Freedom of Movement – I
“People voted”, declared a Tory MP during one of the interminable Brexit debates recently, “to end uncontrolled immigration” from the EU. Some people may have done, but if they did, what they were voting to end was nothing more than a figment of, say, Nigel Farage’s imagination. Freedom of movement within the EU was never uncontrolled. But slogans can become powerful tools. We need, said the various Leave campaigns – and later, after a rapid conversion, Theresa May – to “take back control of our borders”. The truth is that we never lost control of them.
The European Parliament’s Fact Sheet on the freedom of movement of workers certainly confirms that “every EU citizen has the right to reside in the territory of another EU country with no conditions or formalities other than the requirement to hold a valid identity card or passport.”[1] But that’s only for the first three months. After that, the country to which the EU citizen has moved has the right to take control: the host member state has the right to “require a citizen to register his or her presence within a reasonable and non-discriminatory period of time.”[2] Then the rules get tougher, as, “for EU citizens who are not workers or self-employed, the right of residence depends on their having sufficient resources not to become a burden on the host Member State’s social assistance system, and having sickness insurance.”[3] Moreover, EU citizens have no right of permanent residence in another EU country until they have completed “five years of uninterrupted legal residence”.[4]
But can’t they come and live off “our benefits” for as long as they like? No. Indeed, the European Court of Justice
recently rejected the right to benefits of an inactive EU citizen who had entered the host Member State solely for the purpose of claiming benefits (Case C-333/13 Dano): it held that the right to equal treatment, which would include access to benefits, presupposes legal residence … which the claimant did not have owing to a lack of sufficient financial means.[5]
One puzzled writer to The Guardian’s Letters page in 2017, Paul Whitaker, summed up the situation:
Since 2004, European Union law has allowed governments to control movements of European citizens as follows: allow EU citizens to freely circulate only for three months and then require them (should they want to stay longer) to show they are working (employed or self-employed), a registered student or have sufficient resources (pension, savings) to support themselves and comprehensive sickness insurance, e.g. a valid European health insurance card enabling the NHS to claim back the cost of treatment or have private health insurance. The UK is one of the few governments that has not implemented this.[6]
He then asks a pertinent question:
For six years, Theresa May was in charge of the Home Office responsible for immigration, yet did nothing to adopt these conditions. One wonders why not and why immigration was allowed to dominate the referendum and is still being paraded as a big problem. Yet another failure of our own government and the Home Office under Theresa May is being blamed on the EU. The remedy was always in the UK’s hands.[7]
But Paul Whitaker hasn’t quite got it right here at the end. For surely there was nothing to remedy, since freedom of movement was doing a lot of good to this host member state. Growing numbers of its citizens were also making the journey in the opposite direction, taking up opportunities to work or retire in other EU countries. What’s to remedy? But then came the riot of fantasy that was the EU referendum, and the panic that followed.
[1] European Parliament Fact Sheet, “Free Movement of Workers: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/factsheets/en/sheet/41/free-movement-of-workers
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.
[6] “EU rules already offer a solution on freedom of movement”, Letters, The Guardian, 8 January 2017: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/jan/08/eu-rules-already-offer-a-solution-on-freedom-of-movement
[7] Ibid.
I will do no harm or injustice to them
There’s a thing called the Hippocratic oath, taken by medical students when they end their studies and set out on their careers. It’s 2,500 years old now, so it’s a bit out of date. For one thing, the medic declares, “I swear by Apollo the physician, and Asclepius, and Hygieia and Panacea and all the gods and goddesses” to keep the oath; for another, aspiring doctors say, “In purity and according to divine law will I carry out my life and my art.” Mind you, leaving aside the divine law, the purity promise may be less out of date when coupled with the promise to avoid “any voluntary act of impropriety or corruption, including the seduction of women or men, whether they are free men or slaves.” (We may once have thought slavery was out of date after Toussaint L’Ouverture and Wilberforce, but not any more.) It may also be encouraging to know that your GP has sworn, “I will not use the knife, even upon those suffering from stones, but I will leave this to those who are trained in this craft.” But much is out of date – the prohibition of abortion for example. But there is one promise that’s right up to date, even to today’s headlines, and it’s one we all need to be sure of. Speaking of their patients, doctors promise: “I will do no harm or injustice to them.”
