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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/
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
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 Tory hostile environment continues – but Labour must face up to its past
No sympathy should be wasted on Amber Rudd. Her role in the Windrush scandal can be dealt with swiftly. According to the Home Office memo sent to Rudd and other ministers:
- The Home Office set a “target of achieving 12,800 enforced returns in 2017-18 … we have extended our target of assisted returns[1]
- This target set the government on a “path towards a 10% increased performance on enforced returns, which we promised the Home Secretary earlier this year.”[2]
- Rudd set the target “personally”.[3]
So her responsibility for what happened is established and her claim to know nothing about targets is rubbish.
However, this isn’t just about the Windrush generation or even their descendants. The injustice done to them is manifest and for many of them a tragedy. But this story of targets goes wider than this particular scandal. It is about a very real and ongoing hostility at the Home Office towards migrants in general and asylum seekers in particular.
The memo cited above speaks of “assisted returns”, a category which certainly does include asylum seekers. “Typically”, says the memo, “these will be our most vulnerable returnees.”[4] The use of the word “vulnerable” does not indicate sympathy any more than talk of “assisted returns” indicates a helpful approach. When Home Office officials use the word “assisted” it means the same as when they use the word “enforced”.[5] It means you’ve got to go, we don’t believe you, we don’t want you, didn’t you understand the message on Theresa’s big van? – GO HOME.
I described what happens when you are in the hands of the Home Office in earlier blogs.[6] As I said in these blogs, during my research as long ago as 2007 I found that what was called an “agenda of disbelief” had permeated the asylum process. This was encouraged by section 8 of the Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants) Act 2004, which obliged “a deciding authority” to “take account, as damaging the claimant’s credibility, of any behaviour” specified as such. I gave several examples of how, in the frantic rush to find “credibility issues”, Home Office officials forgot the UN Guidelines urging them to give, wherever possible, “the benefit of the doubt” to asylum seekers’ accounts of persecution or torture and instead set up what asylum support and human rights groups called an “agenda of disbelief” which enabled them to cast doubt on the stories told by large numbers of applicants who had indeed been persecuted or tortured.[7]
The focus today is not on section 8 of that Act but on paragraph 322(5) of the Immigration Rules. Caseworkers are using this paragraph to justify refusing indefinite leave to remain (ILR) to 1,000 highly skilled migrants by claiming they are guilty of lying in their applications, typically about their incomes or their tax records. Growing numbers are taking their cases to court – and winning. According to The Guardian, among the cases waiting to be resolved are
a former Ministry of Defence mechanical engineer who is now destitute, a former NHS manager currently £30,000 in debt, thanks to Home Office costs and legal fees, who spends her nights fully dressed, sitting in her front room with a suitcase in case enforcement teams arrive to deport her, and a scientist working on the development of anti-cancer drugs who is now unable to work, rent or access the NHS.[8]
Saleem Dadabhoy is unlikely to become destitute or fall into debt, since he is
a scion of one of the wealthiest families in Pakistan, [facing] deportation under [para.] 322(5) despite three different appeal courts having scrutinised his accounts and finding no evidence of any irregularities, and a court of appeal judge having ruled that he is trustworthy and credible.[9]
Others connected to him, however, might well face debt or destitution: if he were to be deported, 20 people employed by him would lose their jobs and the company (worth £1.5m) would close.
It has become clear that all this is the result not just of Amber Rudd’s time at the Home Office but of Theresa May’s creation of a “hostile environment” when she was in the same job. However, it goes back further than that. The examples I have given of the “agenda of disbelief” relate to Labour’s time in office. The hostile environment, in fact, goes back to Tony Blair, who set targets for asylum seeker deportations, and to Home Secretary David Blunkett, who had kids separated from their parents and put into local authority care in order to persuade their parents to go home when they were afraid to do so. Rod McLean, Head of Asylum Policy at the Home Office in 2006, told me this was because Blunkett was making policy “with an eye to the media”, who wanted tougher measures on removals. He then told me the policy would be abandoned “because it hasn’t worked”. I asked him, “When you say it hasn’t worked do you mean that, instead of waiting for you to take their children away, they just disappear?” “Yes,” he said. Unfortunately the policy wasn’t abandoned – it remained on the statute book.[10]
I believe that Labour not only has to blame the Tories for the “hostile environment” but own up to its own past, when it presided over an “agenda of disbelief”, in which asylum seekers were considered guilty until proved innocent. Because if Labour doesn’t recognise its past it will be in danger of repeating it. This is not to cast doubt on Corbyn’s best intentions – but the tabloids are still there, and so are the successors of Rod McLean.
Immigration Rules, para. 322: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/immigration-rules/immigration-rules-part-9-grounds-for-refusal
[1] “Amber Rudd was sent targets for migrant removal, leak reveals”, The Guardian¸ 28 April 2018: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/apr/27/amber-rudd-was-told-about-migrant-removal-targets-leak-reveals
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid., see the “Q & A” box, “What are enforced departures?”
