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Paris is personal
I’m upset by this. Politicians will make what capital they can out of this fire. But I’m upset. I haven’t been inside the building much – it always seemed a gloomy place to me. But it’s a memorable piece of Paris architecture and it contains a lot of history, both the kind we may celebrate and the kind we would have to deplore. And it’s just down the road from where I used to work. Paris is where I always feel at home – immediately, no matter how long I’ve been away. Paris is personal, and this catastrophe feels like an injury to someone I love.
I know that if a fire broke out (and they often do) in what are called the “difficult suburbs”, where many of the city’s ethnic minorities live out their marginalised lives, the media wouldn’t be piling in to report on it and photograph it. The president wouldn’t cancel a speech and turn up, there would be no inquiry announced into its cause within the hour (as was the case with Notre-Dame). And the cause of the fire would sure as hell not be related to any renovations because there wouldn’t be any renovations, let alone ones costing millions of euros. But I’m sad, because I once lived there, and I know it a bit. I’m going to be there in the middle of May and I will visit the site of this disaster. And I will wish Paris well, from its centre to its “difficult suburbs”.
On Popes, cardinals, paedophilia and cover-ups
In the New Testament, the apostle Paul had a big argument with the apostle Peter: “I opposed him to his face”, he said.[1] There is, however, nothing to suggest that Peter (in Catholic teaching, the first Vicar of Christ, or Pope) ever trod on his own toes. We’ve had to wait till the 21st century for that. Former Pope Benedict XVI (who was allowed to retire rather than wait to die in office) is poking his nose into the business of his successor, Pope Francisco. And that is to go where angels fear to tread, and Benedict seems to have stumbled into the paths of foolishness. What he has done is lay the blame for paedophilia among priests on “the revolution of 68”, reports Le Monde,[2] because, according to Benedict, it made paedophilia “something that was permitted and appropriate” (of all the ills blamed on 1968 I don’t think I’ve heard that specific one before – but I may have lived a sheltered life). But back to Benedict:
Why has paedophilia attained such proportions? At the end of the day, the reason is the absence of God … [A] world without God can only be a world without direction and therefore a world without a notion of good and evil.”[3]
But remember, we’re talking about the Catholic Church. Benedict must surely believe that God is present in the Church. He has to believe that, if only to justify his salary and his robes and cassock allowance when he was in office, and his pension since. And it is paedophilia tolerated, denied and covered up by the Church that concerns his successor today.
But if Benedict is right and all this happened while God was absent from the world, what was God doing to stop the abuse, the denials and the cover-ups in the domain in which he was uniquely present, the Church. Not a lot, it seems.
And Benedict? He is now trying to limit the damage the scandal has done to the Church by blaming 1968, and he says that “paedocriminality” became severe only after the second half of the 1980s. This claim, says Le Monde, is particularly questionable because “there have been numerous revelations that go back to at least the immediate post-Second World War period, as in Ireland, for example.” But what was he doing in “the second half of the 1980s” anyway when, he says, paedophilia was raging? “Before succeeding Jean-Paul II [as Pope]”, reports Le Monde, “Cardinal Ratzinger [Benedict’s real name] was fighting hard to change canon law in order to allow the guilty to be kept out of harm’s way” (i.e. protected, their crimes covered up).
Perhaps Ratzinger now regrets not resisting the temptation to interfere. Too late now though. The cat is out of the bag. Or the toothpaste is out of the tube. But I don’t think the shit will hit the fan: he’s 92, he’ll get the sympathy granted to the elderly, he’s Pope Emeritus, he won’t go to jail. But there’s not much merit in that.
[1] Galatians 1:11.
[2] Le Monde, 11 April 2019: https://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2019/04/11/benoit-xvi-attribue-la-pedophilie-dans-l-eglise-a-mai-68-et-a-l-absence-de-dieu_5449019_3224.html
[3] Ibid.