Both those things were done to Esayas Welday, an Eritrean asylum seeker in the UK. He was diagnosed with leukaemia and started a course of chemotherapy. But suddenly the treatment was stopped and he was told that, because he couldn’t afford the £33,000 needed to pay for the treatment, that was it. He had already been homeless. Now he was homeless again, turfed out of Northwick Park Hospital in West London, with a few bits of medication in a plastic bag. Read his story below. The hospital trust apparently treated him in this way because they thought the government had instructed them to do so. They said: “Mr Welday is not eligible for NHS treatment … he is homeless with refugee status.” They were wrong. He was eligible although he was homeless. They were wrong again because with refugee status he would have been eligible. They were wrong yet again because he didn’t have refugee status, he was simply an asylum seeker asking for refugee status. And as such he was eligible because his treatment was urgent. How did they get all this wrong? I would guess it’s because these particular rules, part of the government’s hostile environment towards migrants since 2017, are complicated, strict and presented in such a way that the pressure is on staff to err on the side of refusal rather than follow their instinct to care.
Happily, another hospital interpreted the rules in a different way. Whittington Hospital in North London looked at their patient, looked at the rules, and refused to be panicked or pressured into doing “harm or injustice” to him. His treatment continued.
My point is this: capitalism corrupts everything, It has no respect for human decency. It even tricks people sworn to a duty of care into thinking that they now have no need to care. It demands what this article describes as payment “upfront for many forms of hospital-based medical care, even though such patients are usually penniless and often destitute, like Welday.” Complicated and hard-to-interpret government rules imposing a hostile environment seemed to lock the NHS bureaucracy and then its staff into a scenario that would have ended in Esayas’s death (at 29) if another solution had not been found by other staff.
We definitely need a general election. But we need more than that. We need to overturn a system of markets and money and profits and a culture of xenophobia and racism that insists that “they” are not equal to “us”. Are our alternative leaders up to the job? I hope so. But I don’t know.
The article:
A tale (and a hope) for “our tempestuous day” in 2019
How Beastly the Bourgeois is – D. H. Lawrence
How beastly the bourgeois is
especially the male of the species–
Presentable, eminently presentable–
shall I make you a present of him?
Isn’t he handsome? Isn’t he healthy? Isn’t he a fine specimen?
Doesn’t he look the fresh clean Englishman, outside?
Isn’t it God’s own image? tramping his thirty miles a day
after partridges, or a little rubber ball?
wouldn’t you like to be like that, well off, and quite the
thing
Oh, but wait!
Let him meet a new emotion, let him be faced with another
man’s need,
let him come home to a bit of moral difficulty, let life
face him with a new demand on his understanding
and then watch him go soggy, like a wet meringue.
Watch him turn into a mess, either a fool or a bully.
Just watch the display of him, confronted with a new
demand on his intelligence,
a new life-demand.
How beastly the bourgeois is
especially the male of the species–
Nicely groomed, like a mushroom
standing there so sleek and erect and eyeable–
and like a fungus, living on the remains of a bygone life
sucking his life out of the dead leaves of greater life
than his own.
And even so, he’s stale, he’s been there too long.
Touch him, and you’ll find he’s all gone inside
just like an old mushroom, all wormy inside, and hollow
under a smooth skin and an upright appearance.
Full of seething, wormy, hollow feelings
rather nasty–
How beastly the bourgeois is!
Standing in their thousands, these appearances, in damp
England
what a pity they can’t all be kicked over
like sickening toadstools, and left to melt back, swiftly
into the soil of England.
Is no news good news?
I have hardly watched any news since just before Christmas. And you know how it is when you’ve been on holiday and when you come back it takes time to understand that you are back and that you will have to adjust to what is called normality, as opposed to the beach, or the mountains, or the Metropolitan Museum? Well, I’ve been away from the news for two weeks (apart from an accidental, careless sight of the Home Secretary telling the nation that asylum seekers are only genuine if they make their applications in the first safe country they cross on their journey and not bother us here; at that point I fumbled for the off-switch, rushed out of the room, and went back into news-blocking mode. Oh, but before I found the off-switch I caught a glance of a newly inaugurated Brazilian president, and then I was really desperate for the off-switch.
