numbers to new arrivals from 57 different countries, including Poland, China and the Philippines.
Also new is the extent to which those who arrive in Britain work for agencies. Britain has more agency workers than any other European Union member state, but they have the fewest employment rights – a position that New Labour has fiercely defended. What few rights workers do have are hard to enforce. This is particularly the case for those who may have poor English, no right to benefits, or who lose their right to be in the country if they lose their job – as those on work permits do. For those working without legal authority, so-called “illegal workers”, there may be no enforceable rights at all. They face unpaid wages, massive deductions for rent and transport, tied accommodation, very long hours, sexual and racial abuse, and intimidation. Government immigration rules determine who ends up in this situation – which countries of origin and what sort of work is acceptable. Overseas students who work for over 20 hours a week, work permit holders who change employers or holidaymakers who overstay their visas and work are all considered “illegal”. The uncertainty of their status and absence of rights makes workers vulnerable, and there are employers who take advantage. It is not migrant workers who drive down wages – where it happens, it’s their bosses.
Ministers purport to be concerned, but their emphasis is on enforcement of immigration rules by stepping up raids. The majority of penalties for employing workers illegally have been imposed on takeaway restaurants. The Health and Safety Executive and Gangmasters Licensing Authority, who have some powers to protect workers’ interests, are starved of resources. Yet in 2006 the government got over £230 million from fees for visas, work permits and workers’ registration covering workers from the eastern EU. Racism is promoted between workers of different nationalities by some bosses. Immigration rules and the way in which they are implemented are also racist – one in two Nigerians who overstay their visas are pursued by what is now the UK Borders Agency, but only one in 50 Australians.Unions can make a difference in reducing divisions, and in recent years all the major ones have taken steps to organise among migrants. There have also been a number of successful initiatives at grassroots level. Migrant workers in warehouses, cleaning contractors and food processors have successfully unionised and won improvements. Both Unite and the RMT unions have had some successes with contract cleaners.Most unions now prepare recruitment material in different languages – with Usdaw offering 35. CWU strikers used their translated leaflets during last year’s post dispute to persuade Polish casual workers not to cross picket lines and to join the union.
Unison has produced a branch handbook on organising migrants and a “myth-buster” aimed at its membership. In Westminster, central London, the Unison branch has organised traffic wardens and toilet attendants – almost all migrants and all privatised. Unite has campaigned for limited regularisation for those working without official permission, and successfully for the right for domestic workers to change employers when faced with abuse without losing their right to be in Britain. However, the unions’ focus on winning recognition offers little to workers who cannot wait to get their unpaid wages, or who are worried about denunciation to the authorities. Employers have exploited competition among unions for members and recognition. In the US the slack has been taken up by “workers’ centres”, who have developed direct action tactics such as demonstrating on bosses’ lawns until outstanding pay was forthcoming. In France, the sans papiers movement has fought for regularisation for undocumented workers. An effective strategy in Britain needs to combine these tactics with union organisation and opposition to the wealth gap that forces people to leave home to find work. It should also avoid organising migrants into separate branches – this can at best have only short-lived success. If we build a movement based on solidarity, there will be no question of anyone driving down wages.
Also new is the extent to which those who arrive in Britain work for agencies. Britain has more agency workers than any other European Union member state, but they have the fewest employment rights – a position that New Labour has fiercely defended. What few rights workers do have are hard to enforce. This is particularly the case for those who may have poor English, no right to benefits, or who lose their right to be in the country if they lose their job – as those on work permits do. For those working without legal authority, so-called “illegal workers”, there may be no enforceable rights at all. They face unpaid wages, massive deductions for rent and transport, tied accommodation, very long hours, sexual and racial abuse, and intimidation. Government immigration rules determine who ends up in this situation – which countries of origin and what sort of work is acceptable. Overseas students who work for over 20 hours a week, work permit holders who change employers or holidaymakers who overstay their visas and work are all considered “illegal”. The uncertainty of their status and absence of rights makes workers vulnerable, and there are employers who take advantage. It is not migrant workers who drive down wages – where it happens, it’s their bosses.
Ministers purport to be concerned, but their emphasis is on enforcement of immigration rules by stepping up raids. The majority of penalties for employing workers illegally have been imposed on takeaway restaurants. The Health and Safety Executive and Gangmasters Licensing Authority, who have some powers to protect workers’ interests, are starved of resources. Yet in 2006 the government got over £230 million from fees for visas, work permits and workers’ registration covering workers from the eastern EU. Racism is promoted between workers of different nationalities by some bosses. Immigration rules and the way in which they are implemented are also racist – one in two Nigerians who overstay their visas are pursued by what is now the UK Borders Agency, but only one in 50 Australians.Unions can make a difference in reducing divisions, and in recent years all the major ones have taken steps to organise among migrants. There have also been a number of successful initiatives at grassroots level. Migrant workers in warehouses, cleaning contractors and food processors have successfully unionised and won improvements. Both Unite and the RMT unions have had some successes with contract cleaners.Most unions now prepare recruitment material in different languages – with Usdaw offering 35. CWU strikers used their translated leaflets during last year’s post dispute to persuade Polish casual workers not to cross picket lines and to join the union.
Unison has produced a branch handbook on organising migrants and a “myth-buster” aimed at its membership. In Westminster, central London, the Unison branch has organised traffic wardens and toilet attendants – almost all migrants and all privatised. Unite has campaigned for limited regularisation for those working without official permission, and successfully for the right for domestic workers to change employers when faced with abuse without losing their right to be in Britain. However, the unions’ focus on winning recognition offers little to workers who cannot wait to get their unpaid wages, or who are worried about denunciation to the authorities. Employers have exploited competition among unions for members and recognition. In the US the slack has been taken up by “workers’ centres”, who have developed direct action tactics such as demonstrating on bosses’ lawns until outstanding pay was forthcoming. In France, the sans papiers movement has fought for regularisation for undocumented workers. An effective strategy in Britain needs to combine these tactics with union organisation and opposition to the wealth gap that forces people to leave home to find work. It should also avoid organising migrants into separate branches – this can at best have only short-lived success. If we build a movement based on solidarity, there will be no question of anyone driving down wages.
Monday, 12 April 2010
Give no inch to racist lies
Unite leader Tony Woodley gets straight to the point when he argues that the rise of the BNP is "a direct consequence of Labour's failure to represent the interests of our core voters." We are reaching the bottom of the pit dug by the new Labour practitioners of the dark art of triangulation: the attempt to be more "pro-business" than the Tories and "tougher" on immigration than the Daily Mail. The results have been disastrous. In a race to the right, entire communities have been abandoned as the mainstream parties narrow their contest to a handful of marginal seats. If you are unfortunate enough to live in a "safe" seat, your vote is taken for granted. There is little incentive for policy makers to focus on delivering affordable homes or secure jobs, when what counts is polling data from swing voters. A deep and damaging recession has strained political loyalties to a breaking point. White, working-class communities - solid Labour voters for decades - are angry. They have a right to be. Birmingham provides a glimpse of how far Labour has moved from its roots. Since the Labour government was elected in 1997, no council homes have been built in the city.Before Labour lost control of the council in 2004, council housing was in systematic decline. The council seemed to treat it as an embarrassment that it wanted rid of. It ran out of ideas when its plans to dispose of council housing were scuppered by a decisive vote by tenants against a transfer.
It is indicative of Labour's crisis that even Birmingham's Conservative-led council has been more swift in turning its back on failed market approaches. It is now committed to a council house-building programme, taking the ground that should have been Labour's forte. As local councillors, we now deal with the social fallout from a waiting list that runs to 35,000 people. Neither housing associations nor the private market have been able to do more than scratch the surface of this problem. And the collapse in the housing market has brought us to a virtual standstill. It is no surprise that such a severe shortage of one of the essentials of life gnaws away at community cohesion. Frustration runs high as families languish in overcrowded conditions for years while they anxiously watch for any sign of progress up the housing waiting lists. Myths and outright lies circulate and gain credence. Even in my own county it is not uncommon to hear people from Pakistani families echo the myths that recently arrived Somalis are "taking all the homes." Throughout the country, the housing crisis is acute. Labour MP Glenda Jackson is right to call for a "social housing revolution" and right to argue that undermining inequality - whether social, political or racial - cuts to the heart of the BNP extremist appeal. But an emphasis on social inequality in itself is not enough to undercut the appeal of the BNP. Anger at economic injustice is one thing. Directing that anger at scapegoated ethnic minorities is another thing entirely. There is nothing legitimate about that.
The appeal of the BNP cannot be reduced to protest vote alone. Its appeal is based on racism and everyone knows it. As one pithy letter writer to the Guardian put it: "There are a lot of racists around." A significant factor in this growing acceptability of racism is the ideological assault that has accompanied the "war on terror." It is not accidental that the BNP has focused its attacks on the Muslim community. This is fertile ground for the fascists and much of the spadework has already been done on their behalf. Attacks on the Muslim community from mainstream politicians and newspapers have left a bitter taste. Anything and everything Islamic is viewed with increasing suspicion as a potential threat to national cohesion and identity. Polite commentators wring their hands about a lack of "integration." The less polite BNP put it in terms calculated to stir up hatred and resentment. Labour's mantra on the need to make others more "British," rather than making ourselves less racist, has helped undermine concepts of national identity that celebrate pluralism and diversity. Yes, the appeal of the BNP must be undermined by giving back some hope to communities who are threatened by the dark clouds of recession, and years of deepening inequality. But, without an assault on the myths and lies of the racists, this will not be enough. The housing crisis is not caused by asylum-seekers. Unemployment is not rising because a Polish worker gets a job in Britain. If we give an inch to these lies, they will take a mile.
It is indicative of Labour's crisis that even Birmingham's Conservative-led council has been more swift in turning its back on failed market approaches. It is now committed to a council house-building programme, taking the ground that should have been Labour's forte. As local councillors, we now deal with the social fallout from a waiting list that runs to 35,000 people. Neither housing associations nor the private market have been able to do more than scratch the surface of this problem. And the collapse in the housing market has brought us to a virtual standstill. It is no surprise that such a severe shortage of one of the essentials of life gnaws away at community cohesion. Frustration runs high as families languish in overcrowded conditions for years while they anxiously watch for any sign of progress up the housing waiting lists. Myths and outright lies circulate and gain credence. Even in my own county it is not uncommon to hear people from Pakistani families echo the myths that recently arrived Somalis are "taking all the homes." Throughout the country, the housing crisis is acute. Labour MP Glenda Jackson is right to call for a "social housing revolution" and right to argue that undermining inequality - whether social, political or racial - cuts to the heart of the BNP extremist appeal. But an emphasis on social inequality in itself is not enough to undercut the appeal of the BNP. Anger at economic injustice is one thing. Directing that anger at scapegoated ethnic minorities is another thing entirely. There is nothing legitimate about that.
The appeal of the BNP cannot be reduced to protest vote alone. Its appeal is based on racism and everyone knows it. As one pithy letter writer to the Guardian put it: "There are a lot of racists around." A significant factor in this growing acceptability of racism is the ideological assault that has accompanied the "war on terror." It is not accidental that the BNP has focused its attacks on the Muslim community. This is fertile ground for the fascists and much of the spadework has already been done on their behalf. Attacks on the Muslim community from mainstream politicians and newspapers have left a bitter taste. Anything and everything Islamic is viewed with increasing suspicion as a potential threat to national cohesion and identity. Polite commentators wring their hands about a lack of "integration." The less polite BNP put it in terms calculated to stir up hatred and resentment. Labour's mantra on the need to make others more "British," rather than making ourselves less racist, has helped undermine concepts of national identity that celebrate pluralism and diversity. Yes, the appeal of the BNP must be undermined by giving back some hope to communities who are threatened by the dark clouds of recession, and years of deepening inequality. But, without an assault on the myths and lies of the racists, this will not be enough. The housing crisis is not caused by asylum-seekers. Unemployment is not rising because a Polish worker gets a job in Britain. If we give an inch to these lies, they will take a mile.
Sunday, 11 April 2010
Rolling back the human rights clock
Amnesty International will place Britain firmly in the dock on Monday as "the most influential and aggressive promoter in Europe" of the policy of returning detainees to countries where they may face torture. This policy, which Britain has pursued since 1992, of repatriating people who it believes pose a risk to national security, is based on insubstantial assurances from other governments that they will not be tortured. It has always been the most transparent of excuses for a tactic which doesn't give a damn for the interests and rights of the individuals concerned, but concentrates on an "out of sight, out of mind" philosophy, which might be convenient for the British government, but is potentially lethal for its victims. Many of the countries that have given such assurances routinely practise torture on prisoners and the idea that these pledges are worth even the flimsy paper that they are written on is a despicable fraud. It is being worked on those least able to take care of their own interests and is a transparent attempt to evade the international responsibilities laid on the government to take due regard for the safety of refugees and political exiles, whatever it may think of their political principles. Britain is, of course, not alone in adopting this callous and evil practice.
