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No change from Labour, whatever the Observer says
The Observer article below welcomes Labour leader Keir Starmer’s statement on Labour’s approach to small boats, people smugglers, deportations and refugee policy generally. In contrast to the left’s view that there is little to “differentiate a possible future Labour government from the present Conservative one”, it claims to detect “a sharp dividing line between the government and Labour on asylum policy.” It says Labour is offering a humane, pragmatic and commonsense approach in contrast to the Tories’ populism and its “cruel, unworkable policy”.
The paper is right to say that the government has removed the right of all migrants who have arrived in small boats to claim asylum, when most of them would qualify for refugee status if they did; it is right to deplore the measures the government have introduced “to detain them until they can be deported to another country for their claim to be processed”; in the light of the government’s keenness to deport asylum seekers it deems to be “illegal”, the article is right to point out that no deportation deals have been achieved with any country except Rwanda (and the Supreme Court has yet to rule on the legality of that deal); it is also right to criticise the backlog the government has allowed to develop in the processing of asylum claims, so that “83% of claims made in 2018 had not been processed five years later”. The article is right to condemn the Tory policy package.
But the Observer is wrong to say that the “real difference” between Labour and the Tories is that Labour “would scrap the government’s unworkable and cruel detention and deportation policies, restoring the right of people to claim asylum in the UK.” It will do this, the Observer seems to believe, by investing in “1,000 extra case workers and a returns unit of 1,000 staff to process claims much more quickly and deport those whose claims are rejected.” This would work because Labour would come to a deal with the European Union (EU) “in which the UK would accept a quota of refugees in exchange for being able to return those who cross the Channel in small boats.” But even if such a deal could be reached, we would still be left, under Labour, with the same old “detention and deportation” policy. None of the refugees in small boats will have their claims considered here. If the Observer thinks that shunting vulnerable and desperate people around Europe as they wait for decisions on their future is what it calls “a far better approach”, so be it. The refugees may not agree. Moreover, in the same article, the Observer admits that “pan-European cooperation has never worked well in the bloc and has broken down further in recent years.” The Observer must know it’s clutching at straws.
But there is one thing Starmer has to do before we can believe in this tale of “differentiation” between Labour and the Tories on asylum. He has to commit the Labour Party to repealing the Illegal Migration Act 2022. While the Act remains, Tory policy remains unchanged. Unless it is repealed, there can be no “differentiation” between the parties. In its guidance to the Act, the government makes clear that
anyone arriving illegally in the United Kingdom will not have their asylum claim, human rights claim or modern slavery referral considered while they are in the UK, but they will instead be promptly removed either to their home country or to a safe third country to have their protection claims processed there. (https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2023/37/notes/division/3/index.htm)
Obviously the Act must be repealed. But both Starmer and shadow immigration minister Stephen Kinnock have refused to commit to repealing it. While it stands, so does the policy.
The article begins by setting the “Observer view” in the context of Starmer’s political approach as a whole. Keir Starmer, it says,
has made clear that under his leadership a first-term Labour government would stick to tough fiscal rules, and has ruled out making any unfunded spending commitments in the run-up to the next election. That has fuelled criticism from some on the left of his party, who argue that this has limited the extent to which he has been able to differentiate a possible future Labour government from the present Conservative one.
It says Starmer’s asylum policy makes Labour different. It doesn’t.
What that means for our voting intentions next year is up to us all. But it puts a very big strain on mine.
Names will never hurt him
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/oct/19/eu-will-grant-brexit-extension-if-johnson-sends-letter-says-brussels?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
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.
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