No ifs, no buts – Labour must support free movement
At a jamboree of the G7 interior ministers this week, the French minister, Christophe Castaner, took his chance to attack the non-governmental organisations (NGOs) saving migrants from their sinking vessels in the Mediterranean. The NGOs, said M. Castaner, were “complicit” with the people traffickers.[1] This was in line with his president’s view of the matter: last summer Macron declared that the NGOs were “playing the game of the smugglers”. In saying what he did at the end of this week’s conference, Castaner joined forces with his far-right Italian counterpart, Matteo Salvini, who had also said, during the conference, that there was “collusion” between the NGOs and the traffickers. Salvini’s contribution seemed to be a reassertion of the Italian far right’s earlier campaign against the rescue ships, calling them “the taxis of the sea”.
There is no mention here of our own home secretary, Savid Javid, who has just been forced to apologise for the Home Office’s treatment of the Windrush generation, an affair which also resulted in death for some of its victims. Javid said it was all a terrible mistake, and that it will never happen again. He then popped back to the office where his officials are continuing to steal, and keep, the UK passports of up to 6,000 British-Iraqi citizens on the spurious ground of finding discrepancies in their dates of birth. The Home Office knows full well that many Iraqi Kurds (and most of these people are Kurdish) are uncertain about their dates of birth. Historically, records were not kept in the same way as in the West. The Home Office knows this, yet, cruelly, it persists. The hostile environment continues.
But back to Christophe and Matteo. The “let them drown” brigade in Europe began its campaign some time ago. The UK was complicit.[2] The far right is getting its act together across the world. Will we continue to be complicit? Nothing suggests that the Tory Party will suddenly become migrant-friendly. Its leadership after May will become more right-wing, its home secretary (Javid or otherwise) will become more migrant-hostile.
That’s not where the Labour Party wants to go. Its 2017 election manifesto made this clear:
Labour will not scapegoat migrants nor blame them for economic failures … We will not discriminate between people of different races or creeds. We will end indefinite detentions … Labour will protect those already working here, whatever their ethnicity … Labour values the economic and social contributions of immigrants. Both public and private sector employers depend on immigrants. We will not denigrate those workers. We value their contributions, including their tax contributions … Labour will restore the rights of migrant domestic workers, and end this form of modern slavery … Refugees are not migrants. They have been forced from their homes, by war, famine or other disasters. Unlike the Tories, we will uphold the proud British tradition of honouring the spirit of international law and our moral obligations by taking our fair share of refugees. The current arrangements for housing and dispersing refugees are not fit for purpose. They are not fair to refugees or to our communities. We will review these arrangements.[3]
But if Labour doesn’t want to go down the same road as the Tories, it now has to change its stance on freedom of movement – for its current position, also set out in the manifesto, undermines these commitments. “Freedom of movement will end”, says the manifesto, “when we leave the European Union.” The reason for this was suggested by Emily Thornberry in an interview, apparently citing voters’ concerns about immigration:
As for the single market, you know and I know that it’s very difficult for us to remain in the single market as it currently is because nobody can pretend that the referendum didn’t include a debate on immigration and we want to have fair rules and managed migration when it comes to immigration so we need to negotiate something.[4]
But we are on dangerous ground here. Conceding to voters’ concerns and fears is no substitute for facing them honestly and allaying them. So what are the concerns that voters have about immigration? One of them is the idea that immigrants take jobs from the native population and depress wages. Liberal leader Vince Cable has summarised some of the arguments on this:
At the heart of the politics of immigration is the belief, repeated by Theresa May as a fact, that immigrants, especially unskilled immigrants, depress wages. At first sight the argument seems plausible – and undeniably there is low-wage competition in some places. But there is no evidence that this is a general problem. [In 2013, during the coalition government] I commissioned a range of reviews and studies to establish the facts. They showed that the impact on wages was very small (and only in recession conditions). By and large, immigrants were doing jobs that British people didn’t want to do (or highly skilled jobs that helped to generate work for others). This research was inconvenient to the Home Office, which vetoed the publication of its results.[5]
In 2016, Paul Johnson of the Institute for Fiscal Studies produced a report and asked:
But aren’t all these foreigners taking our jobs? That’s true in the Premier League. The more foreign footballers there are playing for the top clubs, the fewer English players there will be. There’s only room for 11 players in a starting XI.
