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Abstaining is not an option – Labour must reject Patel’s Bill
I’ve written to Labour’s Shadow Home Secretary, Nick Thomas-Symonds, and my local MP, Emma Hardy, asking them to make sure that Labour votes against Priti Patel’s new asylum Bill.
Scrutiny of the Nationality and Borders Bill begins tomorrow (19 July). It is of particular interest to me because of my earlier research at Hull University on the treatment of asylum seekers. My particular concern today is that Labour should give no credibility to the Bill. In particular Labour shouldn’t abstain at any point on the grounds that “we understand voters’ concerns”. Labour did this on the Welfare Bill in 2015 and the front bench tried to do it on the Immigration and Social Security Bill in, I think, 2017. But it is time to stand up for a few principles now and not just run scared. The current Bill is the worst Bill of its kind that I can remember and it will do untold harm to people from the moment it becomes law. Labour should have no truck with it from day 1.
I’ve looked at the Bill itself now, so I thought I’d make some preliminary comments. I will focus on Part 2, which is about asylum, but for now I will only mention a couple of points.
Section 10 is unacceptable from the outset: it immediately creates two groups of refugees. Group 1 refugees are legal; Group 2 refugees are not. They are “unlawful”. What makes them unlawful is, according to s.10 (4), because “a person’s entry into or presence in the United Kingdom is unlawful if they require leave to enter or remain and do not have it.” This new definition of “unlawful” makes the vast majority of asylum seekers illegal. The Bill achieves this end, in part, because it creates an entirely new offence. According to s.37(2), (C1), a person who
“(a) requires entry clearance under the immigration rules, and
(b) knowingly arrives in the United Kingdom without a valid entry
clearance,
commits an offence.”
Plus, according to s. 37 (3):
“In proceedings for an offence under subsection (C1) above of
arriving in the United Kingdom without a valid entry
clearance … (b) proof that a person had a valid entry clearance is to lie on the defence.”
This offence of “arriving in the UK” is a new offence, created by this Bill. According to criminal defence barrister Aneurin Brewer, the current situation is that
“those who merely arrive, immediately claim asylum and are as a result admitted to the UK while their asylum claim is processed have not entered the UK illegally.” https://www.freemovement.org.uk/prosecutions-for-assisting-unlawful-immigration-in-small-boats-cases-the-key-to-acquittal/
If this Bill is passed, they will have done so and thus, although the Bill doesn’t breach Convention Article 31 (1) according to Patel’s narrow and restrictive interpretation, it certainly ignores the spirit of UNHCR recommendations on applying a “flexible and liberal” approach and on giving “the benefit of the doubt”.
Patel is legally entitled to do this. It may be worth bearing in mind that the Refugee Convention is not a perfect instrument for protecting refugees. Its final form was the result of a deal. Every state wanted to limit its obligations to give protection to refugees. So the Convention and UNHCR’s Guidelines, despite talk of liberality and benefit of doubt, provided them with caveats and ways of avoiding their responsibilities. One example of this is Article 31(1). While it is generally interpreted as prohibiting governments from imposing any penalties on asylum seekers who arrive without passports or other travel documents, governments generally do impose penalties because the article talks of asylum seekers who come “directly” from the country of their persecution and refers to illegal entry. The word “directly” can be interpreted to mean that penalties can be imposed if the asylum seeker comes to the UK and passes through another “safe” country where, it is always assumed, they could have claimed asylum. This interpretation of the word “directly” was probably the reason why the Dublin Convention, now not applicable after Brexit, was not regarded as a contravention of the Refugee Convention. one of the things Patel is proud of doing in this Bill is making this requirement part of UK law now, thus dealing with the “problem” of the disappearance of the Dublin Convention after Brexit.
So what I’m saying is that, in principle, the Convention seems to establish the primacy of refugee protection, but in its detail and in practice it has proved to be ambiguous and open to a variety of interpretations. UNHCR “advocates that governments adopt a rapid, flexible and liberal process” when dealing with asylum applicants because it recognises “how difficult it often is to document persecution”. However, its interpretation of the Convention contradicts this stance. In its definition of a refugee, the Convention’s reference to persecution “for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion” suggests the possibility of group persecution and a collective refugee experience. But, when interpreted by UNHCR, the definition turns out to be based on a concept of persecution in which the burden of proof falls on the individual asylum seeker. Thus people “who apply for refugee status normally need to establish individually that their fear of persecution is well-founded”, i.e. they must provide evidence that it is not just their social group, members of their political party or people who share their religion or ethnicity who are in danger but themselves as individuals. I have sat in a good few solicitors’ offices listening to them explaining to their clients how their letters, newspaper reports, and their photographs are absolutely not proof. A “flexible and liberal process” becomes less likely as governments demand this rigorous standard of proof. To put the burden of proof on refugees is to consider them guilty until proved innocent.
But Patel is clearly entitled to do what she’s trying to do here. She can invent laws and move the goalposts, she can choose only to follow the UNHCR advice that suits her and ignore the rest. But I think Labour should do its best to stop her. It should, if it can’t eliminate all her hostile purposes from the Bill, vote against the whole shebang and campaign loudly against it from the start. It should never abstain. Not just because of the Refugee Convention, important though that is. But because of the principle of refugee protection and the defence of human rights.
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.
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/
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