By Diane Abbott
LONDON: After a set of elections in which the Labour leadership’s campaign was almost all about immigration and asylum, it has decided to “go further and faster” in the same direction. We know that the outcomes of the May 1 elections were disastrous for Labour, and unfortunately, we can confidently predict further disasters lie ahead for as long as this line is maintained.
It should be clear that to defeat Reform UK, we need to set out a clear alternative that delivers for working people and the poor, that promotes equality, not division, and supports peace over genocide and endless war.
It used to be claimed, falsely, that “we never speak about immigration,” when it seemed to some of us that we talk about little else. But now, no-one can claim that to be the case and the talk is all in terms set by the anti-migrants. Labour’s leaders not only fail to challenge this, but they are also key participants.
And no-one could accuse the government of failing to act on the issues of migration and asylum. Since the Labour May 1 election meltdown, ministers have announced a variety of crackdowns: on visas for Nigeria, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, on student visas, on migrants who are not fluent in English and English tests for all migrants. All of which culminated in Starmer’s speech on the immigration White Paper, which won support from Farage.
All of that took place in seven working days! This is a government obsessed by immigration. The speech itself has been widely compared to Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech, which got him thrown out of Ted Heath’s Tory Party. And, despite later denials, the prime minister explicitly tells us where he stands on the political spectrum. With his attack in the same speech on One Nation policies, he is declaring that he too stands to the right of Heath.
The damage caused by previous immigration is “incalculable,” according to Starmer, despite paying lip service to the contribution of previous waves of immigrants. The government’s entire approach to immigration policy is economically, morally and politically bankrupt.
It is not entirely new, but it does plumb new depths. After the 2010 election, when we had presided over our full share of the Iraq war, the global banking crisis and the slump in the Western economies, the candidates for the subsequent Labour leadership election all declared we lost only because “we were too soft on migration,” free from any evidence whatsoever. This politics of scapegoating ushered in 14 years of Tory austerity.
The same approach is adopted now, only in government and after austerity has ravaged our communities. No, it is not true that migrants are coming here to take low-paid, low-skilled jobs. The average pay of migrants is higher than non-migrants, and skills levels are higher still (it is just that many of them are underpaid for their skills because they work in the NHS).
The population, by definition, cannot take jobs; they are the ones who create them, or the state sector does it for them by proxy. There are clearly enormous pressures on public services and on housing, but fewer migrants will exacerbate this problem, which is either created by or at least allowed by successive governments.
In certain sectors, such as social care, employers and the (mainly private) service as a whole rely largely on migrant workers, and they are severely underpaid. But the government has no intention whatsoever of raising pay in the care sector to attract domestic workers. The choice, therefore, is overseas workers doing social care work, or nobody at all doing it. The government seems to have chosen the latter, and we will all be worse off.
In a similar vein, Starmer complains that higher-skilled workers from overseas provide no incentive for British employers to invest in skills. Yet the government itself provides no compulsion and little incentive to create either apprenticeships or the continuous in-work training that a modern workforce needs. The number of apprenticeships is dwarfed by the number of non-graduates becoming new workers each year.
So, the idea that curbing migration will address the lack of quality jobs available, or the crises in public services or in housing, is completely false. These are a product of abysmally low investment.
To the extent that ministers understand this, their position is morally bankrupt. They are peddling immigration policy snake oil, which in many areas, such as social care or universities, will only make us all worse off.
This is only compounded when the government’s own assessment is that all these measures, splitting up families, denying residency and citizenship, demonising asylum-seekers and threatening all people of colour will achieve a reduction of 100,000 in inward migration. This is of an annual total of 1.2 million (and net migration of 750,000). The pretence is that this policy will reduce the total significantly, yet the government’s own projection is that it will only reduce migration fractionally.
Ministers claim that they are “smashing the [people-trafficking] gangs,” which is a meaningless variation on the Tories’ “stopping the boats.” The gang members profiting from this trade have no need ever to get into one of the small boats, for obvious reasons. But the promise is false and reactionary, demonising all asylum-seekers and never stopping the traffic.
If you tell the public that this is the single most important issue facing the country, promise to deliver significant change and then fail spectacularly, you can only reinforce your enemies’ arguments and trash your own credibility. Farage is right, for once, when he says, “The more they keep singing our tunes, the more we win.” That process is already well under way, as May 1 shows.
Starmer claimed in his recent press conference that he was not responding to any particular party, or chasing any set of voters, which just reinforces most people’s suspicion that that is exactly what he is doing.
But we know that the anti-migrants’ economic arguments are false, as migrant workers are on average higher-paid, higher-skilled and contribute more to public services than others. Being far tougher on those claiming benefits is part of this government’s “solution,” implying that disabled and vulnerable people are largely work-shy and can be forced into the vacancies created by fewer recruits from overseas.
This is a war on foreigners and a war on “scroungers,” familiar hard-right Tory territory, which always morphs into a war on all workers. The labour movement cannot win on this agenda. (IPA Service)
Courtesy: Morning Star
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