Yet there is not a fixed number of jobs in the economy. There are seven million more people in work in the UK than there were 40 years ago. Astonishingly, there are nearly two million more than immediately before the recession in 2008. Employment rates among the UK-born are close to record levels. More people means more jobs, not more unemployment. There is absolutely no evidence that higher levels of immigration have increased unemployment among native-born Brits.[6]
On wage levels he wrote:
Evidence on wage impacts is a bit less conclusive. While many studies do not find any evidence of immigration depressing wages, a recent Bank of England paper suggests that the impact of migration on UK-born lower-skilled workers might have been to reduce wages by 1 per cent over a period of eight years. Thus it may have played a part, though only a minor one, in recent experience of low or negative pay growth.[7]
In fact, instead of seeing the fears and concerns of people as a reason for declaring an end to free movement, Thornberry could have argued those points and others in order to allay them and embrace free movement. Labour’s failure to do this had its impact on the Labour manifesto itself. First, the Tory White Paper on immigration post-Brexit included an income threshold of £30,000 p.a. which migrants would have to meet before they could have the right to work.[8] This would keep the poor out, and because of the way poverty is structured it would discriminate by race and ethnicity too. Labour’s response was:
We will replace income thresholds with a prohibition on recourse to public funds. New rules will be equally informed by negotiations with the EU and other partners, including the Commonwealth.[9]
This suggests that the “no recourse to public funds” rule would apply to EU and Commonwealth citizens alike, and it has the same effect as the Tory proposal: it discriminates against the poor and in the end it also discriminates by race and ethnicity.
Secondly, Tory policy matches this exclusion of the poor with “a new, skills-based immigration system”. Such a system “will mean we can reduce the number of people coming to this country, as we promised”.[10] On this, Labour’s manifesto (p. 28) says a Labour government would work
with businesses, trade unions, devolved governments and others to identify specific labour and skill shortages. Working together we will institute a new system which is based on our economic needs, balancing controls and existing entitlements.
This sounds no different to a Tory skills-based system.
The failure to defend immigration also led to the fiasco of Labour’s front bench at first whipping to abstain on the government’s Immigration and Social Security Bill a few weeks ago. There were many reasons to vote against the Bill. As David Lammy MP described it:
It will force our NHS and other vital services into an even deeper staffing crisis. There are already 41,000 nursing vacancies in England. The salary threshold still under consideration would exclude many skilled medical staff, including nurses, paramedics and midwives.
It continues the inhumane practice of indefinite detention. We remain the only European country which does not set a time limit for detained migrants. This sullies our international reputation and undermines complaints we make about human rights abuses abroad.
The 1.2 million [UK citizens in Europe] will inevitably see their own rights eroded too. Overnight they could lose their ability to live and work freely in Europe. Young people who overwhelmingly want the chance to live across the continent are having their horizons permanently narrowed.[11]
But Diane Abbott argued at the time:
The Labour [P]arty is clear that when Britain leaves the single market, freedom of movement ends, and we set this out in our 2017 manifesto. I am a slavish devotee of that magnificent document: so on that basis, the frontbench of the Labour [P]arty will not be opposing this bill this evening.[12]
In the event, the Labour front bench changed its mind and whipped MPs to vote against the Bill, rather than abstain, after protests by several MPs and an immediate on-line and email protest from Labour activists and others. But it took the front bench 90 minutes to do this, after MPs had originally been told they could go home as their votes were not required. Many of them did. Only 178 out of 256 Labour MPs were present to vote.[13]
Labour, under its present leadership, and with its expanded membership, is better than this. At a time when far-right forces are getting their act together, Labour should do so too, giving not an inch of ground to racism and xenophobia, whether it comes from politicians in France, Italy, Brazil, or the United States, or whether it is home-grown. In the Brexit arguments we should be fully in favour of the right to travel, to move from anywhere to anywhere, and for whatever reason: we should be in favour of the right to free movement.
