Fight racism – defend migrants

Prime Minister David Cameron has again whipped up racist fears about immigration, calling for “good immigration, not mass immigration” and claiming he will stop “hundreds of thousands” coming to Britain.

In a speech to the Tory Party faithful, but broadcast far and wide, Cameron said “significant numbers of new people, not able to speak the same language, not really wanting to integrate, have created a kind of discomfort and disjointedness in some neighbourhoods”.
Cameron as Prime Minister, defending a capitalist system which sees growing inequality in Britain between rich and poor, must surely take a lot of the blame for any sense of discomfort and disjointedness that people feel – not immigrants.
But in times of economic crisis and social decline racism is a tried and tested method of divide and rule. Using emotive language which is designed to whip up prejudice and appeal to the headline writers in the Murdoch press, Cameron and the Tories prefer to deflect attention away from the bankers and the rich and towards some of the poorest people in our society.
It is racist scaremongering pure and simple. Cameron uses vague generalisations that cannot be challenged. He refers to one horrific court case about Asian pimps to make an unrelated point about “young British girls” being preyed upon. These are the same arguments that the BNP used in West Yorkshire to win support.
The speech chimed with other recent comments he has made, condemning multiculturalism for “encouraging different cultures to live separate lives, weakening our collective identity” and calling for an “active, muscular liberalism” to combat Muslim extremists. That he made this jibe on the day the fascist thugs of the English Defence League were marching in Luton attempting to carry out another pogrom against the local Asian community speaks volumes about where Cameron’s “muscular” allegiances lie.

Fact and fiction

This is the old Tory Party. In the 1960s Enoch Powell warned of “rivers of blood” caused by immigration. In the 1970s Margaret Thatcher claimed white people were being “swamped by people with a different culture”. Both replaced fact with fiction.
The reality is that Black and ethnic minority people are systematically discriminated against in Britain.
Black Caribbean boys are three times more likely to be excluded from school than white boys. Almost a third of all stop and searches are instigated against ethnic minorities – over a half, when police are looking for knives and guns. Young black adults are four times more likely to be in prison than white youths.
In the job market, the pattern is the same. Two-fifths of people from ethnic minorities live in low-income households, twice the rate for White people, a figure that rises to 50 per cent for black Africans and two-thirds for Asian Muslims. Black youth unemployment officially stands at 50 per cent, though Lee Jasper of Black Activists Rising Against Cuts reckons the true figure could be as high as 70 per cent. Yet the percentage of the British population who are ethnic minorities is less than 10 per cent.
Meanwhile Britain continues to terrorise, impoverish and detain asylum seekers. Many are deported to hostile regimes, some to their death. Three Iranians, encouraged by Britain to rise up against the regime in 2009, are now on hunger strike, their lips sown up, fearful of being sent back to their torturers.

Roots of racism

The root of this racial oppression has nothing to do with a “clash of cultures” or a refusal by immigrants to “fit in”. It has everything to do with the needs of British capitalism.
The bosses need a differentiated labour market, where it is justifiable to pay some workers less than a living wage. By excluding black and Asian people from equal access to education, ingraining poverty in their communities and criminalising their youth, they ensure there is a stagnant pool of hungry labour, ready to do the jobs at the rates that others would not.
Racism is the ideology that both “justifies” this inherently unjust relationship, and attempts to bind some workers to “their” bosses. This can take the form of support for imperialist wars in Afghanistan and now Libya. It is similar to the poision of national chauvinism, like the “British Jobs for British Workers” strikes in 2009 that aimed at taking away jobs from migrant workers.
So it is excellent that Lambeth Unison and the Save Our Services anticuts group joined the demo in support of justice for Smiley Culture last month. Racism and the oppression of black and Asian communities is on the rise. The bosses know that, in times of job losses, service cuts and wage restraint, racism is a useful to keep us divided.
Cameron himself made this clear in the most telling part of his Tory conference speech: “The real issue is this: migrants are filling gaps in the labour market left wide open by a welfare system that for years has paid British people not to work… Put simply, we will never control immigration properly unless we tackle welfare dependency.”
This is as clear as one, two, three. First whip up fears over their way of life being threatened by immigrants; second blame ethnic minorities for the inadequacies of schools, housing and hospitals, cut to the bone by the cuts programme; and third say, “We’ll get tough on black and Asian workers, if you’ll work for peanuts in hellish conditions.”
It’s a con. And there’s only one group, one class of people who are benefiting: the bosses and the bankers who caused this crisis in the first place.
Immigration is presented as the problem in Britain today but the real problem is capitalism and the growing gap between rich and poor. Working class immigrants need to be welcomed into the workforce and labour movement. Racism needs to be exposed, confronted and defeated, wherever it raises its ugly head – through demonstrations, strikes and self-defense. Only this way can we unite the whole working class in the struggle for genuine socialism.