By KD Tait
The Labour government has launched a ferocious attack on immigrant workers in the wake of damaging local election results which saw big gains for Nigel Farage’s populist, anti-immigrant Reform UK.
In a speech which echoed Enoch Powell’s infamous ‘rivers of blood’ that marked a watershed in race relations, Keir Starmer claimed that the Tories’ ‘one-nation experiment in open borders’ meant Britain was ‘becoming an island of strangers’. The Labour leader concluded by claiming that immigration had done ‘incalculable’ damage to Britain.
For the first time since becoming prime minister, Starmer noticed some of the appalling social consequences caused by neoliberal policies that destroyed Britain’s industrial base, and 14 years of austerity that has virtually wiped out the welfare state. He chose, however, to blame migrants.
The right to buy policy which destroyed the social housing stock, the failure to invest in new jobs in the former industrial areas, the deliberate underfunding of the NHS, poverty pay subsidised by social security—these are choices made by politicians, who want to break up the health service, line landlords’ pockets, and ensure bumper payouts for the profiteers who are extorting local authorities in the guise of providing social care for the elderly.
Real problems palmed off onto immigrant workers who make a—literally—vital contribution to public services and suffer equally if not more so from their absence as British-born counterparts. Immigrant workers who, thanks to decades of punitive anti-immigrant measures, not least Brexit, pursued by both main parties, are subject to insecure, discriminatory, and racist employment and visa conditions that undermines the ability of the whole working class to collectively defend jobs and conditions.
The threat of Reform
Labour press officers claim that the immigration white paper was long in the planning. There is no reason to doubt the cabinet’s personal commitment to punishing immigrants just for the sake of it. But everyone knows that it’s Labour’s precipitous collapse in support, from what was already a very low base, which prompted Starmer’s racist rant. With Reform second placed in more than 90 seats, Labour only have to hear the crack of Farage’s whip to start foaming at the mouth.
Labour has lost support because its leaders’ tepid commitment to ‘change’ evaporated on contact with government. Or to put it more accurately, the mutually incompatible definitions of that slogan existing in the heads of Starmer and his voters were resolved in favour of the Labour leadership’s commitment to overhauling and modernising the state in the interests of British capitalism.
Labour does want change—just not the change voters thought they were promised. When pensioners had their winter fuel payment snatched away, the two-child benefit cap was maintained, and personal independence payments for the disabled cut, Labour made it clear that poverty before work, in work, and after work would be a feature, not a bug for this government.
So far, it is this remorseless logic of cause and effect which is hammering Labour into second place in the polls, but the local elections are a grim foretaste of where Labour’s refusal to go onto the offensive against the billionaires, landlords and banks, is headed.
Home secretary Yvette Cooper’s white paper proposes sweeping restrictions on visas, with whole industries effectively barred from recruiting from overseas. To make sure the boot is firmly put in—and seen to be put in— family reunions will be severely curtailed. Arbitrary caps on foreign student visas will be lowered, exacerbating the funding crisis for a sector that has become dependent on international fees to compensate for domestic underfunding.
Ripping off Reform’s manifesto doesn’t stop at kneejerk promises to slash legal immigration. In order to speed up deportations, former chief public prosecutor Starmer now promises to court rulings on deportations based on the ECHR/Human Rights Act to reform based on the unimpeachable legal principle of ‘common sense’. Farage demanded Labour emulate Trump and declare a national emergency at the border. But Labour’s new Border Security bill already gives new terrorism powers to the increasingly paramilitary border agency.
Labour hopes to avoid the fate of predecessors, who disappointed voters by making promises on immigration targets they had no intention of keeping, by refusing to put a number on its plans—saying only that ‘net migration will fall’ by the end of the parliament. Why this should be any more convincing to Reform-curious voters than performatively advertised blitz of measures targeting irregular migration, so-called smuggling gangs, and asylum seekers in the last year is neither asked nor answered.
Triangulation
Labour claims its new anti-immigrant measures are simply responding to what voters want. But using the right-wing populist vote as a benchmark on attitudes to immigration is, as ample evidence from the UK, as well as France, Germany, Italy and the United States shows, a circular and self-defeating policy. To the extent that hostility to immigration is a deflected anger at pressure on jobs, housing and public services, cutting immigration by the tens or even hundreds of thousands will do nothing to improve access—and will make it worse in many sectors.