[1]« Castaner accuse les ONG d’être complices des passeurs » Le Monde, 6 April 2019: https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2019/04/06/castaner-accuse-les-ong-d-etre-complices-des-passeurs_5446576_3210.html
[2] “Mediterranean Massacre”: https://bobmouncerblog.wordpress.com/2015/04/22/mediterranean-massacre-job-done/
[3] For The Many Not The Few: The Labour Party Manifesto 2017, pp. 28-29: https://labour.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/labour-manifesto-2017.pdf
[4] “Labour signals that Britain should remain in customs union”, Irish Times, 18 February 2018: https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/uk/labour-signals-that-britain-should-remain-in-customs-union-1.3396757
[5] “The Tory fallacy: that migrants are taking British jobs and driving down wages”:
[6] Immigration limits won’t lift Britain: https://www.ifs.org.uk/publications/8317
[7] Ibid.
[8] White Paper: “The UK’s future skills-based immigration system”: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/766465/The-UKs-future-skills-based-immigration-system-print-ready.pdf, p. 3.
[9]For The Many Not The Few: The Labour Party Manifesto 2017, p. 28: https://labour.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/labour-manifesto-2017.pdf
[10] White Paper: “The UK’s future skills-based immigration system”: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/766465/The-UKs-future-skills-based-immigration-system-print-ready.pdf, p. 3.
[11] In a series of three tweets on 28 January 2019, before the front bench change of mind, declaring his intention to vote against the Bill.
[12] House of Commons debate, 28 January 2019: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/jan/28/labour-in-embarrassing-u-turn-over-immigration-bill-vote
[13] By my calculation, since the government won the vote by 297 votes to 234 (a majority of 63), if the full quota of Labour MPs had turned up to vote against them (another 78), the government would have lost the vote on the Bill.
An attack on human rights posing as a clampdown on “terrorists”
Here’s a translation of part of a story in the French newspaper Libération[1]:
They call it the optimisation of security. Or how to do still more, on the cheap, with an existing system that is already not exactly lax. So on Monday the government responded to the damage caused in the Champs-Élysées during the gilet jaunes’ “Act XVIII”. The new measures, intended to stamp out these actions once and for all, have been announced from the desk of the prime minister, Edouard Philippe, at his desk in Matignon [the prime minister’s Paris residence]. He chose, incredibly, a martial tone for the occasion.
The most spectacular measures concern the banning of gilets-jaunes demonstrations “each time it is necessary” “in the areas which have been most affected”, whenever the authorities “know that extreme elements will be present willing to cause damage”. Let’s be clear, this means in fact banning all gatherings of the gilets jaunes, by its nature a very heterogeneous movement and reticent from its very beginnings to organise hand in hand with the authorities. Until now, the authorities have shown indulgence in the first hours of demonstrations but called in the forces of law and order at the first signs of conflict. After Saturday the shape of things looks quite different: if there is a publicly declared ban police and gendarmes will be ordered to question everybody present in the places named – Édouard Philippe mentioned the Champs-Élysées in Paris, Capitole Square in Toulouse, Pey-Berland Square in Bordeaux. Such an operation has already been tested, notably on the celebrated Parisian avenue during the “Demonstration for All” during the presidency of François Hollande.”
You get the picture. On a pretext of knowing the unknowable, they will deny everybody their right to protest. This, in the land of human rights. This, in the EU with its much-vaunted human-rights guarantees. We must be careful when we ask for clampdowns and bans on the people we don’t like – such bans are easily extended to people we do like and to ourselves.
It is also interesting to note that no mention is made by the French prime minister of the policeman caught looting on Saturday during the demonstration,[2] no sign of “questioning” him for being “present in the place named” and caught looting, or charges being made, or court hearings to come. Remember, the “authorities” are after us, never after them.
