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The hostile environment: Labour’s response
In the first blog in this series (https://bobmouncer.blog/2025/03/22/hostile-environment-the-windrush-scandal-i/), I showed how the announcement of a “hostile environment” for migrants by UK Home Secretary Theresa May in 2012 led to suffering and trauma for thousands of people, the Windrush generation. In the second blog (https://bobmouncer.blog/2025/03/26/hostile-environment-the-windrush-scandal-ii/), I told the story of Hubert Howard, who was one of its victims. In the third blog (https://bobmouncer.blog/2025/03/30/hostile-environment-the-windrush-scandal-iii/), I showed how documents that could have prevented the disaster to Hubert and thousands of others were deliberately destroyed; I described how the scandal slowly emerged and the government’s obstinate refusal to roll back on the policy; and I showed how a compensation scheme was finally devised and how it failed so many Windrush victims. In the last blog (https://bobmouncer.blog/2025/04/02/hostile-environment-the-mediterranean-scandal/) I described the Mediterranean scandal, in which the EU, including the UK, stopped rescue operations in the Mediterranean and how a UK government tried to deny its responsibility for the ensuing tragedy.
In this blog, I examine Labour’s response to the hostile environment.
Labour’s response
The two major scandals examined in my previous blogs in this series unfolded, first, under a Tory/LibDem coalition government and then under the subsequent Tory government. But what was Labour’s response to May’s hostile environment? Maya Goodfellow describes it as “the most minimal resistance”.[1] Labour, the official opposition, abstained in the final Commons vote on the Immigration Bill. Sixteen MPs voted against it, but only six of them were Labour MPs: Diane Abbott, Kelvin Hopkins, John McDonnell, Fiona Mactaggart, Dennis Skinner and Jeremy Corbyn. Corbyn said the Bill was
dog-whistle politics, the mantras being that every immigrant is an illegal immigrant who must somehow be condemned, and that immigration is the cause of all the problems in our society … If we descend into a UKIP-generated xenophobic campaign, it weakens and demeans all of us and our society, and we are all the losers for that.[2]
One of the other MPs was Sarah Teather, a LibDem MP and former minister, who had told The Guardian in 2013 that the proposals in the Bill were “hewn from the same rock” as earlier welfare cuts, much of which were “about setting up political dividing lines, and trying to create and define an enemy”.[3] But apart from the six rebels, Labour MPs obeyed their leader, Ed Miliband, and the Labour whips, and abstained in the Commons vote.
By October, Miliband had moved further right. In a by-election campaign in the Rochester and Strood constituency, which UKIP was hoping to win, Miliband declared he would toughen immigration policy if Labour won the general election in May the following year.[4] Echoing Theresa May, he raised familiar spectres and fears about immigration, ignoring its advantages. The UK, he said, “needs stronger controls on people coming here” and promised a new immigration reform Act if he became Prime Minister. His message was:
- If your fear is uncontrolled numbers of illegal migrants entering the country, Labour will crack down on illegal immigration by electronically recording and checking every migrant arrive in or depart from Britain
- If your fear is of widespread migrant benefit fraud, Labour will make sure that benefits are linked more closely to workers’ contributions
- If the spectre that haunts you is, as Margaret Thatcher had put it, that immigrants were bringing an “alien culture” to Britain, Labour understands, and will ensure that migrants integrate “more fully” into society
- Miliband turned his attention to the EU. Arguments about Britain’s EU membership were coming to a head at this time, with both the Tory right and UKIP agitating for the UK to leave. In 2013, Prime Minister David Cameron had agreed to renegotiate Britain’s terms of membership. The renegotiation would be followed by an in/out referendum to take place after the 2015 general election. Miliband, in his by-election speech in 2014, included migration from the EU in his new immigration promises. He claimed that Labour under Tony Blair had wrongly opened the UK to Eastern Europeans when their countries had joined the EU in 2004. He would not let that happen again. If he won the 2015 election, there would be longer “transitional controls” for new EU members before they could move to Britain.
He even told the voters of Rochester and Strood that they didn’t need to vote for UKIP to get these policies: Labour would do the job.