[6] https://bobmouncerblog.wordpress.com/2018/02/12/the-secretary-of-state-still-doesnt-believe-you-2/
https://bobmouncerblog.wordpress.com/2018/02/14/inappropriate-behaviour/
[7] See Dealt with on their Merits, pp.151-162: https://hydra.hull.ac.uk/assets/hull:2678a/content
[8] “At least 1,000 highly skilled migrants wrongly face deportation, experts reveal”, The Observer, 6 May 2018:
[9] Ibid.
[10] See Dealt with on their Merits, pp.220-221: https://hydra.hull.ac.uk/assets/hull:2678a/content
For peace – and against ceasefires
Am I missing something? I’m tired of the United Nations wringing its United hands about Aleppo and acting surprised because a ceasefire has failed, humanitarian aid hasn’t been delivered and the bombing has got worse. Of course it has. All the nations of the world are united in believing in war; all of them are armed to the teeth, the big and strutty ones with WMDs. War is the opposite of humanitarian. It’s the opposite of aid. War is destruction. War is murder. That’s what it’s for. Why would two (or in the Syrian situation, Gawd knows how many) antagonists at war be interested in aid to their victims? Or a ceasefire? (“Will it hold?” “Oh dear, there seem to have been violations.” What a surprise!).
This is why I can’t stand the mushy sentimentality surrounding the Christmas truce during the First World War. One English language textbook a few years ago used it in one of its lessons. The class weeps over a bilingual “Silent Night” in the trenches, sighs as it realises that the very next day both choirs went back to war, and then the class joins in singing some old wartime song popular with the British troops.
I don’t have an answer to all this. We don’t need ceasefires or humanitarian aid. We need to stop believing in war. Jeremy Corbyn doesn’t believe in war but, if he does get into government, I don’t know how he’ll try to persuade others. He’s set himself the task of trying to persuade his own party not to renew Trident (there’s a mountain to climb) and we can only join him in that effort and keep our fingers crossed. But it feels as if it could all be too late, especially since Iraq, and our creation of ISIS.
So, as I say, I’ve got no answer. I’m just tired of it, that’s all.
Conflicting objectives?
Alan Johnson, my local MP, who ran Labour’s Remain campaign, blames Jeremy Corbyn for the Brexit vote. He says that Jeremy, or his “office”, “worked against the rest of the Party”, had “conflicting objectives” and had “undermined” the campaign. He offers no evidence. I replied on the Hull Daily Mail’s website today as follows:
“It would be useful to hear some analysis of the way the media marginalised the Labour case for staying. Jeremy was ignored by the mainstream media most of the time, as was Alan Johnson. Just the odd clip or specific comment, almost never a whole speech or extended quotes from their speeches. While the Boris Johnson/Gove v. Cameron show got full coverage, as did Farage’s every move. So the impression was that Labour wasn’t saying much, or was ‘lacklustre’. As for Jeremy’s office ‘working against the rest of the Party’, having ‘conflicting objectives’ and seeking to ‘undermine’ the campaign, you need to give examples, Alan, and say how, why and who. The consequences of just making and repeating accusations are disastrous. Especially when they make no sense.”
Here’s the original article:
Referendum blues, and the dangers of wishful thinking
On Question Time last night, Owen Jones raised the question of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and its threat to the NHS remaining in public ownership. He claimed that the UK now has an exemption from TTIP when it comes to the NHS. He said the following:
“Because people protested and campaigned here and all over Europe we not only got an exemption for the NHS (forced upon this government against their will) but because people protested and campaigned all over Europe TTIP lies in ruins. Don’t let anyone say we can’t change the European Union.”
I don’t think we’ve got an exemption and I don’t think TTIP lies in ruins. The latest information I can find after a quick search is from the Daily Mirror and The Guardian of 19 May, where a No. 10 spokesperson is quoted as saying that the government would accept the Commons amendment to the Queen’s speech (put by Peter Lilley (Tory) and Paula Sherriff (Labour), and supported, I think, by the SNP), which proposed that the Commons should
“respectfully regret that a Bill to protect the National Health Service from the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership was not included in the Gracious Speech.”
I understand from this that getting an exemption would involve an Act of Parliament, so I don’t see how Owen Jones can say we’ve got an exemption now. I’d have thought it would mean some more jiggery-pokery at EU Central too.
At my Constituency Labour Party meeting last month, when I asked a question about whether TTIP was a threat to the public ownership of the NHS, Peter Prescott (arguing for a Remain vote), agreed that it was – but claimed that TTIP would have to be agreed to by all 28 members of the EU and that therefore we would have a say at that stage, and that he couldn’t see France, either, agreeing to this aspect of TTIP under a Socialist Party government. He didn’t mention an exemption. (He didn’t mention, either, that President Hollande is apparently the most unpopular president of France since records began, so who knows whether there will be a Socialist Party government of France when TTIP gets to that stage?)