Amnesty makes it clear that it has spread all across Europe and it lists at least 12 countries where it has been adopted and even enshrined in domestic law. There are no words to explain just how dangerous this is to its victims and cases abound where these assurances have been proven to be worthless;and shockingly it's not just in Europe that it has been adopted enthusiastically. In one sense, it's merely the diplomatic version of the "extraordinary rendition" used by the US to transport suspects in the so-called war on terror to countries where they could be conveniently tortured while keeping US hands comparatively clean. The US has also used this diplomatic fiction extensively. Indeed, it was only last week that we reported the conclusion of a "Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty" between the US and Algeria, a country not notorious for its gentle treatment of detainees. This led justice campaigners Reprieve to issue a desperate plea to European countries to intervene to rescue Guantanamo Bay detainee Ahmed Belbacha from deportation and almost certain torture in Algeria. The severity of his plight can be measured by the fact that he is campaigning to stay in the US prison camp rather than face return to Algeria. What appears to be happening is that governments the world over are abandoning civilised standards of behaviour as too onerous for them to apply and washing their hands of these unfortunate individuals.
But, in carelessly abandoning such standards under flimsy legal fictions, they are sabotaging a move to a more humane and progressive set of moral standards that the world has been struggling painfully towards under the pressure generated by generations of human rights campaigners. This campaign has been going on since the darkest days of empire in the 19th century and was showing just the faintest signs of success. That success is now in jeopardy because, with the hysteria and violence generated by the phoney war on terror, the world is steadily moving backwards. Lord knows, it wasn't much progress. But to abandon it now under the camouflage of cheap and worthless paper agreements is to abandon all the civilised values that capitalist countries claim to value and abide by, but routinely betray. We cannot allow them that retreat and that betrayal. It is one retreat among many that are designed to roll back hundreds of years of hard-won progress by the working class and progressive movement and it really is one step too far.
Amnesty makes it clear that it has spread all across Europe and it lists at least 12 countries where it has been adopted and even enshrined in domestic law. There are no words to explain just how dangerous this is to its victims and cases abound where these assurances have been proven to be worthless;and shockingly it's not just in Europe that it has been adopted enthusiastically. In one sense, it's merely the diplomatic version of the "extraordinary rendition" used by the US to transport suspects in the so-called war on terror to countries where they could be conveniently tortured while keeping US hands comparatively clean. The US has also used this diplomatic fiction extensively. Indeed, it was only last week that we reported the conclusion of a "Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty" between the US and Algeria, a country not notorious for its gentle treatment of detainees. This led justice campaigners Reprieve to issue a desperate plea to European countries to intervene to rescue Guantanamo Bay detainee Ahmed Belbacha from deportation and almost certain torture in Algeria. The severity of his plight can be measured by the fact that he is campaigning to stay in the US prison camp rather than face return to Algeria. What appears to be happening is that governments the world over are abandoning civilised standards of behaviour as too onerous for them to apply and washing their hands of these unfortunate individuals.
But, in carelessly abandoning such standards under flimsy legal fictions, they are sabotaging a move to a more humane and progressive set of moral standards that the world has been struggling painfully towards under the pressure generated by generations of human rights campaigners. This campaign has been going on since the darkest days of empire in the 19th century and was showing just the faintest signs of success. That success is now in jeopardy because, with the hysteria and violence generated by the phoney war on terror, the world is steadily moving backwards. Lord knows, it wasn't much progress. But to abandon it now under the camouflage of cheap and worthless paper agreements is to abandon all the civilised values that capitalist countries claim to value and abide by, but routinely betray. We cannot allow them that retreat and that betrayal. It is one retreat among many that are designed to roll back hundreds of years of hard-won progress by the working class and progressive movement and it really is one step too far.
Saturday, 3 April 2010
Immigration blame game is dangerous territory
Building Britain's Future is the government's draft legislative programme for 2009-2010. It claims "Britishness" throughout. The front cover has a union jack logo, while Gordon Brown's foreword speaks of "the best of British values." It sends shivers down the spine of those of us who regard values as universal. A small part of the programme, hyped up by Downing Street spin-doctors, is the proposal to change the allocation rules for council housing. The document doesn't say "British homes for British workers" but certainly implies it. Stating that "there is a perception that allocations policies for social housing are unfair, inflexible and act as a barrier to people being able to move when they need to," the government proposes to enable "local authorities to give more priority to local people and those who have spent a long time on a waiting list." Code for "too many foreigners are being given council houses." There may be that perception, but is it based on reality? The law governing the allocation of council and housing association properties forbids an allocation to most people "subject to immigration control" and other "persons from abroad." That means most immigrants are not entitled to social housing at all. Contrary to the "perception" that the government relies on, asylum-seekers cannot obtain social housing. No-one who is here unlawfully - because they came in under the radar or overstayed after their visas expired - is entitled. European Union nationals who don't - or can't - work aren't allowed to apply. Those on conditional visas - students, work permits, family members etc - can't apply although they pay taxes and national insurance. Only a small proportion of immigrants are even entitled to apply for social housing.
If you're not a British or European Union citizen, you need refugee status or unconditional indefinite leave to remain. British citizens returning to Britain after having lived abroad must pass a "habitual residence" test to show that they intend to remain here permanently. European Union workers may apply for social housing, but only if they remain here as workers or have been here working for at least five years. Anything less would be a breach of European Union obligations. Migrants who are entitled to apply for social housing have a harder job trying to apply than British citizens. The eligibility rules are extremely complex and so migrants who are entitled can be told (wrongly) that they are not. Those groups of recent arrivals who are entitled to apply are not in any privileged position. If they are entitled to apply, their need for social housing will be assessed just like everyone else's. Recent arrivals who don't have children and are able-bodied are as unlikely as any equivalent British citizen ever to be given a council or housing association property. Those who are assessed as eligible for social housing take their place in the queue. Research by the Equality and Human Rights Commission has found that most recent migrants tend to live in private rented accommodation, not in social housing. Their accommodation is more likely to be sub-standard than that occupied by British citizens. The second part of the promise "give more priority to ... those who have spent a long time on a waiting list" is already established law. By law, local authorities must recognise and give a "reasonable preference," otherwise known as a "reasonable headstart," to certain groups of people who have the greatest need for social housing - homeless people, those living in overcrowded or otherwise unsatisfactory housing, people who need to move for medical or welfare reasons.
Each local authority's policy must ensure that there is some recognition of those needs. In other words, someone who falls within one of those categories is given a certain number of points. But this emphasis on "need" doesn't mean that someone in one of those categories will always trump a person who has less need, but has been waiting longer. Last year an important legal case decided by the House of Lords confirmed that, provided local authorities ensured that there was some recognition of those groups specified by statute as entitled to a "reasonable preference," how local authorities then organised their allocation schemes and worked out the number of points that were given for various forms of need or for waiting time, was entirely up to each local authority. So local authorities have actually been giving points for waiting time. If the government is considering changing the law, it would have to junk the concept that those who have a greater need for social housing should have that need recognised. That would be a major policy change. Even the Tories, who legislated to implement Peter Lilley's "little list" of people such as single mothers who didn't deserve council homes, couldn't quite bring themselves to abolish preference for "need" altogether. Of course, the main point is that council and housing association homes are in desperately short supply - so people who have been waiting for years for a home find scapegoats. The recession has forced the government to acknowledge the shortage of social housing. Local authorities are finally going to be allowed to keep the receipts from council house sales, and put that capital money into building more houses. The government says that 3,000 additional council homes and 12,500 housing association homes will be built over the next two years.
That's a start. But what with five million households waiting for council or housing association properties, and the numbers set to increase as repossessions of owner-occupied homes increase, it is probably a drop in the ocean. The responsibility for scapegoating, however, lies with the government. As a local councillor in a hard-pressed local authority during the 1990s, I'm well aware that anyone waiting years for a new home looks at their neighbour and questions why he or she appears to have queue-jumped. But it's the job of politicians and the media to refute those myths, not propagate them. The slogan "local homes for local people" originates from the BNP, was taken up by Margaret Hodge and effectively now by the government. As I've demonstrated, it's simply not true that migrants unfairly queue-jump. It's wholly irresponsible of the government to legitimate that false perception. Rather than taking on the BNP, it's playing into their hands.
If you're not a British or European Union citizen, you need refugee status or unconditional indefinite leave to remain. British citizens returning to Britain after having lived abroad must pass a "habitual residence" test to show that they intend to remain here permanently. European Union workers may apply for social housing, but only if they remain here as workers or have been here working for at least five years. Anything less would be a breach of European Union obligations. Migrants who are entitled to apply for social housing have a harder job trying to apply than British citizens. The eligibility rules are extremely complex and so migrants who are entitled can be told (wrongly) that they are not. Those groups of recent arrivals who are entitled to apply are not in any privileged position. If they are entitled to apply, their need for social housing will be assessed just like everyone else's. Recent arrivals who don't have children and are able-bodied are as unlikely as any equivalent British citizen ever to be given a council or housing association property. Those who are assessed as eligible for social housing take their place in the queue. Research by the Equality and Human Rights Commission has found that most recent migrants tend to live in private rented accommodation, not in social housing. Their accommodation is more likely to be sub-standard than that occupied by British citizens. The second part of the promise "give more priority to ... those who have spent a long time on a waiting list" is already established law. By law, local authorities must recognise and give a "reasonable preference," otherwise known as a "reasonable headstart," to certain groups of people who have the greatest need for social housing - homeless people, those living in overcrowded or otherwise unsatisfactory housing, people who need to move for medical or welfare reasons.
Each local authority's policy must ensure that there is some recognition of those needs. In other words, someone who falls within one of those categories is given a certain number of points. But this emphasis on "need" doesn't mean that someone in one of those categories will always trump a person who has less need, but has been waiting longer. Last year an important legal case decided by the House of Lords confirmed that, provided local authorities ensured that there was some recognition of those groups specified by statute as entitled to a "reasonable preference," how local authorities then organised their allocation schemes and worked out the number of points that were given for various forms of need or for waiting time, was entirely up to each local authority. So local authorities have actually been giving points for waiting time. If the government is considering changing the law, it would have to junk the concept that those who have a greater need for social housing should have that need recognised. That would be a major policy change. Even the Tories, who legislated to implement Peter Lilley's "little list" of people such as single mothers who didn't deserve council homes, couldn't quite bring themselves to abolish preference for "need" altogether. Of course, the main point is that council and housing association homes are in desperately short supply - so people who have been waiting for years for a home find scapegoats. The recession has forced the government to acknowledge the shortage of social housing. Local authorities are finally going to be allowed to keep the receipts from council house sales, and put that capital money into building more houses. The government says that 3,000 additional council homes and 12,500 housing association homes will be built over the next two years.
That's a start. But what with five million households waiting for council or housing association properties, and the numbers set to increase as repossessions of owner-occupied homes increase, it is probably a drop in the ocean. The responsibility for scapegoating, however, lies with the government. As a local councillor in a hard-pressed local authority during the 1990s, I'm well aware that anyone waiting years for a new home looks at their neighbour and questions why he or she appears to have queue-jumped. But it's the job of politicians and the media to refute those myths, not propagate them. The slogan "local homes for local people" originates from the BNP, was taken up by Margaret Hodge and effectively now by the government. As I've demonstrated, it's simply not true that migrants unfairly queue-jump. It's wholly irresponsible of the government to legitimate that false perception. Rather than taking on the BNP, it's playing into their hands.
Monday, 29 March 2010
Tories become more hate-filled by the day
It appears there's an election on. It's easy to tell because the Tories have started getting back to their ABCs, like attacking immigrants. After spending all that time and money trying to convince us that they had changed, that they were modern, that they were no longer the nasty party, David Cameron has suddenly remembered that his supporters actually are nasty little racists. In a time when a Tory victory is looking far less assured, Cameron thinks he needs to move to shore up his core vote against the likes of UKIP; that means reaching for the dog whistles. Once upon a time Cameron bent over backwards to shift the public image of his party towards a new fluffy, friendly style. He even changed the logo to a piece of broccoli - what more could we ask of him? However, the general election campaign is beginning to look more and more like it will mirror the despicable 2005 "Are you thinking what we're thinking..." campaign by the day. At the weekend Cameron announced a flagship policy that if he were elected prime minister he would slash net immigration. The Tories have backed up this launch with a national roll-out of posters attacking Gordon Brown personally for letting in too many immigrants. Cameron plans to cut immigration by imposing a strict "cap" on numbers, a policy as reprehensible as it is unworkable.
