15.03.2007
Reid whips up xenophobia
In response to home secretary's John Reid xenophobic incitement directed at those from outside Britain, Jim Moody argues for open borders
Home secretary John Reid last week exercised his brief to split the working class using xenophobic incitement directed at those from outside Britain. He told BBC Breakfast on the morning of Wednesday March 7: "It is unfair that foreigners come to this country illegitimately and steal our benefits, steal our services like the NHS and undermine the minimum wage by working. Year on year, we are going to make it even more difficult for them to do that."
Reid also boasted on BBC Radio Five Live: "We are now throwing out more asylum-seekers - failed asylum-seekers - than ever before." And this is the man who in August called for a mature debate on the "immigration challenges" facing Britain.
Reid floated the idea of a Migration Advisory Committee last summer to consider the 'optimum number' of migrants who should be allowed in each year. It could then set a quota for the number of work permits that it hands out to people from outside the European Union - allegedly to ease the pressure on schools and hospitals. A consultation exercise, which ran from late November for 10 weeks, has just ended. Consultation members are now to be appointed and will begin work in April next year, with the MAC fully operational by April 2008.
Britain had no restrictions on who entered its territory until 102 years ago, in 1905. Following campaigning by a fascist harbinger, the British Brothers League, which mounted anti-semitic demonstrations in the East End of London, the UK parliament passed the Aliens Act. This set up the Immigration Service, whose first chief inspector, W Haldane Porter, was a close associate of major Evans-Gordon, a founder of the British Brothers League.
In the chauvinistic atmosphere at the start of World War I, the Aliens Restriction Act 1914 was introduced onto the statute book. Under its provisions, 21,000 aliens were deported and 32,000 interned. After the war, and amidst continuing anti-German and anti-semitic fervour, an even more draconian Aliens Restriction Act 1919 was passed despite the end of the wartime emergency, the excuse for which its predecessor was passed.
Much greater restrictions followed. The Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962, initially opposed by Labour, was tightened by the same party when elected to government in 1964. Only doctors, dentists and trained nurses in the main, plus family members, were allowed into fortress UK. Then entry certificates became a legal requirement under the Immigration Appeals Act 1969. Labour prime minister Jim Callaghan's government reacted to expulsion of Kenyan Asians in early 1968 by invalidating their British passports through the punitive Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1968. Once the Tories were returned to government under Ted Heath in 1970, they introduced an even more restrictive Immigration Act 1971 in a panic over Idi Amin's expulsion of Ugandan Asians: overnight the status of Caribbean, Indian, Pakistani, and African British subjects became that of 'alien'.
By the 1980s, general migration to the UK had all but ceased; only refugees and asylum-seekers were being permitted entry in relatively small numbers: "Applications for asylum, excluding dependants, fell by 24% in 2005 to 25,710. The nationalities accounting for the highest numbers of applicants were Iranian, Somali, Eritrean, Chinese and Afghan ... An estimated 31% of the 25,710 applications in 2005 resulted in grants of asylum (8%) or humanitarian protection or discretionary leave (12%), or in allowed appeals (12%)" (Home Office Statistical Bulletin August 22 2006). But, of course, the reactionary fuss around migration is not really about numbers: it is all about manipulation of public perceptions and ensuring that profit, not people, is decisive. By contrast, we communists do not get drawn into the numbers game: the principle of freedom of movement for all is what matters.
In recent years, the bottom-feeder 'debate' in the gutter press has focused on so-called 'illegals'. Uniquely in criminal law, those who fail to become documented workers in Britain are themselves declared illegal; by contrast, anyone prosecuted for an illegal offence in the courts is not herself or himself described as an illegal person. This suits the capitalist class, which achieves its goals thanks to its friends in the fourth estate.
