By KD Tait
Keir Starmer, reeling from the electoral trouncing Labour took at the hands of Nigel Farage in the councils and the loss of Runcorn, has shamefully resorted to immigrant bashing. With Reform second placed in more than 90 seats, Starmer denounced the Tories for what he calls a ‘one-nation experiment in open borders’ and claimed the country runs the danger of ‘becoming an island of strangers’, and that this has done ‘incalculable’ damage to Britain.
Can anyone who thinks seriously about it imagine that this is what destroyed Britain’s industrial base, led to 14 years of austerity or ruined the welfare state? Was it immigration that caused the failure to invest in new jobs in the ‘left behind’ industrial areas, or the deliberate underfunding of the NHS, or poverty wages? Did immigrants cause Thatcher’s right to buy policy which destroyed the social housing stock?
No, of course not. These were choices made by politicians, who wanted 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.
These real problems are blamed on the very immigrant workers who make a vital contribution to public services and suffer equally, if not more so, from their absence as their British-born counterparts. Immigrant workers are subject to insecure, discriminatory, and racist employment and visa restrictions. These undermine the ability of the whole working class to collectively defend jobs and conditions.
Home secretary Yvette Cooper’s White Paper proposes sweeping restrictions on visas, with whole industries effectively barred from recruiting overseas, with family reunions 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.
Former human rights lawyer and chief public prosecutor Starmer now threatens to restrict appeals against deportation to the European Court (ECHR) based on the Human Rights Act, yielding to the racist mania of the Tory press. He has pleaded (in vain) for Albania to provide a deportation ‘hub’, aping the Rwanda policy of the Tories. The new Border Security bill gives new ‘anti-terrorism’ powers to the increasingly paramilitary border agency.
The excuse for these reactionary policies by Labour and some trade union leaders 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, and the workforce is 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.
Tackle the real causes
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.
Keir Starmer’s language legitimises far right talking points, and acts as a transmission belt for turning resentment at cost of living pressures 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. 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.
A small number of leftwing Labour MPs have denounced Stramer’s proposals. But the link we need to seize upon is the trade union leaders, who must be called on not just to criticise but to oppose in action what is an assault on the services provided by immigrants in our hospitals, universities, care homes, and on construction sites.
This applies to Unison, the principal health and social care union, and to PCS, whose members direct and carry out immigration policy. Both are led by self-proclaimed socialists. Will they put socialist principle first, or will they bend the knee to the law, once again?
We need a rank and file campaign to insist they do the former and prepare to defy the law wherever possible. Where migrants form a significant part of the labour force, workers should link up with anti-raids networks and prevent bosses or the state from rounding up their workmates and sending them to detention centres.
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.
That is why must we fight to abolish 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.