[1] https://www.liberation.fr/france/2019/03/18/gilets-jaunes-l-executif-montre-ses-muscles_1716016?xtor=EPR-500001&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=quot
[2] A policeman was videoed looting clothes from a shop in the Champs-Elysees during the gilets-jaunes demo. A second police officer then struck the camera operator with a truncheon. The first officer apparently nicked a Paris-St-Germain football jersey! – https://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2019/03/17/gilets-jaunes-l-igpn-saisie-apres-une-video-montrant-un-policier-prenant-des-vetements_5437508_3224.html?fbclid=IwAR0qfiwyAgpS8N1pgOjqnNEurAI1rmRNiL-O3ZkmKBFO4y_U_-XrmhxXoYo
Perspectives
What the people of Dieppe think about Brexit. From the man who doesn’t like English food and doesn’t like the English themselves; to the woman whose father was rescued by a British fisherman 40 years ago and believes the sea belongs to everyone and also says, more practically, that if English waters are closed to French fishing it will cost Dieppe 200,000 euros a year; to a gay man from Dieppe who visited Brighton at the age of 15 and found emancipation; and a woman who complains that Brexit will lower the price of property in Dieppe. And a British couple in Newhaven who regret the closing of doors.
Words Fail – A Fell Revisited
This, from Malcolm Evison
Freedom of Movement II
What will immigration policy be after Brexit?
The Tories were clear about their intentions from the beginning. In the Foreword to their White Paper on post-Brexit immigration policy May declared, “As we leave the European Union, free movement will end.”[1] But she also added: “For the first time in decades, it will be the democratically elected representatives of the British people who choose who comes into our country.” This promotes the claim that for the last few decades there was “uncontrolled immigration” – which, as we saw in the previous blog, was not true. Given this bad start, there should be no surprise at the criticisms that quickly emerged. May had said that the government would
introduce a new, skills-based immigration system. This will be a system where it is workers’ skills that matter, not which country they come from.
It will be a single system that welcomes talent, hard work, and the skills we need as a country. It will attract the brightest and best to a United Kingdom that is open for business.
Migrants have made a huge contribution to our country over our history – and they will continue to in the future. But it will also be an immigration system that is fair to working people here at home. It will mean we can reduce the number of people coming to this country, as we promised, and it will give British business an incentive to train our own young people.[2]
The White Paper also announced that skilled workers would have to be earning £30,000 if they were to qualify for entry. In this way, preference was to be given to high earners while low earners would be much less welcome. Sabrina Huck of Labour Against Racism and Fascism summarised much of this approach when she pointed out that
“low skilled” workers from “low risk” countries (countries whose citizens are deemed less likely to commit immigration offences such as overstaying or coming under false premises)[3] can apply to work in the UK for up to 12 months, with no ability to bring family members, access different visa schemes or extend their stay, and without access to public benefits during their time. When the 12 months are up, the person is not allowed to re-apply for this visa until a “cooling off” period of a year has passed, effectively banning them from re-entering for work purposes in this time.[4]
Problems with Labour’s response to the White Paper and the Immigration and Social Security Bill
In her response to the White Paper, Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott was right to point out that the £30,000 salary threshold for skilled workers does not reflect a skills-based immigration system, because skill levels don’t always reflect salary levels. But, as Sabrina Huck noted, “Abbott is not challenging the basic assumption that a person’s ability to enter the country, and to live a life with full citizen’s rights, is determined by their material contribution to the needs of British capital.”[5] She added:
This is a dangerous line for the left to take, as it concedes to the right’s political argument that immigration in itself is not a right, and that people’s worth is determined by their (narrowly defined) value for the economic system. This argument underpins much of the Conservative’s [sic] austerity agenda, the demonisation of the working class, poor and disabled, as undeserving, because they do not “contribute” their “fair share” to society.[6]
Abbott’s response to the Bill itself increased these worries: “The Labour [P]arty is clear”, she said,
that when Britain leaves the single market, freedom of movement ends, and we set this out in our 2017 manifesto. I am a slavish devotee of that magnificent document: so on that basis, the frontbench of the Labour [P]arty will not be opposing this bill this evening.[7]
In the event, the Labour front bench changed its mind and whipped MPs to vote against the Bill, rather than abstain, after protests by several MPs and an immediate on-line and email protest from Labour activists and others. But it took the front bench 90 minutes to do this, after MPs had originally been told they could go home as their votes were not required. Many of them did. Only 178 out of 256 Labour MPs were present to vote.[8]
It is, of course, true that the Labour manifesto appeared indistinguishable from the Tory White Paper and the Bill when it came to freedom of movement: “Freedom of movement will end when we leave the European Union. Britain’s immigration system will change …” it said.[9] It is also true that assurances were given that Labour would not “scapegoat migrants nor blame them for economic failures” and that Labour “will develop and implement fair immigration rules” and “not discriminate between people of different races or creeds.”[10] But how fragile are these assurances in the light of Labour’s incomprehensible original decision to abstain? Such a possibility should not even have crossed the leadership’s minds. For there were overwhelmingly more important reasons to vote against the Bill. In the words of David Lammy, MP for Tottenham:
It will force our NHS and other vital services into an even deeper staffing crisis. There are already 41,000 nursing vacancies in England. The salary threshold still under consideration would exclude many skilled medical staff, including nurses, paramedics and midwives.