Of course Cameron can say he is in favour of drastically reducing net immigration but he happens to be pushing buttons that he has little control over. Most British immigration is from the EU and there is no mechanism to restrict this. More than that, when it comes to Tory immigration policy, as with all their other policies, money will trump any other consideration. Left-of-centre think tank the Institute for Public Policy Research asked: "Would the government be happy to tell KPMG that it could not bring over an analyst from its New York office? Or to tell Arsenal that it could not sign a promising young player from Cote d'Ivoire?" The answer is, of course, no. Immigration controls are about keeping the poor out. If you have wealth behind you, your free passage will always be assured. The flip side of this is that immigration laws are frequently used against union organisation. While we allow these laws to force part of the workforce to live in fear of being deported, we hand the employers a union-busting tool on a plate. While we have a situation where there are tight restrictions on the movement of labour while capital is free to travel as it pleases, those who exploit us are being dealt all the trump cards. Our solidarity, sympathy and friendship has to be with those who work alongside us no matter where they are from - because the alternative is to allow their presence to divide us. For the left we have to have the basic understanding that the lines on a map are not some objective standard of worth and if you were born on one side of an abstraction your rights as a citizen should not be quite different from if you come from the other side of that conceptual marker.
The right is quite wrong to cite pressure on our public services as a reason to curtail immigration. Without migrant workers the NHS, for example, would collapse. Whether it's cleaners, nurses, doctors or specialists the health service is propped up at every level by workers who have come from overseas. Far from being a burden on public services, immigrants are responsible for keeping them functioning, yet we treat them like we are doing them a favour. It is not just the Tories, though would that it were. Cameron's announcement came just a day after Defence Minister Kevan Jones attacked the idea that Gurkhas should be allowed to settle in Britain. He explicitly denounced Joanna Lumley, who has been a high-profile campaigner in favour of Gurkhas' rights, saying that she was guilty of "raising expectations" and that she should be making it clear that Gurkhas have no rights. Amid allegations that Gurkhas bound for Britain were being forced to pay hundreds of pounds in legal advice in Nepal, Jones said of Lumley: "Her deathly silence, frankly, irritates me." It's interesting that the Labour minister is more irritated by someone who campaigns for extending people's rights than he is by the laws of his own government that perpetuate the injustice in the first place. In particular Labour's record on asylum has been a disgrace.
There was a grim reminder of this in Glasgow two weeks ago when a family whose application had been turned down committed suicide together. The three Russians jumped from a tower block on the day they were to be evicted from the hostel in which they were staying, having lost their appeal to stay in Britain. These deaths are just the most visible reminder of the horrors that our government inflicts upon people whom it has decided cannot have even the basic rights that we regard as normal. Recent events in Yarl's Wood, with protests and hunger strikes, show that people will stand up for their rights. But without our support they are left in a very vulnerable position. Locking up children is an abomination at the best of times, but locking them up just because they are foreign is a disgrace that no Labour government should ever be associated with. Yet this is not just commonplace, the government takes pride in its harsh attitude towards those from other countries. If the political parties hope to fight this election on the idea of "fairness" then let them start with the way we treat guests to this country. Imprisoning those fleeing torture, impoverishing those seeking shelter and treating as a "problem" those who have come here to make a contribution to society is not fair. It should not be a criminal offence to have the wrong colour passport. It should be regarded as a universal human right to travel from one place to another freely without one state or another treating you with contempt because you don't seem to know your place.
Of course Cameron can say he is in favour of drastically reducing net immigration but he happens to be pushing buttons that he has little control over. Most British immigration is from the EU and there is no mechanism to restrict this. More than that, when it comes to Tory immigration policy, as with all their other policies, money will trump any other consideration. Left-of-centre think tank the Institute for Public Policy Research asked: "Would the government be happy to tell KPMG that it could not bring over an analyst from its New York office? Or to tell Arsenal that it could not sign a promising young player from Cote d'Ivoire?" The answer is, of course, no. Immigration controls are about keeping the poor out. If you have wealth behind you, your free passage will always be assured. The flip side of this is that immigration laws are frequently used against union organisation. While we allow these laws to force part of the workforce to live in fear of being deported, we hand the employers a union-busting tool on a plate. While we have a situation where there are tight restrictions on the movement of labour while capital is free to travel as it pleases, those who exploit us are being dealt all the trump cards. Our solidarity, sympathy and friendship has to be with those who work alongside us no matter where they are from - because the alternative is to allow their presence to divide us. For the left we have to have the basic understanding that the lines on a map are not some objective standard of worth and if you were born on one side of an abstraction your rights as a citizen should not be quite different from if you come from the other side of that conceptual marker.
The right is quite wrong to cite pressure on our public services as a reason to curtail immigration. Without migrant workers the NHS, for example, would collapse. Whether it's cleaners, nurses, doctors or specialists the health service is propped up at every level by workers who have come from overseas. Far from being a burden on public services, immigrants are responsible for keeping them functioning, yet we treat them like we are doing them a favour. It is not just the Tories, though would that it were. Cameron's announcement came just a day after Defence Minister Kevan Jones attacked the idea that Gurkhas should be allowed to settle in Britain. He explicitly denounced Joanna Lumley, who has been a high-profile campaigner in favour of Gurkhas' rights, saying that she was guilty of "raising expectations" and that she should be making it clear that Gurkhas have no rights. Amid allegations that Gurkhas bound for Britain were being forced to pay hundreds of pounds in legal advice in Nepal, Jones said of Lumley: "Her deathly silence, frankly, irritates me." It's interesting that the Labour minister is more irritated by someone who campaigns for extending people's rights than he is by the laws of his own government that perpetuate the injustice in the first place. In particular Labour's record on asylum has been a disgrace.
There was a grim reminder of this in Glasgow two weeks ago when a family whose application had been turned down committed suicide together. The three Russians jumped from a tower block on the day they were to be evicted from the hostel in which they were staying, having lost their appeal to stay in Britain. These deaths are just the most visible reminder of the horrors that our government inflicts upon people whom it has decided cannot have even the basic rights that we regard as normal. Recent events in Yarl's Wood, with protests and hunger strikes, show that people will stand up for their rights. But without our support they are left in a very vulnerable position. Locking up children is an abomination at the best of times, but locking them up just because they are foreign is a disgrace that no Labour government should ever be associated with. Yet this is not just commonplace, the government takes pride in its harsh attitude towards those from other countries. If the political parties hope to fight this election on the idea of "fairness" then let them start with the way we treat guests to this country. Imprisoning those fleeing torture, impoverishing those seeking shelter and treating as a "problem" those who have come here to make a contribution to society is not fair. It should not be a criminal offence to have the wrong colour passport. It should be regarded as a universal human right to travel from one place to another freely without one state or another treating you with contempt because you don't seem to know your place.
Sunday, 28 March 2010
A chronicle of injustices
The European Convention on Human Rights gives us certain rights if we are arrested or detained. These rights are also deep-seated principles of English common law. How then can a government apparently committed to the Human Rights Act keep people locked up on the basis of evidence that can't be shown to the detainees or their lawyers? The use of secret evidence was rare before September 11 2001. In December that year Parliament consciously broke the Human Rights Act when it decided that foreign nationals could be indefinitely detained without charge or trial; as a result eleven men were imprisoned in Belmarsh until December 2004, when the House of Lords ruled that indefinite detention was unlawful. Before that decision, the men had tried to obtain bail or release from the Special Immigration Appeals Commission, only to find that they were turned down because of evidence kept secret from them and their lawyers. In February 2009, after a series of conflicting and confusing decisions by the British courts, the European Court of Human Rights considered the use of secret evidence. The government argued that revealing the evidence would jeopardise national security and that using "special advocates" made secret evidence acceptable.
Special advocates are lawyers approved by the Home Office to consider the secret evidence and to make what arguments might be available in the detainee's favour about that evidence. As soon as the special advocate receives the evidence, he or she must not speak to anyone about it and in particular must have no contact with the detainee and his or her lawyers. In the absence of being able to ask the detainee about the evidence, how does the special advocate know where any holes might be, whether a particular informant has a motive to lie or whether the detainee has an alibi? The European Court of Human Rights disapproved. It said: "The special advocate could not perform this function (of testing the evidence) in any useful way unless the detainee was provided with sufficient information about the allegations against him to enable him to give effective instructions to the special advocate." At the very least, the evidence disclosed to the detainee should be "sufficiently specific ... for the applicant to provide his representatives and the special advocate with information with which to refute them, if such information existed." So surely that should have been an end to the matter.
But the problem has been that the European Court of Human Rights was considering secret evidence used to justify indefinite detention which had officially ended in 2005. How did this ruling apply to the labyrinthine system of detention without charge or trial that has sprung up since 2005? Indefinite detention still exists, just in new forms. In 2005 the government proposed that house arrest should replace the by then unlawful system of indefinite detention - Parliament refused but did back the more neutrally termed "control orders." The men who had been detained were released and immediately subject to control orders. Control orders are not a soft option. They involve 16-hour curfews, restrictions on where the person can go during those hours when he or she is allowed out, visitors restricted to an approved list of people, bans on using the phone or internet and electronic tagging. One South African judge has said: "We had measures like that in South Africa. We called them house arrest." When the Belmarsh detainees and others went to the Special Immigration Appeals Commission, they again found that the government was relying on secret evidence - yet again they could not be told why they were being held in these conditions. In June the House of Lords decided that the European Court of Human Rights decision on secret evidence applied to control order cases too. Anyone subject to a control order should be told at least the gist of the evidence used against them. But by that time there were more people indefinitely detained on the basis of secret evidence, this time by the use of "immigration detention."
These are people who have been served with deportation notices by the Home Office on the grounds that they are a threat to national security and who are then refused bail while they challenge the decisions to deport them through the courts. And while the court battle is fought out over years, the people themselves are either imprisoned or released on bail on even more stringent conditions than those used in control orders - 22-hour curfews, advance approval of the routes of walks during the remaining two hours and so on. Yet again they don't know why the government thinks that they are such a risk. On December 1, the Court of Appeal decided that the refusal of bail in these cases, and any draconian bail conditions, was so close to control orders that the same rules should apply and at least the gist of the secret evidence should be disclosed. All well and good. But not for Mr U, who was imprisoned first in Belmarsh and now for immigration reasons for all but eight months of the last eight years. He has been refused bail despite the new rulings for reasons that still haven't been given to him or to his lawyers. The government claims that revealing the secret evidence would jeopardise the work of the security services and put informants at risk. But who knows how reliable this information is without the person it is used against knowing what is said? And who knows whether any of this information was obtained by foreign governments using torture, making the information unreliable?
The bottom line is that none of these people has ever been charged with a criminal offence. Yet they have all been detained or subjected to effective house arrest because of information that they aren't allowed to know about and can't challenge. The decision to refuse bail to Mr U may be an aberration and it may be that the courts will implement the higher courts' decisions properly. But the government will still twist and turn to retain as much secrecy as possible.
Special advocates are lawyers approved by the Home Office to consider the secret evidence and to make what arguments might be available in the detainee's favour about that evidence. As soon as the special advocate receives the evidence, he or she must not speak to anyone about it and in particular must have no contact with the detainee and his or her lawyers. In the absence of being able to ask the detainee about the evidence, how does the special advocate know where any holes might be, whether a particular informant has a motive to lie or whether the detainee has an alibi? The European Court of Human Rights disapproved. It said: "The special advocate could not perform this function (of testing the evidence) in any useful way unless the detainee was provided with sufficient information about the allegations against him to enable him to give effective instructions to the special advocate." At the very least, the evidence disclosed to the detainee should be "sufficiently specific ... for the applicant to provide his representatives and the special advocate with information with which to refute them, if such information existed." So surely that should have been an end to the matter.
But the problem has been that the European Court of Human Rights was considering secret evidence used to justify indefinite detention which had officially ended in 2005. How did this ruling apply to the labyrinthine system of detention without charge or trial that has sprung up since 2005? Indefinite detention still exists, just in new forms. In 2005 the government proposed that house arrest should replace the by then unlawful system of indefinite detention - Parliament refused but did back the more neutrally termed "control orders." The men who had been detained were released and immediately subject to control orders. Control orders are not a soft option. They involve 16-hour curfews, restrictions on where the person can go during those hours when he or she is allowed out, visitors restricted to an approved list of people, bans on using the phone or internet and electronic tagging. One South African judge has said: "We had measures like that in South Africa. We called them house arrest." When the Belmarsh detainees and others went to the Special Immigration Appeals Commission, they again found that the government was relying on secret evidence - yet again they could not be told why they were being held in these conditions. In June the House of Lords decided that the European Court of Human Rights decision on secret evidence applied to control order cases too. Anyone subject to a control order should be told at least the gist of the evidence used against them. But by that time there were more people indefinitely detained on the basis of secret evidence, this time by the use of "immigration detention."