One pledge seemed at first sight to be protective of migrants. Miliband said he wanted to ensure that migrants were not exploited by employers. However, this was, in fact, a reference to another fear – that migrant workers undercut native workers’ wages because bosses often pay lower wages to migrants (often below the minimum wage). However, where this problem exists, its solution lies not in immigration law but in employment law and its enforcement. It also lies in union recognition and legally binding agreements.
As promise followed promise and pledge followed pledge, Miliband began to sound like Theresa May. A few months later, as the 2015 election approached, Labour’s campaign included the issuing of mugs with “Controls on immigration” printed on them.
Labour’s immigration controls mug
None of this saved Miliband or his party, and the Tories won the 2015 election; the referendum vote in 2016 in favour of leaving the EU led to David Cameron’s resignation as Prime Minister; he was succeeded by Theresa May; Ed Miliband resigned as Labour leader; Jeremy Corbyn was elected in his place; the process of leaving the EU began. In 2017, Theresa May called another general election, hoping to increase her majority. In the event, the Tory party lost its small overall majority but won the election as the largest single party. But from then on it had to rely on Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) votes to get its business through the Commons.
These parliamentary changes meant nothing for the Windrush generation. The scandal began to come to light in 2017 but their suffering continued beyond the end of the decade, one of the main reasons being that the compensation scheme was seriously flawed. This remained a problem in April 2025, almost a year after the election of a Labour government. The Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman (PHSO), Rebecca Hilsenrath, had found that
further harm and injustice are still being caused by failings in the way the scheme is working. We found recurrent reasons for this, suggesting these were not one-off issues but systemic problems.[5]
In response, the Home Office sought to give some reassurance:
This government is committed to putting right the appalling injustices caused by the Windrush scandal and making sure those affected receive the compensation they rightly deserve.[6]
Nevertheless, given the Home Office’s record, we should hesitate before we are reassured. In 2020, the Williams review of the Windrush scandal had made 30 recommendations to the government, all of which were accepted by Priti Patel, Tory Home Secretary at the time. In January 2023, the Home Office unlawfully dropped three of them.[7] Moreover, the department prevented the publication of a report prepared in response to the Williams Review. Williams had said that Home Office staff needed to “learn about the history of the UK and its relationship with the rest of the world, including Britain’s colonial history, the history of inward and outward migration and the history of black Britons.” As a result, the Home Office commissioned an independent report: The Historical Roots of the Windrush Scandal. In the words of Jim Dunton, the report
lays much of the blame for the Windrush scandal on essentially racist measures introduced to restrict the ability of Commonwealth citizens to move to the UK in the years since the second world war.[8]
The report has been available internally since 2022 but, writes Dunton, “the department resisted attempts for it to be made publicly available, including rejecting repeated Freedom of Information Act requests and pressure from Labour MP Diane Abbott.” Then, in early September 2024, after a legal challenge was launched,
a First Tier Tribunal judge ordered the document’s publication, quoting George Orwell’s memorable lines from 1984: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”[9]
So the Home Office, reluctantly, made the report publicly available, and I will refer to its findings in future blogs. But it is not yet time to take Home Office reassurances at face value. Or Labour’s reassurances, come to that.
In future blogs: more on Labour’s record on immigration and race; and the necessary exposure of a long-standing myth.
[1] Goodfellow, M. (2019), Hostile Environment: How immigrants became Scapegoats, Verso Books, London, loc. 167.
[2] Jack Peat, “Just 6 Labour MPs voted against the 2014 Immigration Act”, The London Economic, 19/04/2018:
[3] Decca Aitkenhead, “Sarah Teather: ‘I’m angry there are no alternative voices on immigration’.”, The Guardian, 12 July 2013.
[4] Andrew Grice, “Ed Miliband attempts to take on Ukip – with toughened immigration policies”, The Guardian, 24 October 2014: Ed Miliband attempts to take on Ukip – with toughened immigration policies | The Independent | The Independent
[5] Adina Campbell, “Payments for Windrush victims denied compensation”, BBC News, 5 September 2024: Payments for Windrush victims denied Home Office compensation – BBC News
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ashith Nagesh & André Rhoden-Paul, “Home Office unlawfully axed Windrush measures”, BBC News, 19 June 2024: Windrush Scandal: Home office unlawfully axed recommendations, court rules – BBC News
[8] Jim Dunton, “Home Office publishes internal ‘roots of Windrush’ report after FoI battle”, Civil Service World, 27 September 2024: Home Office publishes internal ‘roots of Windrush’ report after FoI battle
[9] Ibid.