It continues the inhumane practice of indefinite detention. We remain the only European country which does not set a time limit for detained migrants. This sullies our international reputation and undermines complaints we make about human rights abuses abroad.
The 1.2 million [UK citizens in Europe] will inevitably see their own rights eroded too. Overnight they could lose their ability to live and work freely in Europe. Young people who overwhelmingly want the chance to live across the continent are having their horizons permanently narrowed.[11]
The Labour Campaign for Free Movement couldn’t understand abstention either:
The Bill would end free movement for EU citizens and subject them to UK immigration control. Rather than having parliament specify what the new regime will be, it would hand over a blank cheque to Ministers who will be able to write and re-write the law themselves – so-called “Henry VIII powers”. The Government’s White Paper last month signalled some of their intentions – a brutal attack on the rights and security of migrants, especially working-class migrants.[12]
It was impossible not to be reminded of the fiasco of the Labour abstention during the Tories’ Welfare Bill debate in 2015, at the height of the first Labour leadership elections. The Bill was set to impose 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.[13] 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),[14] 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.[15] Moreover, many young people between the ages of 18 and 21 would no longer be able to claim Housing Benefit.[16] Most people expected Labour to 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.[17]
Harman went on to instruct Labour MPs to abstain in the Commons vote on the Bill.[18] This caused much dissent among MPs, and Harman tried to defuse the crisis by tabling a “reasoned amendment” to the Bill, an amendment which changed nothing since it still supported controls on the overall costs of social security and backed 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. Among the leadership candidates, only Corbyn voted against the Bill.
On that occasion, Corbyn was the hero, together with John McDonnell. They refused to pander to the prejudices and misperceptions about benefits that some voters entertained. Instead they tried to counter and dispel them. John McDonnell made a powerful speech:
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.[19]
In the debate on the Immigration and Social Security Bill this week he could have stood ready to counter and dispel the current prejudices and misperceptions about immigration and migrants. Instead he, Corbyn, Abbott and the rest of the front bench stood ready to give in to them. It took a rebellion to stop that happening.
What fears do people have? One of them is the notion that immigrants take jobs from the native population and depress wages. Liberal leader Vince Cable has summarised some of the arguments on this:
At the heart of the politics of immigration is the belief, repeated by Theresa May as a fact, that immigrants, especially unskilled immigrants, depress wages. At first sight the argument seems plausible – and undeniably there is low-wage competition in some places. But there is no evidence that this is a general problem. [In 2013, during the coalition government] I commissioned a range of reviews and studies to establish the facts. They showed that the impact on wages was very small (and only in recession conditions). By and large, immigrants were doing jobs that British people didn’t want to do (or highly skilled jobs that helped to generate work for others). This research was inconvenient to the Home Office, which vetoed the publication of its results.[20]
In 2016, Paul Johnson of the Institute for Fiscal Studies produced a report and asked:
But aren’t all these foreigners taking our jobs? That’s true in the Premier League. The more foreign footballers there are playing for the top clubs, the fewer English players there will be. There’s only room for 11 players in a starting XI.