These are people who have been served with deportation notices by the Home Office on the grounds that they are a threat to national security and who are then refused bail while they challenge the decisions to deport them through the courts. And while the court battle is fought out over years, the people themselves are either imprisoned or released on bail on even more stringent conditions than those used in control orders - 22-hour curfews, advance approval of the routes of walks during the remaining two hours and so on. Yet again they don't know why the government thinks that they are such a risk. On December 1, the Court of Appeal decided that the refusal of bail in these cases, and any draconian bail conditions, was so close to control orders that the same rules should apply and at least the gist of the secret evidence should be disclosed. All well and good. But not for Mr U, who was imprisoned first in Belmarsh and now for immigration reasons for all but eight months of the last eight years. He has been refused bail despite the new rulings for reasons that still haven't been given to him or to his lawyers. The government claims that revealing the secret evidence would jeopardise the work of the security services and put informants at risk. But who knows how reliable this information is without the person it is used against knowing what is said? And who knows whether any of this information was obtained by foreign governments using torture, making the information unreliable?
The bottom line is that none of these people has ever been charged with a criminal offence. Yet they have all been detained or subjected to effective house arrest because of information that they aren't allowed to know about and can't challenge. The decision to refuse bail to Mr U may be an aberration and it may be that the courts will implement the higher courts' decisions properly. But the government will still twist and turn to retain as much secrecy as possible.
Tuesday, 23 March 2010
Why we should defend migrant workers
Anyone reading the press or listening to politicians’ speeches will notice periodic attempts to whip up fears about immigration “running out of control” and to blame immigrants for creating all manner of social problems. Both the Tories and New Labour are talking immigration up as an issue, grubbing for votes by competing to appear “tough” on migrants. That’s at the “respectable” end of the debate. At the other end is a slew of lies, rumours and hate propaganda churned out by racists, whether they be of the casual variety or involved in organised groups such as the fascist British National Party (BNP). Many of these stories are racist myths that have simply been recycled to fit new targets. Last year the Daily Mail ran a story claiming that Eastern European immigrants had been capturing and eating swans. Exactly the same story was spread about asylum seekers a few years ago – and about Gypsies and Travellers before that. Another typical anti-immigrant myth involves attacking migrant workers for being a drain on society or gaining illicit access to services such as benefits or council housing; these stories whip up hatred against migrant workers while simultaneously providing the authorities with a convenient excuse for their failure to deliver.
One story that did the rounds a year or so ago claims that Lithuanians are being paid £5,000 by the government to return home. They are taking this money, so the story goes, yet returning to Britain illegally in order to claim the money again. These stories may seem ridiculous, but they are often believed. For example, the BNP made political mileage with claims that council housing in the east London borough of Barking & Dagenham was being preferentially assigned to African immigrants. There is a chronic shortage of council housing in the borough, and it has seen significant population changes in recent years as people from across London have moved there – many of them from ethnic minorities. The combination of these two factors meant that many people bought the BNP’s lies – despite the fact that no such “preference for immigrants” scheme existed, and despite the fact that the BNP councillors in the borough voted against building new council housing. The picture is the same across Britain – recent immigrants, whether they be refugees or migrant workers, only account for a tiny fraction of social housing.
The housing charity Shelter estimates that less than 1 percent of social housing in 2006/7 went to new arrivals from the latest countries to join European Union (EU). Only 0.7 percent of homeless acceptances were from these countries. But the lies persist, with stories, for instance, that maternity units in hospitals are being filled up by “Polish mothers”. In fact immigrants are more likely to be single and of working age than the population in general – and consequently depend less on public services such as healthcare. As workers, migrants contribute to British society and the economy. They help to pay for and run public services. The NHS, public transport and a host of other services simply wouldn’t function without immigrant labour. Some studies suggest that Britain will need many millions of new immigrants over coming decades if it is to maintain the present ratio of workers to pensioners. According to official statistics immigration is rising – some 600,000 people came to live in Britain in 2006. But so is emigration, with 400,000 people leaving the country in the same year. The right wing notion that Britain is “full up” does not stand up to scrutiny.
But on the left too there can be confusion about migrant labour and a tendency to see these workers in primarily negative terms – that they drive down wages, that bosses use them to break strikes, that they are hard or impossible to organise. The people who put forward these arguments need not be crude racists. They may well hold progressive views on a whole host of other issues. But the underlying pessimism of this position – the despair over ever achieving unity among workers – is ultimately an echo of the divide and rule tactics over immigration used by the ruling class. These tactics need to be confronted. The conditions many migrants work in are shameful. A recent TUC study of workers from new EU states found that nearly a quarter had no written contract and over a quarter had problems receiving their full wages. The study also found that migrants were ten times more likely to be working for less than the minimum wage. One case highlighted by the Guardian newspaper this week involved a Lithuanian construction worker taking home £8.80 for a 39-hour week after deductions. Organising these workers should be a priority for trade unions. Unity is the only way of ensuring they get decent pay and conditions and that bosses do not exploit their vulnerable position to drive down employment standards more generally.
We should acknowledge and celebrate the contribution that migrants make to our daily lives, and resist attempts to denigrate and demonise them. But we should also understand why these myths have a resonance in society. There is a lack of affordable housing in Britain. Our health service is frequently in crisis. And vast swathes of people across the country earn too little money to make ends meet, leading to a lifetime of stress, debt and misery. All these circumstances are now being sharpened and intensified by the impending financial crisis. Soaring inflation is coinciding with plummeting house prices and a panic over debt in financial circles – the so called “credit crunch”. The signs are that this economic crisis will get worse – leading to further pressures on wages, housing and public services. People who are angry look for someone to blame – and immigrants can become a target in this context. It is the duty of the left to defend them – and to argue that this defence ultimately helps all workers.
One story that did the rounds a year or so ago claims that Lithuanians are being paid £5,000 by the government to return home. They are taking this money, so the story goes, yet returning to Britain illegally in order to claim the money again. These stories may seem ridiculous, but they are often believed. For example, the BNP made political mileage with claims that council housing in the east London borough of Barking & Dagenham was being preferentially assigned to African immigrants. There is a chronic shortage of council housing in the borough, and it has seen significant population changes in recent years as people from across London have moved there – many of them from ethnic minorities. The combination of these two factors meant that many people bought the BNP’s lies – despite the fact that no such “preference for immigrants” scheme existed, and despite the fact that the BNP councillors in the borough voted against building new council housing. The picture is the same across Britain – recent immigrants, whether they be refugees or migrant workers, only account for a tiny fraction of social housing.
The housing charity Shelter estimates that less than 1 percent of social housing in 2006/7 went to new arrivals from the latest countries to join European Union (EU). Only 0.7 percent of homeless acceptances were from these countries. But the lies persist, with stories, for instance, that maternity units in hospitals are being filled up by “Polish mothers”. In fact immigrants are more likely to be single and of working age than the population in general – and consequently depend less on public services such as healthcare. As workers, migrants contribute to British society and the economy. They help to pay for and run public services. The NHS, public transport and a host of other services simply wouldn’t function without immigrant labour. Some studies suggest that Britain will need many millions of new immigrants over coming decades if it is to maintain the present ratio of workers to pensioners. According to official statistics immigration is rising – some 600,000 people came to live in Britain in 2006. But so is emigration, with 400,000 people leaving the country in the same year. The right wing notion that Britain is “full up” does not stand up to scrutiny.
But on the left too there can be confusion about migrant labour and a tendency to see these workers in primarily negative terms – that they drive down wages, that bosses use them to break strikes, that they are hard or impossible to organise. The people who put forward these arguments need not be crude racists. They may well hold progressive views on a whole host of other issues. But the underlying pessimism of this position – the despair over ever achieving unity among workers – is ultimately an echo of the divide and rule tactics over immigration used by the ruling class. These tactics need to be confronted. The conditions many migrants work in are shameful. A recent TUC study of workers from new EU states found that nearly a quarter had no written contract and over a quarter had problems receiving their full wages. The study also found that migrants were ten times more likely to be working for less than the minimum wage. One case highlighted by the Guardian newspaper this week involved a Lithuanian construction worker taking home £8.80 for a 39-hour week after deductions. Organising these workers should be a priority for trade unions. Unity is the only way of ensuring they get decent pay and conditions and that bosses do not exploit their vulnerable position to drive down employment standards more generally.
We should acknowledge and celebrate the contribution that migrants make to our daily lives, and resist attempts to denigrate and demonise them. But we should also understand why these myths have a resonance in society. There is a lack of affordable housing in Britain. Our health service is frequently in crisis. And vast swathes of people across the country earn too little money to make ends meet, leading to a lifetime of stress, debt and misery. All these circumstances are now being sharpened and intensified by the impending financial crisis. Soaring inflation is coinciding with plummeting house prices and a panic over debt in financial circles – the so called “credit crunch”. The signs are that this economic crisis will get worse – leading to further pressures on wages, housing and public services. People who are angry look for someone to blame – and immigrants can become a target in this context. It is the duty of the left to defend them – and to argue that this defence ultimately helps all workers.
Monday, 22 March 2010
Why anti-immigrant ranters are idiotic bigots
Over the last few years, it's become one of our quaint English traditions that on any day following the announcement of immigration figures, certain newspapers display headlines such as "TEN MILLION OR SOMETHING LIKE THAT POLES TO SWARM INTO BRITAIN LIKE PLUMBING LOCUSTS!!! And they plan to BUGGER OUR KITTENS!!! These newspapers would compete with each other until they seemed to insist the number of Poles coming was more than the number of Poles in the world--but even then, they'd have replied, "Yes, well, that's because they're planning to bring 10 million of their dead to make use of our soft-touch spirit welfare scheme." But the latest figures, released yesterday, have spoiled this game because it turns out half the Poles who came here have gone back to Poland. Presumably, these newspapers will get round that by screaming, "Poland on brink of disaster as it's invaded by millions of Poles!!!" "Our hospitals simply can't cope with the numbers coming in," said an unnamed doctor. "I'm not racist, but we're already full up." Like all panics about immigration, the anti-Polish version has created an almost artistic level of irrationality.
A landlord of a pub in Lincolnshire, who seemed otherwise charming and eloquent, told me, "The trouble with Poles is they walk in groups of four on the pavement, so you fall in the road trying to get round them." I said, "I'm sure just as many English people walk in groups of four on the pavement." He said, "Yes, but at least they do it in a language I can understand." Which at least is an original way to be annoyed--to snarl: "I don't mind falling in a puddle, as long as it's with the right mix of vowels and consonants, but when it's with three or even FOUR Zs, it's time we took a stand." Now that more are leaving than coming, the anti-immigration newspapers have to revert to more traditional complaints. For example, one paper told us that, "One immigrant is arrested every four minutes." But they must have been short of space, because they left out how the average for the whole population is one arrest every three minutes. Now they'll print a story saying, "Immigrants are refusing to adapt to our way of life by only being arrested once every four minutes. If they don't want to follow our customs, they should go back to where they came from." Even then, it turned out these figures were taken disproportionately from London, where the immigrant population is higher than across Britain, and anyone arrested for murder who didn't fill in the box marked "nationality" was assumed to be an immigrant. Because say what you like about a British murderer, at least they have the manners to complete a form in full afterwards.
The most peculiar side of the obsession with foreigners coming over here and disturbing our population figures is they have little to say about the British citizens living in other countries, the number of which has now passed 5 million. And yet, they often have features about finding the perfect retirement home abroad: "Judith and Roger eventually settled on their delightful rustic cottage in the heart of the Loire, complete with two acres of arable pastures and a goat, from where they could suck dry the overstretched resources of the long-suffering local council. 'I'm a stranger in my own bleeding village,' said one fed-up neighbor." There are 760,000 of us living in Spain; one-twelfth of the population of Cyprus is now British; 5 percent of New Zealand; and so on. And we can hardly claim that on our travels we "adopt the customs of the local community," unless the travel companies claim: "Our popular party game of seeing who's first to drink a bottle of absinthe and puke in an egg cup topless is not only lots of fun, but also a tribute to an ancient fertility ritual here in Crete, and as such enhances the tourists' understanding of regional history and culture." Most of the apocalyptic warnings of Eastern European takeover could be traced back to the organization MigrationWatch, quoted uniformly by the most hysterical anti-immigration papers.
But now that the Poles are going the other way, instead of issuing a statement reading, "Whoops, sorry," the group has declared that the UK population is still destined to rise to an unsustainable 80 million in the next 40 years, because millions are coming here from Africa. That's it. Africa, BILLIONS of them, and they're bringing Mount Kilimanjaro because of our soft-touch mountain payments, and all their giraffes and the Sahara desert - or so the Rabid Right would have you believe!
A landlord of a pub in Lincolnshire, who seemed otherwise charming and eloquent, told me, "The trouble with Poles is they walk in groups of four on the pavement, so you fall in the road trying to get round them." I said, "I'm sure just as many English people walk in groups of four on the pavement." He said, "Yes, but at least they do it in a language I can understand." Which at least is an original way to be annoyed--to snarl: "I don't mind falling in a puddle, as long as it's with the right mix of vowels and consonants, but when it's with three or even FOUR Zs, it's time we took a stand." Now that more are leaving than coming, the anti-immigration newspapers have to revert to more traditional complaints. For example, one paper told us that, "One immigrant is arrested every four minutes." But they must have been short of space, because they left out how the average for the whole population is one arrest every three minutes. Now they'll print a story saying, "Immigrants are refusing to adapt to our way of life by only being arrested once every four minutes. If they don't want to follow our customs, they should go back to where they came from." Even then, it turned out these figures were taken disproportionately from London, where the immigrant population is higher than across Britain, and anyone arrested for murder who didn't fill in the box marked "nationality" was assumed to be an immigrant. Because say what you like about a British murderer, at least they have the manners to complete a form in full afterwards.