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/
A speech to remember for the future
Back in 2015, during the first Labour leadership contest in which Jeremy Corbyn was a candidate, the House of Commons passed the Tories’ Welfare, Reform and Work Bill, a typical Tory attack on the poor from which the increasing numbers of people in poverty are suffering today. Here is a brief account of what happened, ending with the speech that day by John McDonnell (now Labour’s Shadow Chancellor) which I offer as a message of hope as we start what promises to be a challenging year.
What it was all about
On 20 July 2015, the government was determined to enforce its austerity programme and the Bill contained measures under which the most vulnerable in society would have to bear the heaviest burden: measures proposed in the Bill meant that, for the first time, tax credits and family benefits under Universal Credit would be limited to the first two children and that most working age benefits would be frozen for four years from 2016.[1] People claiming the working element of the Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) would have their payments reduced to match the Job Seeker’s Allowance (JSA),[2] and the benefit cap was to be reduced from £26,000 a year to £23,000 in London, and £20,000 in the rest of the country.[3] Moreover, many young people between the ages of 18 and 21 would no longer be able to claim Housing Benefit.[4] It might be thought that Labour would vote against such measures, which impacted so negatively on the poor. But the party’s Acting Leader, Harriet Harman, decided otherwise. She told Andrew Neil on The Sunday Politics:
We won’t oppose the Welfare Bill, we won’t oppose the household benefit cap. [We won’t oppose] what they brought forward in relation to restricting benefits and tax credits for people with three or more children … We’ve got to recognise why the Tories are in government and not us, not because [voters] love the Tories but because they didn’t trust us on the economy and on benefits.[5]
Harman went on to impose a three-line whip on Labour MPs, instructing them to abstain in the Commons vote on the Bill. This caused much dissent in the Parliamentary Labour Party (the PLP), and Harman tried to defuse the crisis by tabling a “reasoned amendment” to the Bill, setting out Labour’s objections to it, but supporting controls on the overall costs of social security and backing proposals such as the lower benefits cap, the removal of tax credits from families with more than two children and the replacing of mortgage interest support with loans. The amendment also said that the Bill should not be given a second reading but Harman insisted that, if the amendment was defeated, MPs should abstain when it came to the vote on the whole Bill. Helen Goodman, the Labour MP for Bishop Auckland, expressed her confusion:
I cannot see why if you table a reasoned amendment rejecting a bill you would then go on to abstain in a further vote on the bill. It would be best to oppose [it] all the way through because of the damage the bill does to people in poverty.[6]
When the amendment was defeated, Goodman went on to vote against the Bill, as did 47 other Labour MPs, including Corbyn.
Corbyn was the only leadership candidate to vote against the Bill. During the debate, John McDonnell made the speech which best reflected the Corbyn leadership team’s view of the Bill: “I make this clear,” he said:
I would swim through vomit to vote against the Bill, and listening to some of the nauseating speeches tonight, I think we might have to.
Poverty in my constituency is not a lifestyle choice; it is imposed on people. We hear lots about how high the welfare bill is, but let us understand why that is the case. The housing benefit bill is so high because for generations we have failed to build council houses, we have failed to control rents and we have done nothing about the 300,000 properties that stand empty in this country. Tax credits are so high because pay is so low. The reason pay is so low is that employers have exploited workers and we have removed the trade union rights that enabled people to be protected at work. Fewer than a third of our workers are now covered by collective bargaining agreements. Unemployment is so high because we have failed to invest in our economy, and we have allowed the deindustrialisation of the north, Scotland and elsewhere. That is why the welfare bill is so high, and the Bill does as all other welfare reform Bills in recent years have done and blames the poor for their own poverty, not the system … We need a proper debate about how we go forward investing in housing, lifting wages, restoring trade union rights and ensuring that we get people back to work and do not have high pockets of deprivation in areas such as mine and around the country … I say to Labour Members that people out there do not understand reasoned amendments; they want to know whether we voted for or against the Bill. Tonight I will vote against it.
The speech: https://youtu.be/4rxKXw7O_pQ
[1] “Benefit changes: Who will be affected?”, BBC News, 8 July 2015: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-33429390 (accessed 29/3/2017).