I’m not clear what “accepting the amendment” means anyway, particularly as the said No. 10 spokesperson seemed a bit dismissive of it: “As we’ve said all along,” he said, “there is no threat to the NHS from TTIP. So if this amendment is selected, we’ll accept it.” So, as I said, I don’t believe we’ve got an exemption and Owen Jones’s claim is, at best, wishful thinking.
I could vote either way in the referendum: there are lots of reasons why I’d like to see us out of this club. I hate what the EU and the European Bank did to Greece (they boasted they’d given Tspiras “a mental waterboarding”), I find the claim that the EU will make it easier to defend workers’ rights (also cited by Jones) more than questionable in the week after the French “socialist” government tear-gassed workers protesting against its proposed laws, which are set to tear up their rights, I hate the EU agreement with Turkey to send Syrians (who are the most vulnerable ones) back to Syria. (This means that every time EU bureaucrats or politicians take a breath they are breaking the Refugee Convention.)
But I’m thinking of voting Remain. Part of that has always been because of the racist arguments of a substantial part of the Leave campaign. But (and this is not unconnected with that reason) a successful Leave vote would also likely result in Boris Johnson and Michael Gove running the government, even more enthusiastic in “punishing the poor”, as Ken Loach described the Tories last week, than even Cameron and Osborne. There is no worse prospect, we don’t need it and we don’t deserve it. So I’m inclining at the moment (and this isn’t set in stone) to adopt Paul Mason’s approach: Get out, but not yet. The time to leave would be when a Labour government is prevented by the EU from implementing its programme (e.g. defending the NHS, bringing back the rail network into public ownership) and then, when it becomes obvious we can’t change the EU, calls another referendum. Then we could leave, heads held high, Corbyn intact.
And that’s another thing: on 23 June, a Leave vote would probably mean, not only the rise of Johnson and Gove, but the end of Jeremy Corbyn. Labour MPs would call for a new leadership election before you could say “plot”, and he would be gone.
And then I would retire from politics!
Tell your MP: “all necessary measures” – against war
The Labour Party decided at its conference this year that military intervention in Syria by the UK should not take place without
- authorisation from the United Nations;
- a comprehensive plan for humanitarian assistance for any refugees who may be displaced by the action;
- assurances that the bombing is directed exclusively at military targets associated with ISIS;
- the subordination of any military action to international diplomatic efforts to end the war in Syria.
I’m not sure if the UN Security Council’s post-Paris call to take “all necessary measures” against ISIS counts as authorisation, although I think David Cameron thinks it does. It looks like he will present proposals for bombing to the House of Commons this week or next and he’s been telling the French president not to worry: it’ll be “shoulder to shoulder” again apparently.
A good many Labour MPs are flexing their shoulders in anticipation of voting with the Tories and against the Labour conference decision and the advice of Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell and others. They’re jumping the gun, of course, if you’ll pardon the expression. Even assuming that the Security Council’s “all necessary measures” count as authorisation, there are three other Labour Party conference criteria to be met before Labour MPs should even consider hoisting their shoulders into war. The Guardian thought that meeting all four criteria would be difficult if not impossible “in the short term”. Or in the long term, I would add. Even if, by sleight of hand or smoke and mirrors, Hilary Benn, say, declared they had been met, those vague criteria couldn’t possibly guarantee that refugees would be protected, that only military targets associated with ISIS would be bombed, or that international diplomatic efforts would be able to end the war in Syria while the politicians “pitilessly” (the word used by the French president) extend it.
Politicians quite like shoulder-flexing. But we must absolutely refuse to give them permission. Although John McDonnell has suggested that Labour MPs might have a free vote, I’ve told my MP (Alan Johnson) to vote against war. Please tell yours. And sign a petition, pass a resolution in your union branch, or at your local Labour Party meeting, and go on a demo.
Because the truth is that the history of previous shoulder-to-shoulder events (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, then back to Iraq again) cries out for them not to do it again. It doesn’t work. It won’t work with French shoulders either. What it will do (to use a phrase that was quite often used by my mother) is send us all to buggery.
In today’s Guardian, Frankie Boyle argues that “Britain clings to its bombing addiction with the weary rationale of a junkie.” He concludes:
“If we wanted to get well as a society, we would end up like anyone in recovery: sitting around a table talking, having awkward conversations and making compromises. Instead, a few months from now, we’ll be dealing with the kind of horror that is unleashed when British MPs are told they can vote with their consciences.”
Jeremy and John, I don’t know how you’re going to play this but, given the malleability of many Labour MPs’ consciences in the past, I don’t feel safe with a free vote.
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