WeeklyWorker

25.02.1999

Smash all immigration controls

National chauvinism, not racism, is today the bourgeoisie’s main ideological weapon. And, for all their official anti-racism, the police remain an organ of the chauvinist state

This weekend’s demonstration for asylum and immigration rights comes immediately after the publication of the Stephen Lawrence report.

Sir William Macpherson’s document slams the Metropolitan Police for “pernicious and institutionalised racism”, accompanied by an orgy of hand-wringing from the liberal media. While on the one hand official anti-racism has never been more pronounced and open, on the other hand the British state’s assault on the rights of immigrants and asylum-seekers has never been more vicious.

At the same time as home secretary Jack Straw announces a new package of politically correct anti-racist measures, he is intent on forcing through his Immigration and Asylum Bill - in order to “minimise the incentive to economic migration, particularly by minimising cash payments to asylum-seekers”, to quote the words of a home office document. Straw intends to disperse them across the country in barrack-style hostels set up for the purpose, and asylum applicants will have no say in where they are placed.

Others who are living with friends or family will have all rights to claim benefit withdrawn, with food vouchers introduced as their only means of state assistance. Even worse, anyone who has the temerity to challenge an immigration ruling in the high court will have even their right to food vouchers or accommodation withdrawn. All this is to be backed up by new state powers to fingerprint people with “inadequate documentation” and those turned away at ports.

For many on the left all this is further ‘proof’ of state racism. Some - Workers Power for one - even say that all immigration controls by their very nature must be racist. The capitalist state - presumably in its South African variant as well - so we are told, has an irrational aversion to people with dark skins. Or, if (as at present) many of the asylum-seekers happen to be from Eastern Europe, it is simply foreigners in general the bourgeoisie despises. This too is labelled racism. And, as everybody knows, the state always hopes to set white worker against black as a means of keeping control. Therefore, according to the conventional ‘wisdom’ of the left, it must inevitably seek to stimulate racism. It is institutionally racist.

How strange then that the state itself has now adopted the very same terminology. In the wake of the murder of Stephen Lawrence, the Macpherson enquiry announced: “There must be an unequivocal acceptance of the problem of institutionalised racism.” And, just as the social-democratised left has been circulating petitions calling for the resignation of Metropolitan Police commissioner Sir Paul Condon for refusing to accept the growing consensus, so the enquiry report states: “Any chief police officer who feels unable to respond will find it extremely difficult to work with the community in the way that policing by consent demands.”

Prior to the enquiry report, Condon had categorically denied that there was “institutionalised racism” in his force. He was using the definition of the term that Lord Scarman had given it after the Brixton riots - that the police must “knowingly as a matter of policy” be implementing racist measures. While there was no possibility that he would accept that this could be applied to the Met, Condon was looking for a way out through “a new and widely accepted definition”. He said: “I hope, pray, anticipate that the judge will say something significant around institutional racism. I will embrace that with zeal.”

Macpherson duly obliged. The term was redefined as

“the collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate professional service to people because of their colour, culture or ethnic origin. It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour which amounts to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping.”

Condon could live with that. To be guilty of “thoughtlessness” is hardly the same as being branded an agent of British-style apartheid. It is equivalent to an acceptance that the police’s policy is basically well meaning, according to bourgeois anti-racist criteria. The commissioner had already accepted that racism was “widespread” and that measures would have to be introduced to tackle it.

But the enquiry’s findings do not pinpoint any specific examples of individual or “institutional” racism in the conduct of the Lawrence case. The police “underplayed or ignored” the importance of race relations and were slow to acknowledge that Stephen’s murder was a racist attack. There are many examples of “ineptitude”, and a general conclusion that the only possible explanation for the “errors and incompetencies” is “pernicious racism”, described as a “corrosive disease”.

So ‘race awareness’ courses will become much more central in police training, and there will be a big recruitment drive to win more black and Asian officers. Condon - if he is allowed to remain in post - will work even harder to achieve his “anti-racist police service”, while John Grieve, head of the Met’s violent and racial crimes unit, will continue to encourage his officers to “go out and nick a few racists”.