The most peculiar side of the obsession with foreigners coming over here and disturbing our population figures is they have little to say about the British citizens living in other countries, the number of which has now passed 5 million. And yet, they often have features about finding the perfect retirement home abroad: "Judith and Roger eventually settled on their delightful rustic cottage in the heart of the Loire, complete with two acres of arable pastures and a goat, from where they could suck dry the overstretched resources of the long-suffering local council. 'I'm a stranger in my own bleeding village,' said one fed-up neighbor." There are 760,000 of us living in Spain; one-twelfth of the population of Cyprus is now British; 5 percent of New Zealand; and so on. And we can hardly claim that on our travels we "adopt the customs of the local community," unless the travel companies claim: "Our popular party game of seeing who's first to drink a bottle of absinthe and puke in an egg cup topless is not only lots of fun, but also a tribute to an ancient fertility ritual here in Crete, and as such enhances the tourists' understanding of regional history and culture." Most of the apocalyptic warnings of Eastern European takeover could be traced back to the organization MigrationWatch, quoted uniformly by the most hysterical anti-immigration papers.
But now that the Poles are going the other way, instead of issuing a statement reading, "Whoops, sorry," the group has declared that the UK population is still destined to rise to an unsustainable 80 million in the next 40 years, because millions are coming here from Africa. That's it. Africa, BILLIONS of them, and they're bringing Mount Kilimanjaro because of our soft-touch mountain payments, and all their giraffes and the Sahara desert - or so the Rabid Right would have you believe!
Thursday, 11 March 2010
Is immigration destroying British culture?
Everything is changing. Many people worry that we’re “losing the British way of life”. But this is an argument that can play into the hands of the right wing and lead to divisions among workers. It is often framed in terms that suggest immigration is destroying “our way of life”. But what exactly is “British” culture? No one can really agree. For some people, it is about eating fish and chips, being good at queuing, and drinking lots of tea. The confusion exists because there is no single British way of life and there never has been. There have always been class divisions, and the lifestyle of the rich and powerful is totally alien to that of the majority.
How many people are brought up by nannies, packed off to Eton, and funnelled into top positions in the City, the army and the state? Such people are said to share the culture of the rest of us. A UK Independence Party document launched this year pronounced, “Britishness can be defined in terms of belief in democracy, fair play and freedom, as well as traits such as politeness.”
Tell that to the former colonies, the workers who have died struggling for the vote and for basic rights, or the people of Iraq and Afghanistan. The way of life of a worker in a supermarket or car factory is totally different to that of a banker paid millions in bonuses, even if they were both born in Britain. In fact the lives that workers here lead are increasingly similar to workers in other countries; they are even likely to eat similar food or wear similar clothes to each other. At the same time, the global rich share the same pampered lifestyle whether they are Saudi princes, British hedge fund managers or Texan oil magnates. Culture is not something fixed and timeless. It is always changing because of wider changes in society. In Britain it was once common for some pubs not to serve women. It isn’t today, because women’s role in society has been transformed in the past few decades. What is popular or acceptable rests on wider social and political factors, not some static “culture”.And most of the time, most people are in favour of the changes that take place.
British life has been massively enriched by the influences from outside these islands on politics, food, music and ideas. Ideas about “British culture” and “national identity” are pushed from the top of society. Our rulers use the idea of a single British identity to try and control people. And, at times of crisis, politicians blame people who don’t conform to “British” culture for all kinds of things. So, they blame hip-hop music and “gang” culture for gun and knife crime. Following the revolution in Russia in 1917, a term was developed in the US to define people suspected of being communist— “un-American”. Today the state calls people who oppose its imperialist adventures “un-British”. Ruling classes use nationalism in an attempt to class divisions.
They want British workers to feel they have more in common with British bosses than with workers in other countries. They want to pressure workers, who have no interest in a system that exploits them, into supporting that system. Sometimes people on the left accept such ideas about Britain. They may say they are proud of the 19th century Chartists demanding democracy, or the anti-fascist spirit of the mass protests in the 1930s.
But these struggles are part of an international working class culture. Socialists shouldn’t waste time trying to find something to be proud of based on where we were born. We should fight for a world where ordinary people don’t need such flimsy ideas in order to feel worth something. Instead we should celebrate the real culture of solidarity and resistance that workers here share with workers from across the world. When society is in flux, and “all that is solid melts into air”, as Karl Marx wrote, people can feel insecure. But clinging on to an illusory sense of a past “golden age” of “Britishness” only strengthens the right. Our culture is the international culture of working class struggle - that’s something to really be proud of.
How many people are brought up by nannies, packed off to Eton, and funnelled into top positions in the City, the army and the state? Such people are said to share the culture of the rest of us. A UK Independence Party document launched this year pronounced, “Britishness can be defined in terms of belief in democracy, fair play and freedom, as well as traits such as politeness.”
Tell that to the former colonies, the workers who have died struggling for the vote and for basic rights, or the people of Iraq and Afghanistan. The way of life of a worker in a supermarket or car factory is totally different to that of a banker paid millions in bonuses, even if they were both born in Britain. In fact the lives that workers here lead are increasingly similar to workers in other countries; they are even likely to eat similar food or wear similar clothes to each other. At the same time, the global rich share the same pampered lifestyle whether they are Saudi princes, British hedge fund managers or Texan oil magnates. Culture is not something fixed and timeless. It is always changing because of wider changes in society. In Britain it was once common for some pubs not to serve women. It isn’t today, because women’s role in society has been transformed in the past few decades. What is popular or acceptable rests on wider social and political factors, not some static “culture”.And most of the time, most people are in favour of the changes that take place.
British life has been massively enriched by the influences from outside these islands on politics, food, music and ideas. Ideas about “British culture” and “national identity” are pushed from the top of society. Our rulers use the idea of a single British identity to try and control people. And, at times of crisis, politicians blame people who don’t conform to “British” culture for all kinds of things. So, they blame hip-hop music and “gang” culture for gun and knife crime. Following the revolution in Russia in 1917, a term was developed in the US to define people suspected of being communist— “un-American”. Today the state calls people who oppose its imperialist adventures “un-British”. Ruling classes use nationalism in an attempt to class divisions.
They want British workers to feel they have more in common with British bosses than with workers in other countries. They want to pressure workers, who have no interest in a system that exploits them, into supporting that system. Sometimes people on the left accept such ideas about Britain. They may say they are proud of the 19th century Chartists demanding democracy, or the anti-fascist spirit of the mass protests in the 1930s.
But these struggles are part of an international working class culture. Socialists shouldn’t waste time trying to find something to be proud of based on where we were born. We should fight for a world where ordinary people don’t need such flimsy ideas in order to feel worth something. Instead we should celebrate the real culture of solidarity and resistance that workers here share with workers from across the world. When society is in flux, and “all that is solid melts into air”, as Karl Marx wrote, people can feel insecure. But clinging on to an illusory sense of a past “golden age” of “Britishness” only strengthens the right. Our culture is the international culture of working class struggle - that’s something to really be proud of.
Friday, 5 March 2010
Nobody is a non-person
As soon as the financial crisis broke last year, up popped Immigration Minister Phil Woolas to tell us that it was time to start cracking down on immigration. Woolas is a man who is able to turn every issue, no matter how unrelated, into one about migrants. He was quoted in November as justifying the Afghan occupation because it kept immigration down. Perhaps he spends all day mumbling about foreigners making his Coco Pops soggy, his shoes too tight and the clouds too dark, but he only comes to public attention when his ramblings coincide with something that also happens to be in the news. Mind you, even Woolas hasn't gone as far as his Italian counterpart, who suggested last week that foods like kebabs be banned. If he threatened one of the nation's national dishes, that really would spark riots, so perhaps Woolas is not as far gone as I thought. Give him time. Sadly Woolas is just the most obnoxious example of a far more widespread tendency to regard immigration as a problem that has to be handled, rather than a freedom where every citizen of the world should have the right to come and go as they please.
Even Gordon Brown is toughening his rhetoric in response to the ever more shrill voices in the Daily Mail et al denouncing Britain's "open-door immigration policy," despite the fact that we've had no such thing in living memory. On Thursday Brown announced a new phase in policy with a keynote speech and draft immigration legislation. He said he wanted to introduce restrictions for migrant workers in accessing skilled jobs - this despite the fact that we have a massive undersupply in the skilled workforce of nurses and plumbers, for example. He also declared his intention to make life even more difficult for asylum-seekers and refugees.
The Refugee Council's head of policy Jonathan Ellis responded by saying the government has proposed "making refugees homeless and destitute. That was ruled illegal by the courts four years ago." Not only that, the government proposes that families who are unable to return home will be refused cash support and forced to rely on a payment card. This makes a mockery of the government's claim to be safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children seeking asylum."
This government's treatment of asylum-seekers is a sickening disgrace. We force people to live in poverty then despise them for their terrible conditions. We lock up refugees and their children and then treat them like the criminals that we have made them resemble. We should not prevent people from being treated as full citizens and then use their low status and poverty as evidence that they are less than us. Nobody is a non-person just because they were born in a different place. One argument that has gained political currency is that the mainstream parties need to start addressing the immigration "problem" because of the threat of the British National Party. But there is something fundamentally corrupting about the idea that in order to combat fascists you have to co-opt their most poisonous ideas. The idea that the BNP can be countered by legitimising its core policies is just plain wrong. We need to counter its ideas, advancing arguments about why immigration is not the problem.
Who is it that denies white working-class people council homes? Who lays them off when recession comes around? Who decides the levels of poverty pay that so many still exist on? None of these issues is caused by immigration, yet it's immigrants that so often get the blame. There are specific issues, such as the use of immigrant and other vulnerable labour to undercut wages - but our answer has to be organising these workers in effective trade unions, not backing the state's right to keep those workers out. Immigration controls actually help to entrench employers' ability to play one set of workers off against another. While migrants are more vulnerable it undermines their confidence to build or get involved in the fight for decent wages. Where workers have come together, immigrants have played an invaluable leading role in trade union struggles. It's the employers who are determined to avoid paying a decent living wage that are the problem, not those poor enough to be willing to be underpaid for the work they do. What side of a line on a map you're from is not important.
But the free market has always meant free movement for capital but not for labour. The cards are habitually stacked against us when we allow artificial divisions like the colour of our passports to have real meaning. Late last year asylum-seeker Rose-Jane Wanjohi and her British-born daughter Natale were saved from deportation by fellow passengers on the flight they had been due to be taken away on. A number of the passengers refused to allow the plane to take off and be a party to an injustice. For them it was a small act, but for Wanjohi, who was returned to the relative safety of a detention centre, it meant everything. It is not true to say that the majority of people are racist or that most of us are directly complicit in the atrocious way that refugees are treated in this country. But it is true that racist ideas have been allowed to seep into every aspect of our society and that even good people can sometimes be drawn into the idea that immigrants are a problem.
When government ministers, of all people, give credence to these ideas, particularly in an atmosphere when mainstream politicians are utterly despised by a large proportion of the population, it does not act as a bulwark against racism but shifts the consensus towards those who would divide us. The BNP as an organisation is not staffed by tactical geniuses or electoral experts - it draws its vote from a pre-existing well of bigotry. It is those ideas that we have to address not just because we want to combat the far-right but because it is capitalism that is the root of our problems not immigration.
Even Gordon Brown is toughening his rhetoric in response to the ever more shrill voices in the Daily Mail et al denouncing Britain's "open-door immigration policy," despite the fact that we've had no such thing in living memory. On Thursday Brown announced a new phase in policy with a keynote speech and draft immigration legislation. He said he wanted to introduce restrictions for migrant workers in accessing skilled jobs - this despite the fact that we have a massive undersupply in the skilled workforce of nurses and plumbers, for example. He also declared his intention to make life even more difficult for asylum-seekers and refugees.
The Refugee Council's head of policy Jonathan Ellis responded by saying the government has proposed "making refugees homeless and destitute. That was ruled illegal by the courts four years ago." Not only that, the government proposes that families who are unable to return home will be refused cash support and forced to rely on a payment card. This makes a mockery of the government's claim to be safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children seeking asylum."
This government's treatment of asylum-seekers is a sickening disgrace. We force people to live in poverty then despise them for their terrible conditions. We lock up refugees and their children and then treat them like the criminals that we have made them resemble. We should not prevent people from being treated as full citizens and then use their low status and poverty as evidence that they are less than us. Nobody is a non-person just because they were born in a different place. One argument that has gained political currency is that the mainstream parties need to start addressing the immigration "problem" because of the threat of the British National Party. But there is something fundamentally corrupting about the idea that in order to combat fascists you have to co-opt their most poisonous ideas. The idea that the BNP can be countered by legitimising its core policies is just plain wrong. We need to counter its ideas, advancing arguments about why immigration is not the problem.
