As the 2015 General Election approaches, the racism of Britain’s ruling class is in full flow. On 20 November UKIP gained its second MP in the Rochester and Strood by-election, triggered by the defection of sitting MP Mark Reckless from the Conservatives. In a televised debate, Reckless admitted that UKIP supported the repatriation of migrants following withdrawal from the EU. UKIP leader Nigel Farage hastily issued a correction, but Reckless maintains that up to that point repatriation had been party policy. A few days later, Farage claimed that children born to immigrants in Britain should also be viewed as immigrants – a position this time defended by a UKIP spokesperson. Tom Vickers reports on the escalation of racism.
UKIP’s success with a platform of open racism has provided the pretext for a further escalation in the racism of the Conservative and Labour Parties. Whereas in the past migrant workers and refugees have been played off against each other, each in turn held up as the ‘model migrant’ and then demonised, in the current period the parties are united in viciously attacking both groups. This is not simply a knee-jerk reaction to UKIP’s growing popularity, there is a deeper purpose: the need to bolster support for Britain’s imperialist war drive in the Middle East and to divide the working class within Britain, intensifying exploitation and undermining resistance.
Persecuting refugees
The office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reports that the total number of international refugees has exceeded 50 million, the largest number since the Second World War. One of the main countries of origin is Syria, where Britain’s part in overt and covert interventions aimed at toppling the Assad government have led to massive human suffering. The British ruling class is determined to stop the victims of its crimes abroad from claiming refuge within Britain. It also seeks to limit refugees because the claim to asylum is a universal human right, and therefore contradicts the attempt to ‘manage’ migration to the labour needs of capital.
The response of Britain and other EU states to the increased number of refugees has been to unleash massive repression against those seeking to enter the EU, which has forced migrants into more dangerous routes. More than 3,000 people have died attempting to enter Europe via the Mediterranean since the start of 2014. In October the British government announced that funding for international search and rescue operations would be withdrawn, on the basis that rescuing people from drowning was creating, in the words of Foreign Office minister Lady Anelay, ‘an unintended “pull factor”’ attracting migrants to Europe.
The growing desperation of refugees trying to cross into Britain from Calais has led to people jumping on and off trucks, hiding beneath the axles of vehicles or entering the sea. Calais Migrant Solidarity reports at least 12 deaths between the start of 2014 and November, and three deaths in one week alone in October. The response of the French state has been to step up repression, with repeated raids and arrests directed against migrants in Calais, and destruction of their makeshift shelters. The British government has joined in, pledging £12m in September to increase port security at Calais, as well as offering the Calais authorities the 9ft-high steel security fences used for the NATO summit in Newport.
The Coalition government and the Labour Party have tried to provide a fig leaf for their utter lack of humanity by pointing to their Syria Vulnerable Persons Relocation Scheme for accepting refugees recommended in advance by UNHCR. Yet between the start of the scheme in March and November 2014 only 100 people had been settled in the UK through this scheme, with a plan to accept only 500 over the next three years. This compares to Germany’s pledge to accept 24,000 over the same period, although even this is tiny given UNHCR’s estimates that there are currently more than 3.3 million Syrian refugees who have left the country, and a further 7.6 million internally displaced.
Thousands more have claimed asylum in Britain since the start of the conflict, but they will be forced to go through the individual asylum process in which refugees are subjected to systematic disbelief and interrogation as they are forced to ‘prove’ their entitlement to refugee status. 23 Syrians who were refused asylum in Britain were deported in 2013. The majority of Syrian refugees are prevented from reaching Britain, or are forced to do so by irregular means, risking their lives and if they are successful facing criminalisation. As a group of Syrian refugees who blockaded the Calais port administration in October 2013 said in their statement demanding a meeting with the British Home Office: ‘We have the right to claim asylum in England, but how do we get there? There is not a legal way to cross.’
Stripping rights from migrant workers
In October Prime Minister David Cameron announced he wanted to cap ‘low-skilled’ migration from other EU countries, going beyond restrictions on access to benefits passed earlier in the year and threatening Britain’s membership of the EU. Given the British economy’s dependence on low-paid migrant labour in sectors such as agriculture, food processing and care work, Cameron’s proposals proved no more than bluster, for in a major speech on 28 November, he pointedly failed to repeat the threat. Instead, he focused on negotiating more severe restrictions on in-work and out-of-work benefits for EU migrants. Under his proposals, they will not be able to receive Universal Credit if they are out of work. Those who cannot find work for six months will be subject to deportation, those in work will be refused tax credits, child benefit and social housing until they have been in the UK for four years. The combined effect would be to increase the pressure on a layer of migrant workers to accept more exploitative conditions and to place pressure on low-waged workers to accept longer hours in order to earn enough to survive.