Yet there is not a fixed number of jobs in the economy. There are seven million more people in work in the UK than there were 40 years ago. Astonishingly, there are nearly two million more than immediately before the recession in 2008. Employment rates among the UK-born are close to record levels. More people means more jobs, not more unemployment. There is absolutely no evidence that higher levels of immigration have increased unemployment among native-born Brits.[21]
On wage levels he wrote:
Evidence on wage impacts is a bit less conclusive. While many studies do not find any evidence of immigration depressing wages, a recent Bank of England paper suggests that the impact of migration on UK-born lower-skilled workers might have been to reduce wages by 1 per cent over a period of eight years. Thus it may have played a part, though only a minor one, in recent experience of low or negative pay growth.[22]
So, just as Harriet Harman should have argued against benefit cuts and voted them down in 2015 instead of pressing the panic button, Corbyn and the Labour front bench should have argued against immigration myths and should never have tried to press the abstain button. They must never do this again.
Corbyn says that after Brexit we will have a new immigration policy. But for some of us our confidence has been shaken by this episode. We need to know what the new policy will be. It should be spelt out now. At a conference last year, the journalist Gary Younge argued that, while the promises and plans of the Labour leadership under Corbyn are welcome news, we still have to hold these politicians to account. In that context, Sabrina Huck has some good advice for us all:
Anti-racism campaigners have a duty to oppose the toxic hostile environment through engaging the public in a positive debate about immigration, challenge the arguments that a person’s value for society can be determined purely based on their economic contribution and by effectively lobbying parliamentarians to oppose legislation enforcing these immigration policies.[23]
[1] White Paper: “The UK’s future skills-based immigration system”: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/766465/The-UKs-future-skills-based-immigration-system-print-ready.pdf, p. 3.
[2] Ibid.
[3] The White Paper counts, among others, Australia, the US, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea and Singapore as “low risk” countries. Poorer countries (e.g. African and Arab countries) are likely to be classified as “high risk”. Thus, for all the talk of more opportunities for people from outside the EU to come and work in Britain, workers from the global south will be virtually excluded.
[4] “The Immigration White Paper represents a massive attack on migrants’ rights”, Labour Against Racism and Fascism: https://laraflondon.wordpress.com/2019/01/04/the-immigration-white-paper-represents-a-massive-attack-on-migrants-rights/
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid.
[7] House of Commons debate, 28 January 2019: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/jan/28/labour-in-embarrassing-u-turn-over-immigration-bill-vote
[8] By my calculation, since the government won the vote by 297 votes to 234 (a majority of 63), if the full quota of Labour MPs had turned up to vote against them (another 78), the government would have lost the vote on the Bill.
[9] Labour Manifesto 2017, p. 28: https://labour.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/labour-manifesto-2017.pdf
[10] Ibid.
[11] In a series of three tweets on 28 January 2019, before the front bench change of mind, declaring his intention to vote against the Bill.
[12] Labour Campaign for Free Movement email, 29 January 2019.
[13] “Benefit changes: Who will be affected?”, BBC News, 8 July 2015: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-33429390 (accessed 29/3/2017).
[14] Ibid.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Ibid.
[17] “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).
[19] Commons Hansard, 20/7/2015, House of Commons, London: https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2015-07-20/debates/1507206000001/WelfareReformAndWorkBill (accessed 29/3/2017).
[20] “The Tory fallacy: that migrants are taking British jobs and driving down wages”:
[21] Immigration limits won’t lift Britain: https://www.ifs.org.uk/publications/8317
[22] Ibid.
[23] “The Immigration White Paper represents a massive attack on migrants’ rights”, Labour Against Racism and Fascism: https://laraflondon.wordpress.com/2019/01/04/the-immigration-white-paper-represents-a-massive-attack-on-migrants-rights/
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:
Bob Mouncer's blog 