First, an atmosphere of hate is generated against those 'stealing' British workers' jobs has the useful (for the bourgeoisie) potential of splitting the working class on national lines, keeping it weak. Essentially, 'illegal' workers must be kept out of unions to keep down labour costs, boosting the surplus value extracted. Second, 'illegal' workers can simply be sacked without difficulty during downturns, at no cost to the employer: without a union or political clout, fear of discovery and deportation can force them to accept grotesque and dangerous conditions.
In actual fact, once the verbiage surrounding the mainstream discussion of migration issues is stripped away, all that is left is that the requirements of British capitalism are what hold sway. The rights of individual workers to travel, live and work where they wish is trampled into the dirt. In total contrast, capital moves where it will around the globe, as do commodities. Nothing illustrates capitalism's inhumanity more than the way it degrades the individual's right compared with its own. Inanimate objects and dead labour are given more rights than those whose living labour capital's insatiable appetite commands.
A working class approach means that we deny any government's 'right' to determine who will or will not enter or leave any territory over which it claims sovereignty. But unlike some elements of the left, however, who see that racism has been utilised in the past against migrant workers to instil labour and societal discipline and weaken our class, communists do not continually apply the epithet 'racist' to every instance of the enemy class's immigration policy over the years. Today, government presents an official policy of anti-racism as well as an anti-working class policy on migration.
The primary purpose of restriction on migrant workers is to serve capital. If capital requires more labour in Britain or any other country, the government permits it. When he was minister of health, Enoch Powell, a racist par excellence, actively recruited health workers from the Caribbean. If capital requires less labour, government turns off the tap using legislation that purports to recognise 'public concern' over immigrants/asylum-seekers/citizens of new EU states. Sometimes it finds it politic to use racism, at others nationalism and chauvinism - whatever works, yet keeps social peace so that profit is safe. The media, of course, play their part too in doling out dollops of 'public concern' of whatever variety.
Despite this clear demarcation between the requirements of the working class and the requirements of capital, some on the left are benumbed with fear that they may not be considered respectable in polite society if they declare the working class truth. The unconsciously ironic column carried in Socialist Worker each week, 'What the Socialist Workers Party stands for', does have something to say on this. Under 'Internationalism' it claims: "We oppose all immigration controls." But when it comes to where it matters, practical politics in front of the class, the SWP falls down on this question, as on so many others. Far from opposing all immigration controls, the SWP has consistently voted down this principle in Respect, whenever it has been raised by the CPGB. If you cannot practise what you preach, what good is your preaching? Talk's cheap and so is SWP politics.
Men, women and children are degraded daily by the British state within the system it has set up to regulate migration. According to National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns, "Every other day a detainee incarcerated in a UK Immigration Removal Centre (IRC), makes an attempt at self-harm (suicide), serious enough to require medical treatment. In the 10 months from April 2006 to January 2007 there were 176 attempts to self-harm that required medical treatment. That is, one incident of self-harm every 1.7 days. In the same period, 1,643 detainees were put on Formal Self-Harm at Risk" (www.ncadc.org.uk). These people, workers in the main, are treated inhumanely to keep the whole working class in thrall. People kill themselves rather being deported, or due to the hopelessness that imprisonment without trial brings them.
It is a central, constant feature of communist politics that we demand workers have the right to decide where they will live and work. We consider that, "Immigration is a progressive phenomenon which breaks down national differences and national prejudices. It unites British workers with the world working class" (CPGB Draft programme - www.cpgb.org.uk/documents/cpgb/draftprog.html). We also aim to bolster the position of workers who migrate to Britain or elsewhere by demanding these basic rights:
l The right to speak and be educated in one's own language. The right to conduct correspondence with the state in one's own language.
l No religious or separate schools.
l The right to learn English for all migrant workers and their families. Employers must provide language courses.
l The right to become citizens with full social and political rights of the country they have emigrated to for all workers who have resided in the country for three months.
As a class for itself, the working class has to seize these reaches of higher politics as its own, gaining hegemony in this arena. The workers united will never be defeated: it is never truer than over migration and the basic freedoms it encapsulates.