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] “Labour won’t oppose Welfare Bill”, BBC News, 12 July 2015: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-33498110/labour-won-t-oppose-welfare-bill (accessed 2/1/2018).
[6] Cited, “Harman seeks to end labour row with reasoned amendment to welfare bill”, The Guardian, 16 July 2015: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/jul/16/harman-seeks-to-end-labour-row-with-reasoned-amendment-to-welfare-bill (accessed 28/3/2017).
We must ensure that nobody will ever again be afraid to ask for medical treatment
We really do have to get rid of this Tory government and replace it with a Labour government different from any other. This story (see link below) about asylum seekers being afraid to get NHS treatment is just one of many reasons. Asylum seekers are afraid of being presented with a bill they have no means of paying, and they are afraid of the Home Office. The groundwork was laid for such fears a good number of years ago by governments of all stripes. A Labour Health Secretary was one who helped. At the end of my research into the treatment of asylum seekers, which I finished in 2010,[1] I wrote this in the wake of the news that an asylum seeker had been refused cancer treatment:
On 30 March 2009 the UK Court of Appeal ruled that failed asylum seekers were not entitled to free National Health Service treatment in England, overruling an earlier High Court ruling that they were. One exception was allowed: if an asylum seeker cannot return home and cannot pay in advance hospitals must consider treatment, but they were at the mercy of the discretion of the hospital. Lord Justice Ward expressed his views on failed asylum seekers clearly: they should not be here and should never have come in the first place. Health Secretary Alan Johnson was “pleased with the Court of Appeal’s judgment that asylum seekers cannot acquire ordinary resident status which would entitle them to treatment and a range of other services.”
When Jeremy Corbyn protests about a Tory statement or policy, the reply often comes back “Labour did the same thing.” Those of us in the Labour Party should always acknowledge the fact when it’s true and we will all have to make sure things are different next time by constantly holding Labour ministers to account. Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott has said clearly, when speaking of the Windrush scandal, “This will not happen when I am Home Secretary.” She will face strong opposition from Home Office officials who are currently enjoying the implementation of the “hostile environment”. We will have to support her, and support asylum seekers, in every way possible, against the pressures, not only of the Home Office establishment, but also of the Tories and their media. And it must never be the case again that vulnerable people are bullied so that they are afraid to ask for medical help. That, among many other reasons, is why I and thousands of other people joined or rejoined the Labour Party when Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader in 2015. We saw a different future.
Asylum seekers ‘too afraid’ to seek NHS care, report says
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/nov/28/asylum-seekers-too-afraid-to-seek-nhs-care-report-says?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
[1] Dealt with on their Merits: https://hydra.hull.ac.uk/resources/hull:2678
Dodgy
Capitalism throws up all sorts of dodgy characters and some of them make a good living advising dodgy governments.
Enter Shanker Singham, former adviser on Brexit to Her Majesty’s government.
Whichever side of the Brexit argument you’re on, Shanker is bad news. His credentials are crap. He claimed in a Facebook profile, says The Guardian, that “he studied law at Oxford. However, his degree there was in chemistry.” Then there is a “biography”, “distributed by a former employer” (Sorry?) that says he assisted “governments in the early privatisations during the Thatcher administration”, yet his career began post-Thatcher (in 1992). Singham denies “that this could be misinterpreted”.
He’s right. It’s clear as day: in the words of Sir Robert Armstrong, Thatcher’s cabinet secretary about her, he was being “economical with the truth”.[1]
May didn’t take his advice. Instead her deal, he says, is “a damage limitation exercise”. That’s why he’s pissed off and touring the studios and editors’ offices. But in or out or somewhere in between, we should be worried. Because we need to find ways of holding governments to account for everything they do and for the way they do everything they do. We have had cause to lose trust in governments of all parties and in the machinery of government (the civil service). Labour governments had plenty of dodgy advisers and spin doctors (remember them?) It had a dodgy dossier that told us that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (remember that?). What we need is an end to dodgy characters and dossiers that capitalism produces from the depths of its bowels like there’s no tomorrow. And for a start, we need some integrity.
Enter Jeremy.