The left-wing, in fact social-chauvinist, gloss put on this policy by Labour and some trade unionists is that cutting immigration will force employers to raise wages, improve conditions and create jobs for unemployed or economically inactive workers. But in many sectors, such as care, where rock-bottom wages and appalling working conditions predominate, among a workforce disciplined by onerous visa requirements, reducing supply is more likely to trigger an assault on jobs and conditions to maintain profit rates than it is to persuade employers to turn out their pockets.
Starmer’s line about an ‘experiment in open borders’ is a myth. For immigrant workers there has never been an open border or equal access to jobs on equal terms and conditions. Immigration controls create a racist hierarchy in the labour market on behalf of the capitalists; to the extent that they ‘protect’ British workers, it is a racist privilege whose price is to make workers sacrifice their class solidarity for an identification of interests with ‘their own’ exploiters.
The way to challenge the obscene exploitation and parasitism which Britain’s immigration regime creates is to fight for sectoral collective bargaining, public ownership of public services, and—most importantly—an end to the discriminatory and racist immigration system which offshores training costs to semi-colonial countries, and enforces a downward pressure on wages in the most exploited, unsafe, and insecure industries.
Arbitrary promises to crack down on immigration doesn’t address any of that. They aren’t meant to. This policy is pure cynical calculation. Starmer might want to address Britain’s productivity crisis, ageing population, and aversion to investment and training—but to do that he would need to force the ruling class to pay for it collectively through taxation and long term economic planning. The markets won’t lend it, and his government hasn’t got the nerve to demand the rich cough up.
Keir Starmer’s language legitimises far right talking points, and acts as a transmission belt for turning elementary hostility to economic competition into chauvinism and racism. It will accelerate the alienation of Labour voters in the big cities, where every other neighbour is now one of Starmer’s ‘strangers’, and clear the way for Farage, and worse after him.
Labour’s already lukewarm pledges to improve employment conditions and pay, by ending exploitative zero-hours contracts, or introducing a fair pay agreement for adult social care workers, have already been abandoned or kicked into the long grass in the face of resistance from employers. That reveals the immigration white paper for what it is—not an even-handed intervention into the labour market to end the exploitation of immigrant labour, but a shameful display of racist pandering.
Resistance
A small number of leftwing Labour MPs have denounced the proposals. But instead of explaining why net immigration has risen to such high levels, and exposing Reform’s utterly fraudulent commitment to ‘net zero migration’, hundreds more will either keep silent, or pretend to share the reactionary prejudices that they hope will save their parliamentary seats. This policy of reflecting back the ideas the media and think tanks tell MPs that voters have, instead of acting as a tribune and advocate for the general interests of the class they supposedly represent, is accelerating the terminal disintegration of Labour as a cohesive force at national elections.
The responsibility for that lies with the MPs, not voters. The responsibility of socialists is to intervene into this process to channel the exodus of workers repelled by Labour away from the liquidation of their class interests into the liberal Greens, Scottish or Welsh nationalists, and towards the conclusion that it is reformism as a policy, not just its organisational expression, that is bankrupt.
The link we need to press upon here is the trade union leaders, who must be called on not merely to denounce in words, but to oppose in action what amounts to a wholesale assault on the democratic rights and access to services of their members and the class as a whole. This applies equally to Unison, the principal health and social care union, as it does to PCS, whose members direct and carry out the civil service side of immigration policy. Both are led by self-proclaimed socialists. Will they put socialist principle first, or will they bend the knee to the law, again?
Immigration controls serve to divide the working class, promote national hostility, and strengthen the far right, but also the grip of social-chauvinist reformism by promoting trade union methods to defend ‘British’ jobs against ‘foreign’ workers.
Internationalism is the absolute foundation of working class strength and essential to developing consciousness of its historic goal—international socialism, a society which is consciously uprooting the roots of racism, chauvinism and all forms of social oppression and exploitation.
Internationalism in deeds not words is what separates revolutionaries from reformists, and that’s why we fight to smash all immigration controls, to dismantle the detention centres; to organise community defiance of Border Agency raids and self-defence against racist pogroms; to demand working class action for equal rights for all workers, regardless of nationality.