Anyway, yesterday morning I watched the Andrew Marr Show and found I didn’t understand much of what was being said. There was Theresa May repeating the words of her old recordings. When she felt that perhaps they had lost some of the impact they once had she reverted to that real old-time-religion favourite: “On the 29th of March we will leave the European Union, take back control of our borders, control of our laws, and control of our waters with a deal that is in the interests of all the British people”, she sang. Her voice took on a slight Thatcher intonation, and the whole performance, with the accompanying jangly necklace, was obviously designed to bring the likes of Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg to a premature orgasm. As a matter of fact, I never really did understand what “control of our waters” actually meant, but now, since my news-blocking effort, I don’t understand what any of it means. Still, life goes on and I must try to revise my Brexit vocab.
Then there was Labour Shadow Health Secretary Jonathan Ashworth, who also repeated a lot of old songs, though without the jangly necklace, about the damage Tory policies were doing. The songs all spoke the truth (and I cheered up a bit) but then he seemed unable to answer any of the really interesting questions, like what Labour’s own policy on social care and the NHS would actually be. From his first words, I think he was saying something like “We’ll look to see what the Tories are offering and then we’ll …” and I felt the urge to block the news again. Then he was asked whether his plan for the NHS would be full public ownership like in the old days. He muttered something about “there will always be a role for the private sector”. This sounded like a kind of partnership – a public-private partnership even. This has usually been code for “private”, both under Tory and Labour governments. These schemes are ones where private calls the shots, makes everything more expensive and rakes in the profit. That’s its purpose. So Jonathan’s words were worrying. Because many of us thought those days would be over under the new politics. Not that we want to go back to the old days, far from it. We thought we would go forward to a democratically accountable public ownership, in which workers and users of services would call the shots. That was never the case in the old days. The old nationalised industries and public services were run by more or less the same people who ran them when they were private. And they ran them on the same lines. At the end of the day they were supposed to make a profit, like their capitalist predecessors. And they mostly did.
It’s time to tell a story. Long years ago, when Sir Keith Joseph was Education Secretary, I interviewed him for an audio magazine for the blind. We touched on the private versus public question. He agreed that publicly owned outfits make a profit: “Oh, yes, they make a profit, of course, but – well, look at that splendid jumper you’re wearing. I don’t know where you got it, where did you buy it?”
“I don’t remember,” I replied nervously. “Marks & Spencer’s probably.”
“Very well, then. What do you want us to do? Nationalise Marks and Spencer’s? And what would happen then? They’d say, ‘You can’t have the colour you want – we’ll choose it for you; you can’t have the pattern you want – we’ll choose it for you; you can’t have the style you want – we’ll choose it for you.’ Is that want you want?”
I can’t remember my answer, but anyway he slowly calmed down. Of course, he wasn’t really worried about my rights, or customer satisfaction, or the service provided. His real concern was that in a publicly owned operation the profits would go to the wrong people: instead of going into the pockets and coffers of his friends they would go to the state, where they might be spent on improving the service. Of course, in “the old days” governments often spent the money on things that, if we’d been asked, we would have vetoed. But we weren’t asked. That’s why now, after Corbyn’s election, the eyes of some of us lit up when we heard the words “democratically accountable” attached to the words “public ownership”. And that’s why my eyes glazed over and I was tempted to head for the news-blocker when Ashworth mentioned “a role for the private sector”. But I thought, No, I’ve closed that door behind me. I must now find my way back to being a responsible citizen. It’s difficult though. There aren’t that many role models.
The other thing I noticed yesterday was that America is in lockdown. That sounds uncomfortable. Like when, during the dockers’ strike in the 1970s the Heath government said they would “sequestrate” the union’s funds. “By heck,” said union leader Hugh Scanlon, “We’re going to be sequestrated – that sounds painful!” But Trump clearly doesn’t understand how workers, even those in government departments, feel when they’re sent home or have to work without pay. “They’re 100% behind me,” declared Trump. Yes, and hopefully they’re all armed to the teeth!
A speech to remember for the future
Back in 2015, during the first Labour leadership contest in which Jeremy Corbyn was a candidate, the House of Commons passed the Tories’ Welfare, Reform and Work Bill, a typical Tory attack on the poor from which the increasing numbers of people in poverty are suffering today. Here is a brief account of what happened, ending with the speech that day by John McDonnell (now Labour’s Shadow Chancellor) which I offer as a message of hope as we start what promises to be a challenging year.