[1]https://www.news.com.au/finance/work/leaders/two-moments-of-legal-genius-which-tell-you-more-about-malcolm-turnbull-than-anything-hes-ever-done-in-politics/news-story/99b294dda251d4c3b7de3a5240c1b42b
Just a couple of points about Brexit
The truth is that whether we leave the EU with May’s deal, without a deal, or with a deal that looks more or less like the status quo (which must surely be the real meaning of phrases like “on the same terms as we have at present”) or with some other deal, or whether we just say, “I know, let’s just stay in, it was all a mistake, sorry”, socialists and anyone who thinks another world is possible will still have a fight on their hands.
Jeremy Corbyn said that one of the reasons we should stay was to preserve the workers’ rights gained in the EU. And, sure enough, those rights have often been better in other European countries than in the UK. I worked as an English teacher in France in the first half of the 1990s, and I was gobsmacked to find that, not only was there the right to join a union, you had the right for it to be recognised by the boss. If you wanted a staff representative you just had to ask. If you wanted a union rep, ditto. If you wanted a union rep (and at our language school there were just two union members out of a staff of about 35) an official from the union (in our case the CGT) would come and set up the operation. It meant that the boss was legally obliged to have annual pay negotiations with the union reps, among other obligations. None of this was perfect, but it was a good deal better than the situation in Thatcher’s Britain at that time. And French workers in their unions had fought for such rights well before the EU was even a twinkle in anybody’s eye.
But none of it was permanent either. Even before I left in 1995, there were rumours that these rights were under threat of being removed. One of my students said, “If they try that, there’ll be another revolution!” But Macron has made the most determined attempt so far to weaken and remove those rights. But even before Macron, in 2016, as Corbyn was saying we should remain in order to preserve workers’ rights, the government under Socialist Party president François Hollande was tear-gassing workers demonstrating against its own attack on their rights, an attack prompted from within the EU itself. I wrote in a blog in 2016 that
what was interesting in terms of Jeremy Corbyn’s argument was the claim by Danielle Simmonet from the Parti de Gauche (Party of the Left). She argued that the proposed law was not just a proposal by the French government. It was concocted by the government, the bosses – and the European Union. The proposed law is a “demand” of Brussels, she said, and a “deal” made with the European Union institutions themselves.[1]
So we can stay in to preserve human rights if we like, but they will not simply require preserving but vigorously defending, and probably will have to be fought for all over again. The same goes for all other rights, “standards”, etc.
If we leave the EU we will, for dead certain, have to fight to defend and extend our rights. The state will oppose us because it is a capitalist state, and thus not our friend. Even if we get a Corbyn-led government we will have to fight for change. John McDonnell spoke at a meeting in London recently and talked of “transforming the state”. He said this transformation would involve all of us in our unions, our communities, our pressure groups, etc., and in the Labour Party. The process needed to start now, he said, and it would be at least 10 years before we would see real progress (or as he put it, “two terms”). Of course, the state will resist any such transformation and we will have to hold a Labour government accountable and constantly keep it on track. It will be under enormous pressure to backtrack, abandon the transformation and return to “business as usual”. This will be the case in or out of the EU.
My main reasons for voting Remain in the 2016 referendum were about migration. I felt vindicated when it seemed that just the act of voting and getting their required result made so many people feel they then had the right to perpetrate racist attacks. It’s a small world and there can be no xenophobia or racism, no talk of “them” and “us”. We need to fight for free movement, which must be seen as benefiting both those who move and those who stay put and welcome the movers. A UK that bolts the door or pulls up the drawbridge against the antiquated figure of “the foreigner” will move further and further to the right. It will be going nowhere I want to go and nowhere I want to live. So I will probably vote Remain again if asked, despite the unfriendly – no, that’s too weak, think what they did to Greece – the vicious nature of what Yanis Varoufakis calls “Europe’s deep establishment”.[2]
[1] Defending workers’ rights against the EU: https://bobmouncerblog.wordpress.com/2016/06/12/defending-workers-rights-against-the-eu/
[2] Adults in the Room: my Battle with Europe’s Deep Establishment (2017), Vintage, London.
On learning lessons from the past to build a different future
Patrick Cockburn writes about an almost forgotten episode during the First World War: the Mesopotamia campaign.[1] He visits the British North Gate cemetery in Baghdad. He tells a tale of present-day witchcraft and sorcery and of an arrogant ruling class a century ago, its gung-ho militarism, its lies and selective memory, and notes the complete failure of its successors, a century later, to learn lessons.