Cameron’s position implicitly promotes the idea that Britain is being overwhelmed by immigrants. A more explicit statement of this racist myth was left to Defence Secretary Michael Fallon, who claimed in an interview on the Andrew Marr Show that British towns are being ‘swamped’ by immigrants, and that their residents are ‘under siege [with] large numbers of migrant workers and people claiming benefits’. Fallon publicly retracted his comments on the instructions of the party leadership, but by then the work had been done in whipping up further racism. Fallon was publicly supported by other MPs, including former Labour Home Secretary David Blunkett writing in the Daily Mail.
Research by two leading migration economists at UCL, published in November, shows that between 2000 and 2011 European migrants made a net contribution of £20bn to public finances, £5bn of which was from Eastern European migrants, and that their education would have cost Britain £6.8bn if it had not been paid for by their countries of origin. Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith dismissed the report as ‘silly’, and claimed in an interview on BBC Radio 5 Live: ‘they [migrants] literally change the schooling because so many people arrive not speaking English. You have then got problems you know with local services, transport, all that kind of stuff’. This has resonance because the areas where many migrants live are often characterised by inadequate housing, overcrowded schools and poor health provision, but this is because migrants receive a lower ‘social wage’ on average, in the form of benefits and services. What appears as a transfer of resources from the state to migrants, is in fact a transfer of value from migrants to the capitalist class.
Labour Party, racist party
The Labour Party is fighting to prove it is even more hostile to immigrants than the Conservatives, despite protestations from Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary Rachel Reeves that it will not pander to ‘those who deny the positive contribution that immigrants have always made to our country’. Party leader Ed Miliband said in October that immigration was at the top of his party’s agenda, and that he will also press for EU reforms to allow longer restrictions on migrants from new member states, to stop child benefit and tax credit payments for children who live outside the UK, so further reducing the costs of migrant labour for British capital, and to double the period before new arrivals are able to claim benefits, from three to six months.
In November the party leadership had apparently already decided this was not enough, and Rachel Reeves announced the restriction on out-of-work benefits would be extended to two years, and that access to in-work tax credits would also be restricted. As with Blunkett, Reeves’s platform of choice was the Daily Mail, appealing directly to some of the most racist sections of the middle class.
Shadow Immigration Minister David Hanson has made clear that Labour’s hostility toward migrants is nothing new, writing in Why Vote Labour 2015: ‘There is nothing in Labour history, values, or traditions that require us to be in favour, in principle, of unlimited immigration… we have and always will be for managed immigration’ – managed, of course, in the interests of British capital. Miliband has also promised a new immigration bill within a month of Labour coming to office, including new measures to monitor entry and exit at Britain’s borders, new restrictions on recruitment agencies hiring from abroad, a requirement for large companies hiring skilled workers to offer apprenticeships for ‘local workers’, and more demanding requirements for fluency in English for public sector employees.
This continues the tradition of the Blair and Brown governments, which passed six immigration acts between 1997 and 2010. Every measure to separate migrants from non-migrants, for example through limiting access to benefits and other state support, makes it easier for employers to use migrants as a super-exploited, low-waged labour force. Miliband says the new bill would also create a new specific criminal offence for companies that bring workers into Britain to undercut wages. This is all very well, but how would such a law be enforced? It is likely that employers would find ways to evade Miliband’s proposed restrictions, and in doing so sections of migrant labour would be pushed further underground, leading to new conditions for exploitation.
Miliband has said nothing about reversing any of the attacks on asylum rights introduced by the last Labour government. Indeed, John Grayson from South Yorkshire Migrant and Asylum Action Group reports that campaigners who have been calling for local authorities to rehouse Syrian refugees have found Labour-run councils often the most reluctant to do so. Labour also promises to increase the repressive apparatus, recruiting 1,000 extra ‘UK border guards’. Justifying this, Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper complained that under the Coalition government ‘The number of people stopped and turned away at the border has halved. A smaller proportion of people absconding at the border are being found. And we recently discovered 175,000 failed asylum seekers may not be removed because the Department has “limited resources”.’ This makes clear that nothing has changed since 2008, when Labour’s Immigration Minister Liam Byrne boasted of deporting one person every eight minutes.
Build resistance and solidarity
There can be no vote for racists at the 2015 general election. Labour, Conservatives and UKIP are all committed to racist divisions that undermine the chance of working class resistance. The real hope lies on the streets. We need to build a movement that confronts all of these parties with an alternative based on working class solidarity.
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! 242 December 2014/January 2015