Who is it that denies white working-class people council homes? Who lays them off when recession comes around? Who decides the levels of poverty pay that so many still exist on? None of these issues is caused by immigration, yet it's immigrants that so often get the blame. There are specific issues, such as the use of immigrant and other vulnerable labour to undercut wages - but our answer has to be organising these workers in effective trade unions, not backing the state's right to keep those workers out. Immigration controls actually help to entrench employers' ability to play one set of workers off against another. While migrants are more vulnerable it undermines their confidence to build or get involved in the fight for decent wages. Where workers have come together, immigrants have played an invaluable leading role in trade union struggles. It's the employers who are determined to avoid paying a decent living wage that are the problem, not those poor enough to be willing to be underpaid for the work they do. What side of a line on a map you're from is not important.
But the free market has always meant free movement for capital but not for labour. The cards are habitually stacked against us when we allow artificial divisions like the colour of our passports to have real meaning. Late last year asylum-seeker Rose-Jane Wanjohi and her British-born daughter Natale were saved from deportation by fellow passengers on the flight they had been due to be taken away on. A number of the passengers refused to allow the plane to take off and be a party to an injustice. For them it was a small act, but for Wanjohi, who was returned to the relative safety of a detention centre, it meant everything. It is not true to say that the majority of people are racist or that most of us are directly complicit in the atrocious way that refugees are treated in this country. But it is true that racist ideas have been allowed to seep into every aspect of our society and that even good people can sometimes be drawn into the idea that immigrants are a problem.
When government ministers, of all people, give credence to these ideas, particularly in an atmosphere when mainstream politicians are utterly despised by a large proportion of the population, it does not act as a bulwark against racism but shifts the consensus towards those who would divide us. The BNP as an organisation is not staffed by tactical geniuses or electoral experts - it draws its vote from a pre-existing well of bigotry. It is those ideas that we have to address not just because we want to combat the far-right but because it is capitalism that is the root of our problems not immigration.
Wednesday, 3 March 2010
Do migrant workers drive down wages?
For many people it seems logical to conclude that migrant workers drive down wages. The argument goes that, if a Polish worker will work for £6 an hour on a building site, the boss won’t take on workers at the going rate of, say, £8 an hour. So wages fall. It is true that bosses try and get away with paying lower wages. But the history of migration to Britain shows that there is no causal connection between immigration and wages. So, in the 1930s there was very little immigration into Britain – yet there was mass unemployment. In the 1950s and 1960s British bosses and government ministers actively recruited migrants from the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent to work in booming Britain. Workers’ wages rose throughout those decades.
Today wages are declining, often due to cuts in overtime or hours. This coincides with a reduction in the number of migrants coming to Britain. But these examples relate to average wages. Is it different for those in low paid work? Bosses have tried to use migrant workers to lower wages in some low paid sectors. But an increase in numbers of migrant workers has sometimes raised wages. Struggles by migrant cleaners in London have won higher pay for many London cleaners in private companies.
A common myth is that migrant workers have driven down wages in the construction industry. Yet wages across the construction industry have risen over the last decade, even for the lowest paid. There is a battle over wages in construction, but it is not because of “foreign workers”. It stems from bosses trying to use unregulated workers – of whatever origin – and subcontracting to pay less. This is nothing new. Communist Party militant Jack Dash described working on a building site in the 1930s in his autobiography, published in 1969. “This was in the days when Irish immigrant labour was spreading,” he wrote. “Raw Catholic lads from Connemara and Galway were driven through poverty to come over to this country and seek a living and send money home their families. The building workers referred to them as ‘two for half-a-crown’.” This meant that bosses got two men working for the price of one. Dash added, “How true this was I don’t know, but like all racial minorities they were scapegoats – today it is our coloured brothers who are dehumanised and insulted.” He unionised the site and recruited the migrant workers into the union, stopping attempts to undercut wages.
There is a lesson here. Firms compete with each other and will always pay as little as they can in wages to boost their profits. But this is not the fault of migrant workers – it is the fault of the bosses. Those who seek to restrict the number of new workers are aiming at the wrong target. Division among workers is dangerous. An anti-immigrant climate can help the bosses pay migrant workers less. It then becomes easier to force everyone’s wages down. The bosses want “flexible labour markets” – a pool of workers that are instantly available, and instantly sackable. When crisis hits and they scale back production they say there are “too many” workers. There are only “too many” for the priorities of capitalism, the punishing number of hours people work and the assault on welfare services. Bosses try to use this so-called “reserve army of labour” to threaten workers into accepting lower wages. It has always been necessary to fight within the labour movement against the idea that immigrants are responsible for deteriorating conditions of workers. In the 1890s Jewish refugees were simultaneously accused of taking British workers’ jobs and of living on welfare – the same racist myths that we hear about migrant workers today
Jewish workers campaigned against the TUC, which had called for a complete halt to immigration as it said migrants were lowering wages. But the left was able to shape the debate. Strikes by Jewish tailors in Leeds showed the potential for building united action – against racism and the growing offensive against workers. The workers launched a pamphlet arguing that it was the systematic drive by textile bosses to accumulate profits that held pay down. In 1907, bosses brought 700 Spanish workers to work in the Dowlais Iron Works in South Wales, apparently to undercut wages. Initially they led to hostile demonstrations and a proposal for a strike against the Spanish. However, socialists were able to undercut this. The strength of the Spanish union organisation and left wing ideas within it turned anti-immigrant ideas around. As one account puts it, “The young militant miners’ leaders who emerged in the 1920s acknowledged that they primarily acquired much of their sharpened trade union consciousness and internationalist outlook from the presence of the Spaniards in their midst.” In a similar way, at the end of the Second World War, thousands of Polish workers were brought to Britain to work in the mines.
The right of the labour movement argued for quotas of Polish miners and said that Poles should be sacked if there were British workers to do the job. In contrast, the left agitated over the issue of cutting the working week – and won. The miners, alongside the Polish workers, achieved a five-day working week. The battle today, as then, is simpler than it may appear. We need to fight the propaganda intended to divide workers. And we need to fight against attacks on wages by pulling workers together against the bosses and racism.
Today wages are declining, often due to cuts in overtime or hours. This coincides with a reduction in the number of migrants coming to Britain. But these examples relate to average wages. Is it different for those in low paid work? Bosses have tried to use migrant workers to lower wages in some low paid sectors. But an increase in numbers of migrant workers has sometimes raised wages. Struggles by migrant cleaners in London have won higher pay for many London cleaners in private companies.
A common myth is that migrant workers have driven down wages in the construction industry. Yet wages across the construction industry have risen over the last decade, even for the lowest paid. There is a battle over wages in construction, but it is not because of “foreign workers”. It stems from bosses trying to use unregulated workers – of whatever origin – and subcontracting to pay less. This is nothing new. Communist Party militant Jack Dash described working on a building site in the 1930s in his autobiography, published in 1969. “This was in the days when Irish immigrant labour was spreading,” he wrote. “Raw Catholic lads from Connemara and Galway were driven through poverty to come over to this country and seek a living and send money home their families. The building workers referred to them as ‘two for half-a-crown’.” This meant that bosses got two men working for the price of one. Dash added, “How true this was I don’t know, but like all racial minorities they were scapegoats – today it is our coloured brothers who are dehumanised and insulted.” He unionised the site and recruited the migrant workers into the union, stopping attempts to undercut wages.
There is a lesson here. Firms compete with each other and will always pay as little as they can in wages to boost their profits. But this is not the fault of migrant workers – it is the fault of the bosses. Those who seek to restrict the number of new workers are aiming at the wrong target. Division among workers is dangerous. An anti-immigrant climate can help the bosses pay migrant workers less. It then becomes easier to force everyone’s wages down. The bosses want “flexible labour markets” – a pool of workers that are instantly available, and instantly sackable. When crisis hits and they scale back production they say there are “too many” workers. There are only “too many” for the priorities of capitalism, the punishing number of hours people work and the assault on welfare services. Bosses try to use this so-called “reserve army of labour” to threaten workers into accepting lower wages. It has always been necessary to fight within the labour movement against the idea that immigrants are responsible for deteriorating conditions of workers. In the 1890s Jewish refugees were simultaneously accused of taking British workers’ jobs and of living on welfare – the same racist myths that we hear about migrant workers today
Jewish workers campaigned against the TUC, which had called for a complete halt to immigration as it said migrants were lowering wages. But the left was able to shape the debate. Strikes by Jewish tailors in Leeds showed the potential for building united action – against racism and the growing offensive against workers. The workers launched a pamphlet arguing that it was the systematic drive by textile bosses to accumulate profits that held pay down. In 1907, bosses brought 700 Spanish workers to work in the Dowlais Iron Works in South Wales, apparently to undercut wages. Initially they led to hostile demonstrations and a proposal for a strike against the Spanish. However, socialists were able to undercut this. The strength of the Spanish union organisation and left wing ideas within it turned anti-immigrant ideas around. As one account puts it, “The young militant miners’ leaders who emerged in the 1920s acknowledged that they primarily acquired much of their sharpened trade union consciousness and internationalist outlook from the presence of the Spaniards in their midst.” In a similar way, at the end of the Second World War, thousands of Polish workers were brought to Britain to work in the mines.
The right of the labour movement argued for quotas of Polish miners and said that Poles should be sacked if there were British workers to do the job. In contrast, the left agitated over the issue of cutting the working week – and won. The miners, alongside the Polish workers, achieved a five-day working week. The battle today, as then, is simpler than it may appear. We need to fight the propaganda intended to divide workers. And we need to fight against attacks on wages by pulling workers together against the bosses and racism.
Tuesday, 2 March 2010
The exclusion fortress
Immigrants and refugees have always been made scapegoats when they have arrived in this country. But, maintains Kate Taylor, the arguments against their presence have become increasingly sinister. Now allusions to the destruction of our nation are becoming more prolific. Promoting such attitudes of fear in the minds of the public neglects the underlying problems that have created the increasing inequality with which we are faced today. Continuing failure to address these sources of division is cultivating a national identity that is exclusionary and insular, and fails to foster a true sense of belonging in modern-day Britain. What links together the progression of terrorism, Aids and TB and the corrosion of national identity in Britain? The answer: asylum seekers. If we are to believe the proliferation of articles in the media of late, these disparate and threatening trends are coming to the fore not because of growing global instability and poverty and changing demographic trends. Apparently it is the presence of refugees that is undermining our sense of cohesion and safety as a nation.
This feeling has escalated since the tragic murder of PC Stephen Oakes in Manchester a few years ago. The revelation that those responsible were seeking asylum in this country has fostered a linkage between refugees and international terrorism. Yet among asylum seekers are some of the most dispossessed and vulnerable people in the world. So why have they become the scourge of the nation? The scoring of political points by stimulating fear is a crucial factor. Asylum is a debate that needs to happen. But it is not debate but demonisation that is taking place, and because of it other vital social problems are being ignored. If we take asylum seekers out the equation, Britain will not suddenly become a nation defined by equality. Our national identity will still be as ambiguous as it always was. The poor of this country will still be poor. And the sense of disenfranchisement and neglect from those in former Labour heartlands will remain. The blame culture towards newcomers has a long history in Britain. New floods of immigrants always have been the target of doubt and hostility. Jews fleeing the pogroms in Eastern Europe were labelled "So-called Refugees" by the Daily Mail in 1900, just as the same paper judges many who arrive to be "bogus" today.
In 1972 the influx of Ugandan Asians following their expulsion by Idi Amin was to prove pivotal in advancing racialist politics. The National Front was soon marching under the banner "Stop the Asian Invasion". The arrival of Malawi Asians in 1976 prompted the Daily Express headline: "The passport to plenty - More Asians on the way to join 4-star immigrants". If this provokes a sense of déjà vu it is not surprising. Just over a year ago the National Union of Journalists filed a complaint with the Press Complaints Commission over the provocative way in which the Daily Express was handling the whole question of asylum. But times are also very different compared to periods of previous influxes of immigration. Impending war and continued destabilisation across many parts of the world have meant that there is not one discernible wave of refugees with a beginning and an end. Numbers of migrants moving around the globe are now less clear than they once were. With the expansion of the EU in the next few years, this uncertainty will only increase. More than ever before, a climate of fear threatens to deluge us. Due to new technology, terrorism is more prolific yet also more invisible than it once was. We do not know who or what is lurking around the corner. With that fear comes the emergence of new arguments against refugees that have taken on a nastier tone.