For me, he says,
the chief fascination of these cemeteries – whether in Baghdad, Kut, Amara or Basra – is the sheer immensity of the disaster they commemorate, and the extent to which it has been forgotten. Unlike the defeat at Gallipoli and the slaughter on the Somme, the Mesopotamian campaign has faded from British memory, despite the national obsession with the First World War.
There were at least 85,000 British and Indian soldiers “killed, wounded or captured”. But according to the War Graves Commission
the cemetery in Amara on the lower Tigris “commemorates some five thousand servicemen of the Indian Army, of whom only nine are identified as no comprehensive records of the burials were kept by the military authorities”.
Cockburn then tells the story:
The Mesopotamia campaign was grotesquely mismanaged, even by the low standards of the First World War, and those responsible had no wish to recall it. After the publication of a damning official report in 1917, Lord Curzon, a member of the war cabinet, suggested that ‘a more shocking exposure of official blundering and incompetence has not in my opinion been made, at any rate since the Crimean War.’ The intervention began on a small scale in 1914, initially intended to protect the oilfields in south-west Iran from attack by the Ottoman Turks. By 1918, the campaign had ballooned into the biggest British military action outside Europe. In 1915, an overambitious advance, which underestimated the Turks’ fighting strength, aimed at capturing Baghdad to counterbalance the failure at Gallipoli earlier that year. Heavy casualties in a battle at Salman Pak led to a precipitate retreat to Kut, a ramshackle Shia city on a bend in the Tigris a hundred miles south-east of Baghdad. Commanded by Sir Charles Townshend, an insanely egocentric general, 13,000 British and Indian soldiers were besieged there for 147 days between December 1915 and 29 April 1916. Townshend appears deliberately to have allowed his troops to be surrounded: he wanted to make his reputation through a heroic and successful defence of Kut even though he knew his forces were far from their supply base in Basra while the Turks were close to theirs in Baghdad. In order to accelerate the arrival of the British-led forces coming to relieve him he sent misleading information about how long he could hold out, forcing them to attack prematurely and suffer 23,000 casualties while failing to dislodge the well-entrenched Turks. Injured soldiers, their wounds gangrenous and filled with maggots, were crammed into slow-moving river boats and lay in their own excreta for the two weeks it took to reach Basra.
Inside Kut, Townshend became increasingly unbalanced, refusing to visit the hospital where many of his men were lying. He spent much of his time in his house, emerging only occasionally to walk his dog, Spot. He banned his soldiers from sending messages to their families via wireless but dispatched frequent messages of his own asking for promotion. He made no attempt to break out of Kut and, after the surrender, showed little interest in what happened to his men. He and most of his officers were placed by the Turks in comfortable imprisonment, but the other ranks were dispatched on a 700-mile forced march to Turkey during which many died from starvation, beatings, execution, or typhus and cholera. Survivors of the death marches were set to work digging a railway tunnel in the Taurus mountains alongside a few Armenian survivors of the genocide. By the end of the war 70 per cent of the British and 50 per cent of the Indian troops captured at Kut were dead. Released from captivity, Townshend presented himself as a hero of the siege who deserved a senior job. When his promotion was denied, he resigned from the army and became a Conservative MP. Kipling, in his poem ‘Mesopotamia’, which the Daily Telegraph refused to publish (it appeared in the Morning Post instead), furiously denounced the generals who had left the soldiers ‘to die in their own dung’ and predicted that, once the furore had died down, those responsible for the disaster would find a way of keeping their positions:
“When the storm is ended shall we find
How softly but how swiftly they have sidled back to power
By the favour and contrivance of their kind.”
Kipling’s poem was useful reading as the US and British invasion ran into ever deeper trouble a century later, the line about ‘the slothfulness that wasted and the arrogance that slew’ seeming particularly appropriate.
It may be too much to hope for but perhaps, if Labour wins the next election, the corrupt old guard in all parties will lose its influence and never get the chance to “sidle back to power” again. As I wrote that, it seemed to turn into an impossible dream – even a fantasy. But I’ll say it anyway. And here’s another poet to express it, Ben Okri, in the poem he sent to Corbyn in the heady days of 2015:
“Can we still seek the lost angels
Of our better natures?
