Labour’s 2017 manifesto promised an end to free movement and that, instead of the Tories’ £30,000 salary threshold that migrants need to be earning before they dare to take even one step on to our territory, a Labour government would ensure that migrants would have “no access to public funds”. These are promises that should be broken. Like many Labour Party members I’m in favour of free movement, both for me and for others. And as for the second promise, here’s an example of what “no access to public funds” means in practice, It’s taken from Mike Cole’s book “Racism”:

As a direct result of the 2007–08 financial crisis … increasing numbers of people in Peterborough were forced to become homeless, and resorted to squatting in back yards or setting up desperate makeshift camps, which were reminiscent of shanty towns, on roundabouts and in woods. By 2010 it was estimated that as many as 15 camps were scattered around the city. In the same year, a project that was the first of its kind in the country was launched in Peterborough. It involved rounding up homeless migrants and attempting to force them to leave the United Kingdom. The then immigration minister Phil Woolas stated: “People have to be working, studying or self-sufficient and if they are not we expect them to return home …. This scheme to remove European nationals who aren’t employed is getting them off the streets and back to their own country.” Stewart Jackson, a local Conservative MP, described them as “vagrants” and remarked: “I don’t know how these migrants are surviving sleeping rough on roundabouts and bushes but they are a drain on my constituents and taxpayers …. If they are not going to contribute to this country, then, as citizens of their home country, they should return there.”

Typical Tory language? Yes, but Phil Woolas was a Labour minister and MP for Oldham East. Labour must take “no access to public funds” out of its plans for the next manifesto, out of its lexicon of policies and out of its collective head—except as a no-go area.