The language of disease is now commonplace. Trevor Kavanagh, political editor of The Sun, wrote at the end of January that immigrants had brought "alarming levels of infectious TB, Hepatitis B [and] incurable Aids to Britain". Anthony Browne also wrote that disease is the "new asylum peril that we cannot ignore". He stressed that "we live in fear of foreigners bringing death to our land ... It is not by allowing in terrorists that the Government's policy of mass immigration ... claim[s] most lives. It is through letting in too many germs." With such rhetoric we must ask, are the asylum seekers bringing in the germs or are they to be viewed as the germs themselves. More preposterously asylum seekers are also being blamed for failures in a long ailing National Health Service. In January Dr Liam Fox, the Shadow Health Secretary, wrote to all Primary Care Trusts and Hospital Trusts suggesting that UK citizens were being denied access to treatment in the NHS because of "preferential access" given to asylum seekers. He claimed that the NHS was becoming a health tourism destination. This assertion comes at a time when many have to travel abroad from Britain because treatment here is so inadequate.
But more dangerous is the implication that asylum seekers and immigrants are destroying the moral fabric of the nation. The sense of "otherness" attributed to those who are not "natives" has become far more threatening in its stereotyping. We cannot pretend that the asylum system is not in a mess. Bureaucratic inefficiency has resulted in chaos. But the pure venom directed by the media towards the victims of this ineptitude has reached an unparalleled scale. An immigration hierarchy defined by wealth and skin colour threatens to ensue. Asylum seekers are poor and importing poverty scares people. But it is not just these factors that are at issue. At the heart is the very argument against multiculturalism itself. A recent article by the social commentator Melanie Phillips in the Daily Mail contends that "there comes a point when, if there are too many cultures to be integrated, it becomes simply impossible to transmit a national story". The argument of both Phillips and the economist Bob Rowthorn in Prospect magazine last month is that the presence of too many immigrants dilutes our sense of history and cohesion as a nation. But as Benedict Anderson showed in his classic study Imagined Communities, many of the symbols and historical traditions that are used to emphasise national identities are indeed mythical.
Nations are concrete entities in so much as we believe in them, but they are also social constructs. So what we actually mean by nationhood is by no means the same for each person, but crucially, what we believe very much shapes whom we include within its parameters and how that contributes to our feelings of psychological and physical safety. Rowthorn believes that continued large-scale immigration will disturb existing national cultures and identities. "I believe it is a recipe for conflict ... nations are historical communities that have the right ... to resist developments that undermine their identity." He places the blame for the current apocalyptic scenario that has been painted, and which he appears to accept, on the shoulders of a shadowy cosmopolitan elite. "Many cosmopolitans accept the right of 'oppressed peoples' ... to a homeland and identity, but they regard such aspirations as illegitimate when expressed by the historic majorities of Western Europe," he writes. But this assertion lacks validity. Rowthorn fails to recognise the difference between the right of a nation to self-determination, and nationalism itself. The two are in no way the same. Discourses of nationalism in the context of already powerful countries are far more likely to be discourses of exclusion than those constructed by people seeking self-governance.
There is no such thing as an innocent statistic. But Rowthorn accepts the scare figures released by the anti-immigration lobbying group Migration Watch rather uncritically given recent revelations about the selectiveness of the numbers this group uses and the fact that they are extrapolations rather than fact. More worrying is the confusion he promotes between immigrants and ethnic minorities. "The presence of ethnic minorities has made it more difficult to teach a coherent national history." He neglects to note that most ethnic minorities in this country are citizens. Blurring the boundaries to question the belonging of ethnic minorities is a dangerous step.
Furthermore his points are not all borne out by reality. Britain, he asserts, "will soon contain a very large number of people who have no personal connection with the fairly recent past ... What was previously the history of the nation may come to be seen as merely the history of a shrinking ethnic majority, of little relevance to the rest." It is by no means inevitable that immigration is incompatible with maintaining pride in a country and maintaining a sense of cohesive identity. The US example in particular shows us the falsity of this argument. In the States, patriotism and a sense of national identity is perhaps stronger than anywhere despite a myriad of cultures competing for space. The belief is that anyone can be an American regardless of their origin. The emphasis is not on where you are from, or what colour you are. It is about values. This is the crucial point. Strong national identities are not a bad thing. It is how we define them that is the problem. If our identity is about more than past glories of dominance, and if it stretches to encompass the fairness, diversity and other positive traits we believe shape who we are, then migrants in no way pose a threat to our sense of self.
It is when we define Britishness narrowly and negatively that it begins to corrode under its own impossible weight. Immigration is not incompatible with a sense of nationhood. It only undermines nationhood when that nationhood is built upon exclusion. Railing against diversity and mulitculturalism itself is divisive and detracts from the real issues affecting the wellbeing of the country. A dangerous scenario is being drawn out in front of us. It is a world of surveillance, of fingerprinting all newcomers, and of fear of those who are not the same as the majority. In this world we threaten to become locked away in a fortress like never before, defining ourselves by whom we keep out. In terms of asylum, there already exists a clamour to exclude. Last month David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, added seven more countries to the list of those deemed to be "safe", thus automatically refusing refugee status to anyone from these countries. This is a way to appease the public and cut the statistics. The countries he named are Albania, Bulgaria, Jamaica, Macedonia, Moldova, Romania and Serbia/Montenegro. Some of the Eastern European countries have appalling records of human rights abuses against Roma. But the labelling of countries as safe is political in nature.
Genuine refugees are turned away or deported simply because they are from the wrong country. The case of Roma from the Czech Republic provides a good illustration of the arbitrariness of this policy. The Czech Republic is already designated safe and thus not one Romani person fleeing well documented persecution has ever been granted refugee status in Britain. Yet most who end up in Canada, for example, are granted asylum because the government there does recognise the situation in their country. It is not the case, then, that all whose asylum applications fail are not genuine refugees. But people want to keep them out, because they believe asylum seekers get everything, while they continue to have nothing. This is an illusion. Immigrants do not ruin a country's sense of itself. That has been done from within. Britain is in crisis. The removal of all asylum seekers and new immigrants will do nothing to diminish that. The failing NHS, the growth of poverty-related diseases, the lack of industry and the risk of terrorism are problems that will not just disappear. That the presence of refugees is being used as an excuse to attack the foundations of a diverse multicultural society is a disgrace that diverts attention from the real issues of long-term decline and growing division between different parts of the country that urgently needs to be tackled.
This feeling has escalated since the tragic murder of PC Stephen Oakes in Manchester a few years ago. The revelation that those responsible were seeking asylum in this country has fostered a linkage between refugees and international terrorism. Yet among asylum seekers are some of the most dispossessed and vulnerable people in the world. So why have they become the scourge of the nation? The scoring of political points by stimulating fear is a crucial factor. Asylum is a debate that needs to happen. But it is not debate but demonisation that is taking place, and because of it other vital social problems are being ignored. If we take asylum seekers out the equation, Britain will not suddenly become a nation defined by equality. Our national identity will still be as ambiguous as it always was. The poor of this country will still be poor. And the sense of disenfranchisement and neglect from those in former Labour heartlands will remain. The blame culture towards newcomers has a long history in Britain. New floods of immigrants always have been the target of doubt and hostility. Jews fleeing the pogroms in Eastern Europe were labelled "So-called Refugees" by the Daily Mail in 1900, just as the same paper judges many who arrive to be "bogus" today.
In 1972 the influx of Ugandan Asians following their expulsion by Idi Amin was to prove pivotal in advancing racialist politics. The National Front was soon marching under the banner "Stop the Asian Invasion". The arrival of Malawi Asians in 1976 prompted the Daily Express headline: "The passport to plenty - More Asians on the way to join 4-star immigrants". If this provokes a sense of déjà vu it is not surprising. Just over a year ago the National Union of Journalists filed a complaint with the Press Complaints Commission over the provocative way in which the Daily Express was handling the whole question of asylum. But times are also very different compared to periods of previous influxes of immigration. Impending war and continued destabilisation across many parts of the world have meant that there is not one discernible wave of refugees with a beginning and an end. Numbers of migrants moving around the globe are now less clear than they once were. With the expansion of the EU in the next few years, this uncertainty will only increase. More than ever before, a climate of fear threatens to deluge us. Due to new technology, terrorism is more prolific yet also more invisible than it once was. We do not know who or what is lurking around the corner. With that fear comes the emergence of new arguments against refugees that have taken on a nastier tone.
The language of disease is now commonplace. Trevor Kavanagh, political editor of The Sun, wrote at the end of January that immigrants had brought "alarming levels of infectious TB, Hepatitis B [and] incurable Aids to Britain". Anthony Browne also wrote that disease is the "new asylum peril that we cannot ignore". He stressed that "we live in fear of foreigners bringing death to our land ... It is not by allowing in terrorists that the Government's policy of mass immigration ... claim[s] most lives. It is through letting in too many germs." With such rhetoric we must ask, are the asylum seekers bringing in the germs or are they to be viewed as the germs themselves. More preposterously asylum seekers are also being blamed for failures in a long ailing National Health Service. In January Dr Liam Fox, the Shadow Health Secretary, wrote to all Primary Care Trusts and Hospital Trusts suggesting that UK citizens were being denied access to treatment in the NHS because of "preferential access" given to asylum seekers. He claimed that the NHS was becoming a health tourism destination. This assertion comes at a time when many have to travel abroad from Britain because treatment here is so inadequate.
But more dangerous is the implication that asylum seekers and immigrants are destroying the moral fabric of the nation. The sense of "otherness" attributed to those who are not "natives" has become far more threatening in its stereotyping. We cannot pretend that the asylum system is not in a mess. Bureaucratic inefficiency has resulted in chaos. But the pure venom directed by the media towards the victims of this ineptitude has reached an unparalleled scale. An immigration hierarchy defined by wealth and skin colour threatens to ensue. Asylum seekers are poor and importing poverty scares people. But it is not just these factors that are at issue. At the heart is the very argument against multiculturalism itself. A recent article by the social commentator Melanie Phillips in the Daily Mail contends that "there comes a point when, if there are too many cultures to be integrated, it becomes simply impossible to transmit a national story". The argument of both Phillips and the economist Bob Rowthorn in Prospect magazine last month is that the presence of too many immigrants dilutes our sense of history and cohesion as a nation. But as Benedict Anderson showed in his classic study Imagined Communities, many of the symbols and historical traditions that are used to emphasise national identities are indeed mythical.
Nations are concrete entities in so much as we believe in them, but they are also social constructs. So what we actually mean by nationhood is by no means the same for each person, but crucially, what we believe very much shapes whom we include within its parameters and how that contributes to our feelings of psychological and physical safety. Rowthorn believes that continued large-scale immigration will disturb existing national cultures and identities. "I believe it is a recipe for conflict ... nations are historical communities that have the right ... to resist developments that undermine their identity." He places the blame for the current apocalyptic scenario that has been painted, and which he appears to accept, on the shoulders of a shadowy cosmopolitan elite. "Many cosmopolitans accept the right of 'oppressed peoples' ... to a homeland and identity, but they regard such aspirations as illegitimate when expressed by the historic majorities of Western Europe," he writes. But this assertion lacks validity. Rowthorn fails to recognise the difference between the right of a nation to self-determination, and nationalism itself. The two are in no way the same. Discourses of nationalism in the context of already powerful countries are far more likely to be discourses of exclusion than those constructed by people seeking self-governance.
There is no such thing as an innocent statistic. But Rowthorn accepts the scare figures released by the anti-immigration lobbying group Migration Watch rather uncritically given recent revelations about the selectiveness of the numbers this group uses and the fact that they are extrapolations rather than fact. More worrying is the confusion he promotes between immigrants and ethnic minorities. "The presence of ethnic minorities has made it more difficult to teach a coherent national history." He neglects to note that most ethnic minorities in this country are citizens. Blurring the boundaries to question the belonging of ethnic minorities is a dangerous step.
Furthermore his points are not all borne out by reality. Britain, he asserts, "will soon contain a very large number of people who have no personal connection with the fairly recent past ... What was previously the history of the nation may come to be seen as merely the history of a shrinking ethnic majority, of little relevance to the rest." It is by no means inevitable that immigration is incompatible with maintaining pride in a country and maintaining a sense of cohesive identity. The US example in particular shows us the falsity of this argument. In the States, patriotism and a sense of national identity is perhaps stronger than anywhere despite a myriad of cultures competing for space. The belief is that anyone can be an American regardless of their origin. The emphasis is not on where you are from, or what colour you are. It is about values. This is the crucial point. Strong national identities are not a bad thing. It is how we define them that is the problem. If our identity is about more than past glories of dominance, and if it stretches to encompass the fairness, diversity and other positive traits we believe shape who we are, then migrants in no way pose a threat to our sense of self.