Can we still wish and will
For poverty’s death and a newer way
To undo war, and find peace in the labyrinth
Of the Middle East, and prosperity
In Africa as the true way
To end the feared tide of immigration?
“We dream of a new politics
That will renew the world
Under their weary suspicious gaze.
There’s always a new way,
A better way that’s not been tried before.”
[1] Read the whole article: “At the North Gate”, Patrick Cockburn, London Review of Books, Vol. 40, No. 19, 11 October 2018: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n19/patrick-cockburn/at-the-north-gate
The liberal agenda: a warning
In this Guardian article (see link below) Lord Adonis (sorry, he writes as Andrew Adonis; he clearly doesn’t approve of the title he’s accepted – how democratic, indeed how liberal, that is!) describes the late Roy Jenkins as “the most transformational liberal home secretary ever” because, apparently, “he legalised both homosexuality and abortion in one of the most skilful ministerial manoeuvres of parliamentary history.” It’s true that Jenkins was Home Secretary at the time. But it was, of course, the determined campaigns by gays and women that were the crucial elements leading to those changes in the law, not really Jenkins. His image at the time, and his image as handed down through the decades, is that he was the great white hope of the liberal intelligentsia. But I’ll tell you what else he did. He voted to cancel the British passports of the Kenyan Asians who fled to the UK from Kenya in 1967-68, thus pandering to the hostile campaigns against them by Enoch Powell, Duncan Sandys and the fascists of the National Front.
The Kenyan Asians were never called refugees but, effectively, that’s what they were. Their presence in Kenya was part of colonial history and their departure a result of the decolonisation process in East Africa. After independence in 1963 Kenya adopted a policy of Africanisation: in the civil service, Africans had to be rapidly promoted; in private firms, Africans had to be employed at worker and management levels. At the time of independence Asians had been offered Kenyan or British citizenship, and many of them chose British. But the 1967 Trade Licensing Act in Kenya made it illegal for non-citizens to trade in rural or outlying urban areas and in a wide range of goods, and many Asians were forced out of business. Many turned to the UK for help. In 1963 the Conservative government, though fresh from passing the first restrictive Commonwealth Immigrants Act, reassured the Kenyan Asians that their UK citizenship was secure. In March 1968 the Labour government, though fresh from declaring Jenkins’ liberal agenda, cancelled this agreement and passed a new Commonwealth Immigrants Act which removed their UK citizenship. In the space of 72 hours. And what happened to the bright, shiny new liberals in the Labour cabinet when the vote was taken? They voted for it. Roy Hattersley expressed remorse 31 years later in an interview (the following quotation and the later quotation from the Jenkins interview come from the Channel 4 documentary Playing the Race Card, which was first broadcast in October-November1999; they are reproduced from memory and are correct in their substance, but may not be word-for-word):
Shirley [Williams] and I stayed up into the small hours discussing what we should do. When you go into politics you want to achieve certain things, but you can’t achieve everything and you often have to make compromises. But there are some things you shouldn’t compromise on, and this was one of them. We should have resigned rather than vote for it.
And Jenkins? He had become Chancellor by the time the Act was passed. He also explained himself 31 years later: he was Chancellor, he explained, travelling abroad and signing deals and agreements with a host of countries. So, he explained,
I think people would have thought it really rather trivial if I had resigned on this issue.
So beware of liberals bearing gifts. And beware of Lord Adonis, who says in the article that Jenkins “was my hero and later my mentor”. He also says that he “fell politically in love with Tony Blair” (what a careful statement that is!). I’m glad he’s against the idea of breaking away from Labour to form a new party (at least at the moment – remember he’s a liberal). But I suspect he will do his best to undermine Corbyn every chance he gets.
To end on a lighter note: he points out that the SDP failed in their aim in the 1980s to “break the mould of British politics”. Tony Benn once captured this failure perfectly to a Question Time audience:
The SDP was formed to break the mould of British politics and last week they held their annual conference in a telephone kiosk in Plymouth.[1]
His Lordship’s article: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/24/labour-party-split-sdp-tories-england
[1] David Owen, a former Labour Foreign Secretary and one of the “Gang of Four” who founded the SDP, was the MP for Plymouth.