What it was all about
On 20 July 2015, the government was determined to enforce its austerity programme and the Bill contained measures under which the most vulnerable in society would have to bear the heaviest burden: measures proposed in the Bill meant that, for the first time, tax credits and family benefits under Universal Credit would be limited to the first two children and that most working age benefits would be frozen for four years from 2016.[1] People claiming the working element of the Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) would have their payments reduced to match the Job Seeker’s Allowance (JSA),[2] and the benefit cap was to be reduced from £26,000 a year to £23,000 in London, and £20,000 in the rest of the country.[3] Moreover, many young people between the ages of 18 and 21 would no longer be able to claim Housing Benefit.[4] It might be thought that Labour would vote against such measures, which impacted so negatively on the poor. But the party’s Acting Leader, Harriet Harman, decided otherwise. She told Andrew Neil on The Sunday Politics:
We won’t oppose the Welfare Bill, we won’t oppose the household benefit cap. [We won’t oppose] what they brought forward in relation to restricting benefits and tax credits for people with three or more children … We’ve got to recognise why the Tories are in government and not us, not because [voters] love the Tories but because they didn’t trust us on the economy and on benefits.[5]
Harman went on to impose a three-line whip on Labour MPs, instructing them to abstain in the Commons vote on the Bill. This caused much dissent in the Parliamentary Labour Party (the PLP), and Harman tried to defuse the crisis by tabling a “reasoned amendment” to the Bill, setting out Labour’s objections to it, but supporting controls on the overall costs of social security and backing proposals such as the lower benefits cap, the removal of tax credits from families with more than two children and the replacing of mortgage interest support with loans. The amendment also said that the Bill should not be given a second reading but Harman insisted that, if the amendment was defeated, MPs should abstain when it came to the vote on the whole Bill. Helen Goodman, the Labour MP for Bishop Auckland, expressed her confusion:
I cannot see why if you table a reasoned amendment rejecting a bill you would then go on to abstain in a further vote on the bill. It would be best to oppose [it] all the way through because of the damage the bill does to people in poverty.[6]
When the amendment was defeated, Goodman went on to vote against the Bill, as did 47 other Labour MPs, including Corbyn.
Corbyn was the only leadership candidate to vote against the Bill. During the debate, John McDonnell made the speech which best reflected the Corbyn leadership team’s view of the Bill: “I make this clear,” he said:
I would swim through vomit to vote against the Bill, and listening to some of the nauseating speeches tonight, I think we might have to.
Poverty in my constituency is not a lifestyle choice; it is imposed on people. We hear lots about how high the welfare bill is, but let us understand why that is the case. The housing benefit bill is so high because for generations we have failed to build council houses, we have failed to control rents and we have done nothing about the 300,000 properties that stand empty in this country. Tax credits are so high because pay is so low. The reason pay is so low is that employers have exploited workers and we have removed the trade union rights that enabled people to be protected at work. Fewer than a third of our workers are now covered by collective bargaining agreements. Unemployment is so high because we have failed to invest in our economy, and we have allowed the deindustrialisation of the north, Scotland and elsewhere. That is why the welfare bill is so high, and the Bill does as all other welfare reform Bills in recent years have done and blames the poor for their own poverty, not the system … We need a proper debate about how we go forward investing in housing, lifting wages, restoring trade union rights and ensuring that we get people back to work and do not have high pockets of deprivation in areas such as mine and around the country … I say to Labour Members that people out there do not understand reasoned amendments; they want to know whether we voted for or against the Bill. Tonight I will vote against it.
The speech: https://youtu.be/4rxKXw7O_pQ
[1] “Benefit changes: Who will be affected?”, BBC News, 8 July 2015: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-33429390 (accessed 29/3/2017).
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] “Labour won’t oppose Welfare Bill”, BBC News, 12 July 2015: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-33498110/labour-won-t-oppose-welfare-bill (accessed 2/1/2018).
[6] Cited, “Harman seeks to end labour row with reasoned amendment to welfare bill”, The Guardian, 16 July 2015: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/jul/16/harman-seeks-to-end-labour-row-with-reasoned-amendment-to-welfare-bill (accessed 28/3/2017).
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