It is when we define Britishness narrowly and negatively that it begins to corrode under its own impossible weight. Immigration is not incompatible with a sense of nationhood. It only undermines nationhood when that nationhood is built upon exclusion. Railing against diversity and mulitculturalism itself is divisive and detracts from the real issues affecting the wellbeing of the country. A dangerous scenario is being drawn out in front of us. It is a world of surveillance, of fingerprinting all newcomers, and of fear of those who are not the same as the majority. In this world we threaten to become locked away in a fortress like never before, defining ourselves by whom we keep out. In terms of asylum, there already exists a clamour to exclude. Last month David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, added seven more countries to the list of those deemed to be "safe", thus automatically refusing refugee status to anyone from these countries. This is a way to appease the public and cut the statistics. The countries he named are Albania, Bulgaria, Jamaica, Macedonia, Moldova, Romania and Serbia/Montenegro. Some of the Eastern European countries have appalling records of human rights abuses against Roma. But the labelling of countries as safe is political in nature.
Genuine refugees are turned away or deported simply because they are from the wrong country. The case of Roma from the Czech Republic provides a good illustration of the arbitrariness of this policy. The Czech Republic is already designated safe and thus not one Romani person fleeing well documented persecution has ever been granted refugee status in Britain. Yet most who end up in Canada, for example, are granted asylum because the government there does recognise the situation in their country. It is not the case, then, that all whose asylum applications fail are not genuine refugees. But people want to keep them out, because they believe asylum seekers get everything, while they continue to have nothing. This is an illusion. Immigrants do not ruin a country's sense of itself. That has been done from within. Britain is in crisis. The removal of all asylum seekers and new immigrants will do nothing to diminish that. The failing NHS, the growth of poverty-related diseases, the lack of industry and the risk of terrorism are problems that will not just disappear. That the presence of refugees is being used as an excuse to attack the foundations of a diverse multicultural society is a disgrace that diverts attention from the real issues of long-term decline and growing division between different parts of the country that urgently needs to be tackled.
Wednesday, 24 February 2010
Exposed: Immigration myths that divide society
Politicians and the right wing press have unleashed a torrent of abuse against immigrants. The attacks are accelerating and getting nastier, encouraging people who want to whip up racism. A column by Trevor Kavanagh in the Sun newspaper last week was typical of the way statistics can be manipulated. He wrote that recent immigration “was a grotesque exercise in social engineering which has transformed and in some ways put at risk the way we live. “So today we see the seething resentment of British voters – including established migrants – towards those they blame for taking their jobs, living off benefits they haven’t paid for… and threatening to harm the very country that provides them with a home.” It’s the booms and slumps in capitalism that cause unemployment, not immigration. Immigrants didn’t demand the closure of the Redcar steel plant or push through tens of thousands of job losses in manufacturing. There are a million more people unemployed in Britain today than there were two years ago. That’s not because of a surge in immigration, it’s because the system across the world went into deep crisis, and bosses and bankers expected workers to pay the price.
It’s the booms and slumps in capitalism that cause unemployment, not immigration. Immigrants didn’t demand the closure of the Redcar steel plant or push through tens of thousands of job losses in manufacturing. There are a million more people unemployed in Britain today than there were two years ago. That’s not because of a surge in immigration, it’s because the system across the world went into deep crisis, and bosses and bankers expected workers to pay the price. When unemployment was at its highest in 1992 more people left the country than came here. Then, as unemployment begins to fall, a few more people are encouraged to come to Britain. But as unemployment rises the level of migration drops off. The worst ever level of unemployment in Britain was in the 1930s. But immigration was only a few tens of thousands a year. The reason for the recent increase in immigration was the entry of several eastern European countries into the European Union (EU) in 2004 – known as the “A8”. The vast majority of new workers are from these “A8” countries. They came here because there were lots of job opportunities, and many left once these dried up. Last week the press was full of outraged stories about how three English councils – Peterborough, Slough and Boston – were complaining that they could not cope with a flood of immigrants draining their resources.
A rather more sober piece in the Financial Times pointed out: “All three councils were at pains to point out that they welcomed immigration, which had boosted local economies.” The councils’ gripe is that they are not getting the share of central government funding due to councils with a changing population demographic. They are not complaining about the immigration itself, which has created wealth. And council services will be far harder hit by the cuts that are coming than any immigration effect.Britain’s population is around 61 million. There are scare stories of it rising to 70 million – with the implication that this would mean we would be “swamped”. In fact from 1971 to 2004, population growth in the UK ranks 31 out of 38 European and other large nations for which data are available. In this period the population of Britain grew by about 7 percent. For comparison, in the same period the US grew by 42 percent, Japan by 21 percent, China by 52 percent and the population of India doubled. There is not a fixed cake of British wealth where less will go to people already resident if new people arrive. It is people working and using their skills that create the wealth.
Strangely, many of those who go on about the costs of immigration also say the country cannot afford to give people decent pensions because there aren’t going to be enough people of working age around. Both arguments can’t be true. The only way for non-EU citizens to get in is as refugees or asylum seekers. The right wing media likes to make a big issue of illegal immigrants coming in via Calais. Every study has shown that this small number of people are coming here to work, and that they tend to come from countries directly affected by British foreign policy. It is not a coincidence that most come from Iraq and Afghanistan. Far from being a burden on the welfare state, there are large areas of the health service, and transport that would collapse without workers from abroad. Not long ago councils were complaining about having to close schools and having no one to look after old people as those born between the 1950s and 1960s aged. About a fifth of the people who do the vital job of caring for our older people were born abroad. A quarter of British nurses were born abroad – half in London. Without these people the NHS would fall apart. It’s not true that there would be a sudden surge of “indigenous” workers to fill the gap.
And while they staff public services, immigrants are more likely to be single and of working age than the population in general – and consequently depend less on public services such as healthcare. There has never been as much housing in Britain as there is now. There are two bedrooms for every person in this country. The real problem is that the rich have got huge houses – and second and third houses – because housing is distributed according to what people can afford, not what they need. There are nearly a million empty properties in Britain. Most of them are private sector homes that can’t be sold at a profit because of the recession. There are over 650,000 empty homes in England alone (including 1,798 in Barking and Dagenham). It would cost about £1.5 billion to bring 250,000 homes back into use, which would also create 65,000 jobs. That sum is nothing compared to the amount handed to the bankers, or poured into the bloody wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or the £100 billion for Trident nuclear weapons replacement. The housing problems stem from the control by private developers and landlords of the housing market and the collapse of council house building.
Immigration rules and the way in which they are implemented are racist. They are directed against black people far more than white people. Half of the Nigerians who overstay their visas are pursued by what is now the UK Borders Agency, but only one in 50 Australians are persued. When the likes of odious right-wing rags like the Daily Express and the Sun run anti-immigrant stories, they always stoke up the image of Britain being “flooded” by people from Africa, Asia or eastern Europe. They never bleat about the thousands of whites from Australia, the US, Canada, South Africa or north western Europe who come to Britain to live and work.Every group of migrants to Britain have faced racism – from the Irish to the Jews, to people from the Caribbean to Asians and east Europeans. But even when these groups settle in and are partially accepted, attacks on new immigrants spill over into attacks on all Asian and black people, whether they were born here or not.
Bosses and bankers want working people to squabble among themselves rather than turn their fire on the real enemy – the rich. A recent equalities report shows that a tiny 1 percent of people in Britain take home more than £2,000 a week – and the gap between rich and poor is growing. Working people need unity to fight the attacks now, the avalanche of cuts after the election, and hundreds of thousands more job losses. If our rulers can get us to think that immigrants are the problem, then they will escape with their wealth and power intact. It is true that there is a lack of affordable housing in Britain. Young people do have far too few opportunities. But it’s not the fault of immigrants. The NHS is always stretched and sometimes grossly inadequate. And working people are insecure about their jobs, get too little money and have to work far too hard for the pittance they get. But it’s not the fault of immigrants. A united working class has the power to save jobs, win decent pay and conditions, and defend public services. That means rejecting the lies about immigration and the racism and hatred of Muslims which so many politicians and newspapers are now peddling. We shouldn’t let them divide and rule us. We should hit back together.
It’s the booms and slumps in capitalism that cause unemployment, not immigration. Immigrants didn’t demand the closure of the Redcar steel plant or push through tens of thousands of job losses in manufacturing. There are a million more people unemployed in Britain today than there were two years ago. That’s not because of a surge in immigration, it’s because the system across the world went into deep crisis, and bosses and bankers expected workers to pay the price. When unemployment was at its highest in 1992 more people left the country than came here. Then, as unemployment begins to fall, a few more people are encouraged to come to Britain. But as unemployment rises the level of migration drops off. The worst ever level of unemployment in Britain was in the 1930s. But immigration was only a few tens of thousands a year. The reason for the recent increase in immigration was the entry of several eastern European countries into the European Union (EU) in 2004 – known as the “A8”. The vast majority of new workers are from these “A8” countries. They came here because there were lots of job opportunities, and many left once these dried up. Last week the press was full of outraged stories about how three English councils – Peterborough, Slough and Boston – were complaining that they could not cope with a flood of immigrants draining their resources.
A rather more sober piece in the Financial Times pointed out: “All three councils were at pains to point out that they welcomed immigration, which had boosted local economies.” The councils’ gripe is that they are not getting the share of central government funding due to councils with a changing population demographic. They are not complaining about the immigration itself, which has created wealth. And council services will be far harder hit by the cuts that are coming than any immigration effect.Britain’s population is around 61 million. There are scare stories of it rising to 70 million – with the implication that this would mean we would be “swamped”. In fact from 1971 to 2004, population growth in the UK ranks 31 out of 38 European and other large nations for which data are available. In this period the population of Britain grew by about 7 percent. For comparison, in the same period the US grew by 42 percent, Japan by 21 percent, China by 52 percent and the population of India doubled. There is not a fixed cake of British wealth where less will go to people already resident if new people arrive. It is people working and using their skills that create the wealth.
Strangely, many of those who go on about the costs of immigration also say the country cannot afford to give people decent pensions because there aren’t going to be enough people of working age around. Both arguments can’t be true. The only way for non-EU citizens to get in is as refugees or asylum seekers. The right wing media likes to make a big issue of illegal immigrants coming in via Calais. Every study has shown that this small number of people are coming here to work, and that they tend to come from countries directly affected by British foreign policy. It is not a coincidence that most come from Iraq and Afghanistan. Far from being a burden on the welfare state, there are large areas of the health service, and transport that would collapse without workers from abroad. Not long ago councils were complaining about having to close schools and having no one to look after old people as those born between the 1950s and 1960s aged. About a fifth of the people who do the vital job of caring for our older people were born abroad. A quarter of British nurses were born abroad – half in London. Without these people the NHS would fall apart. It’s not true that there would be a sudden surge of “indigenous” workers to fill the gap.
And while they staff public services, immigrants are more likely to be single and of working age than the population in general – and consequently depend less on public services such as healthcare. There has never been as much housing in Britain as there is now. There are two bedrooms for every person in this country. The real problem is that the rich have got huge houses – and second and third houses – because housing is distributed according to what people can afford, not what they need. There are nearly a million empty properties in Britain. Most of them are private sector homes that can’t be sold at a profit because of the recession. There are over 650,000 empty homes in England alone (including 1,798 in Barking and Dagenham). It would cost about £1.5 billion to bring 250,000 homes back into use, which would also create 65,000 jobs. That sum is nothing compared to the amount handed to the bankers, or poured into the bloody wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or the £100 billion for Trident nuclear weapons replacement. The housing problems stem from the control by private developers and landlords of the housing market and the collapse of council house building.
Immigration rules and the way in which they are implemented are racist. They are directed against black people far more than white people. Half of the Nigerians who overstay their visas are pursued by what is now the UK Borders Agency, but only one in 50 Australians are persued. When the likes of odious right-wing rags like the Daily Express and the Sun run anti-immigrant stories, they always stoke up the image of Britain being “flooded” by people from Africa, Asia or eastern Europe. They never bleat about the thousands of whites from Australia, the US, Canada, South Africa or north western Europe who come to Britain to live and work.Every group of migrants to Britain have faced racism – from the Irish to the Jews, to people from the Caribbean to Asians and east Europeans. But even when these groups settle in and are partially accepted, attacks on new immigrants spill over into attacks on all Asian and black people, whether they were born here or not.
Bosses and bankers want working people to squabble among themselves rather than turn their fire on the real enemy – the rich. A recent equalities report shows that a tiny 1 percent of people in Britain take home more than £2,000 a week – and the gap between rich and poor is growing. Working people need unity to fight the attacks now, the avalanche of cuts after the election, and hundreds of thousands more job losses. If our rulers can get us to think that immigrants are the problem, then they will escape with their wealth and power intact. It is true that there is a lack of affordable housing in Britain. Young people do have far too few opportunities. But it’s not the fault of immigrants. The NHS is always stretched and sometimes grossly inadequate. And working people are insecure about their jobs, get too little money and have to work far too hard for the pittance they get. But it’s not the fault of immigrants. A united working class has the power to save jobs, win decent pay and conditions, and defend public services. That means rejecting the lies about immigration and the racism and hatred of Muslims which so many politicians and newspapers are now peddling. We shouldn’t let them divide and rule us. We should hit back together.
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