The truth is that, far from the caricature of capitalist society portrayed by so much of the left, establishment figures are vying with each other to appear the most liberal, tolerant and anti-racist. That is why Straw, in a fit of pique, slapped an injunction on The Sunday Telegraph in a vain attempt to stop it stealing his thunder by leaking the Lawrence report. As Hugo Young wrote in The Guardian,

“The report will be a catharsis. Nobody, either, seems likely to dispute it. Its language may be questioned, but its premise, that racism of every kind is an incontestable evil, is not challenged” (February 23).

How true. Even such ultra-reactionary newspapers as The Daily Telegraph hardly fit into the left’s ‘racist’ categorisation: “The stabbing of this decent young man, with his ambition to become an architect, seems so wicked that it would be less than human to remain unroused. And the suffering caused to Neville and Doreen Lawrence by their son’s death has surely moved every parent in the country” (February 20). Indeed Stephen Lawrence has become almost an icon for the establishment.

But the same paper lays into its fellow rightwing journal, the Daily Mail, for its “Murderers!” headline, over the article which first publicly insisted that the prime suspects for the murder were guilty, even though three of them had just been acquitted, in 1996. The Telegraph condemns the growing campaign to jail the five white men:

“We would be horrified - and rightly - if courts began to hand out guilty verdicts on the basis that the police had a pretty shrewd idea of who was responsible, or that the accused had noxious opinions.”

Indeed, the establishment’s horror at the five’s bigoted racism has led to calls for some highly dangerous steps to be taken - a change in the law to allow a defendant to be tried more than once for the same crime; the banning of any expression of racist language or possession of an “offensive weapon” even in private. While we would be more than pleased to see the incarceration of Stephen Lawrence’s killers, such measures would clearly lay a precedent for the state to use similar draconian curbs against other opponents in the future - not least the working class movement.

Clearly far-reaching changes will be introduced to further cement bourgeois anti-racism - among immigration officers for example, as well as in the police. But Socialist Worker, despite sharing the growing establishment consensus around “institutionalised racism” and joining in the chorus to “sack Condon”, dismisses any such possibility. Hassan Mahamdallie asks, “Can the police be reformed?” and promptly answers his own question in the negative (February 20). He declares bluntly: “Police racism is not the exception. It is the rule ... we should not lose sight of the fact that the police can never be ‘anti-racist’.”

This ‘always have been, always will be’ mentality is no substitute for an analysis. Just why is it impossible for the bourgeoisie to adopt a new ideology? And why can it not be imposed on state organs, including the police? It is now more than clear that the establishment is determined to root out the many racist officers that its police force undoubtedly contains.

But in one sense it is true to say that the police force cannot be reformed. It can never be transformed into an instrument for the working class. Irrespective of newly found anti-racist credentials, it remains an organ of the bourgeois state. Workers need their own bodies, to defend us from the state as well as from racists. We need workers’ defence corps.

However, the fact of the matter is that racism no longer suits the purpose of the establishment. Previously the alleged ‘inferiority’ of subject peoples was used to justify colonial conquests. Today, with the empire long dismantled, a rearticulated national chauvinism is a much more useful weapon. This anti-racist national chauvinism aims to cohere the whole population - black and white - around the class interests of British capital, defined in opposition to the interests of ‘outsiders’. But modern bourgeois anti-racism, despite its aim of domestic stability, can be just as divisive as was its racism. Its ‘positive discrimination’, imposed from the top, serves to pit black against white in competition for jobs and resources (‘black’ and ‘white’ ‘races’ being political constructs - and having nothing to do with supposed biological groupings of human beings). We are meant to approach the state as ‘ethnic’ supplicants - state officials act to ensure ‘fairness’.

Moreover, the aim of state anti-racism is to unite us negatively on the basis of nationality. It encourages workers to turn against the ‘threat’ of asylum-seekers, who are told to stay where they ‘belong’. Straw wants to keep them out not because of their race or ethnicity, but because by and large they are working class and poor. In times of full employment and labour shortages the ruling class positively welcomed immigrants as ‘worst paid labour’. Today they would be a ‘burden’.

Bourgeois anti-racism has nothing in common with positive working class unity. By contrast proletarian politics is first and foremost internationalist. We have no interest in promoting the national state. Just as capital and its products pass freely across borders, so we demand the free movement of workers. We must have the right to live, work - and struggle - anywhere in the world.

Alan Fox