Hypocrisy, two kidnappings and a wedding
Let me just say: this wedding of a royal personage to a “woman of colour” has taken place against the background of Theresa May’s continuing “hostile environment” for the Caribbean Windrush generation as well as for recent migrants. However much Theresa May pretends to be sorry, she hasn’t ended the hostile environment. Another man was jailed this week after responding to a government invitation, to people whose status has been questioned, to contact the authorities with a promise that they would be safe. He turned up at his MP’s surgery last week for advice, was given an appointment at the Home Office, and when he got there the police were there to arrest him, charge him with an offence of “handling stolen goods” allegedly committed (he says not) 20 years ago, and throw him into Pentonville prison before he’s even been tried.[1] That’s the British state for you, the state whose head is Her Majesty the Queen, whose grandson today got married to a “woman of colour”, an occasion described by the press as marking a sea change in British society.
There’s something else. Before the wedding took place, the streets of Windsor were cleared of homeless people. They sleep on the streets of Windsor, the town where the big castle is, because they have nowhere else to go. They were pushed off the streets by the police. That was an act of the British state too, whose head is, etc., etc.
Why do I emphasise that it was the British state doing all this stuff? Because the “hostile environment” has existed no matter what government has been in power. In the 2000s, when the Labour government was in power, it operated an “agenda of disbelief” and set targets for the deportation of refugees, who were assumed to be guilty of lying unless they could prove they were innocent. Where possible, the state made sure that they were deported before they got the chance to prove their innocence. It’s now happening today under the Conservatives.
My point is this: a couple of weeks ago Theresa May apologised on behalf of the state for being party to the “rendition” and torture of two British citizens, dissidents from Libya, Abdel Hakim Belhaj and his wife Fatima Boudchar. They were handed over to Gaddafi in 2004 as a reward for the Libyan state’s cooperation with the British state on a number of issues. May wasn’t apologising for the Conservatives, because these events took place during Tony Blair’s Labour government, when Jack Straw was Foreign Secretary. She was apologising for the state. If Jeremy becomes prime minister, he and his government will be put under the same pressure to do the bidding of the state, especially the security services (MI5, MI6), and powerful civil service bureaucrats, in all sorts of different areas of policymaking. It’s unlikely, to say the least, that Blair and Straw put up any resistance at all to the Belhaj “rendition”. Labour Home Secretaries like David Blunkett didn’t resist when it came to the agenda of disbelief. Jack Straw, when he was Home Secretary in 1998, seemed keen for a while to have former Chilean dictator Pinochet extradited to Spain to be tried for crimes against humanity. But his resolve failed after 16 months of argument (while Pinochet was held under luxurious house arrest in a large country mansion). A secret medical report was produced, allegedly stating that the General’s deteriorating health made him unfit to stand trial. He was allowed to go home to Chile. Duncan Campbell later wrote:
When Pinochet arrived in Chile, he magically abandoned his wheel-chair in a gesture that was widely seen as an indication that he had fooled the English doctors who had examined him and proclaimed him unfit.[2]
Jeremy will resist. Successfully? Who can tell? But he could put down a marker now, so that they know. During the Belhaj apology, he and his front bench sat there looking grim and embarrassed and then thanked the government for the apology! But he could do more. Soon after he became Labour leader, he apologised on behalf of the Labour Party for the Iraq war. He had never supported it. He was at the head of the anti-war movement. But he apologised for the war because it happened under a Labour government.[3] Perhaps he should apologise now, on behalf of the Labour Party, for the treatment of Mr Belhaj and Fatima Boudchar. And perhaps that will make it easier when he comes to resist future demands from his officials to commit high crimes and misdemeanours.
[1] His MP, David Lammy, tweeted to Home Secretary Sajid Javid: “Your officials asked to come to my constituency surgery. Your officials asked for my advice on an outreach strategy because people are too scared to come forward. My constituent followed your advice and went to his interview. The police were waiting with handcuffs to arrest him.” https://twitter.com/DavidLammy/status/997576317913780226
[2] The Guardian, 11 December 2006: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/dec/11/post783
[3] The Guardian, 6 July 2016: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/video/2016/jul/06/jeremy-corbyn-apologises-for-iraq-war-on-behalf-of-the-labour-party-video
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