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Let’s break these promises
Labour’s 2017 manifesto promised an end to free movement and that, instead of the Tories’ £30,000 salary threshold that migrants need to be earning before they dare to take even one step on to our territory, a Labour government would ensure that migrants would have “no access to public funds”. These are promises that should be broken. Like many Labour Party members I’m in favour of free movement, both for me and for others. And as for the second promise, here’s an example of what “no access to public funds” means in practice, It’s taken from Mike Cole’s book “Racism”:
As a direct result of the 2007–08 financial crisis … increasing numbers of people in Peterborough were forced to become homeless, and resorted to squatting in back yards or setting up desperate makeshift camps, which were reminiscent of shanty towns, on roundabouts and in woods. By 2010 it was estimated that as many as 15 camps were scattered around the city. In the same year, a project that was the first of its kind in the country was launched in Peterborough. It involved rounding up homeless migrants and attempting to force them to leave the United Kingdom. The then immigration minister Phil Woolas stated: “People have to be working, studying or self-sufficient and if they are not we expect them to return home …. This scheme to remove European nationals who aren’t employed is getting them off the streets and back to their own country.” Stewart Jackson, a local Conservative MP, described them as “vagrants” and remarked: “I don’t know how these migrants are surviving sleeping rough on roundabouts and bushes but they are a drain on my constituents and taxpayers …. If they are not going to contribute to this country, then, as citizens of their home country, they should return there.”
Typical Tory language? Yes, but Phil Woolas was a Labour minister and MP for Oldham East. Labour must take “no access to public funds” out of its plans for the next manifesto, out of its lexicon of policies and out of its collective head—except as a no-go area.
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.
I will do no harm or injustice to them
There’s a thing called the Hippocratic oath, taken by medical students when they end their studies and set out on their careers. It’s 2,500 years old now, so it’s a bit out of date. For one thing, the medic declares, “I swear by Apollo the physician, and Asclepius, and Hygieia and Panacea and all the gods and goddesses” to keep the oath; for another, aspiring doctors say, “In purity and according to divine law will I carry out my life and my art.” Mind you, leaving aside the divine law, the purity promise may be less out of date when coupled with the promise to avoid “any voluntary act of impropriety or corruption, including the seduction of women or men, whether they are free men or slaves.” (We may once have thought slavery was out of date after Toussaint L’Ouverture and Wilberforce, but not any more.) It may also be encouraging to know that your GP has sworn, “I will not use the knife, even upon those suffering from stones, but I will leave this to those who are trained in this craft.” But much is out of date – the prohibition of abortion for example. But there is one promise that’s right up to date, even to today’s headlines, and it’s one we all need to be sure of. Speaking of their patients, doctors promise: “I will do no harm or injustice to them.”
Both those things were done to Esayas Welday, an Eritrean asylum seeker in the UK. He was diagnosed with leukaemia and started a course of chemotherapy. But suddenly the treatment was stopped and he was told that, because he couldn’t afford the £33,000 needed to pay for the treatment, that was it. He had already been homeless. Now he was homeless again, turfed out of Northwick Park Hospital in West London, with a few bits of medication in a plastic bag. Read his story below. The hospital trust apparently treated him in this way because they thought the government had instructed them to do so. They said: “Mr Welday is not eligible for NHS treatment … he is homeless with refugee status.” They were wrong. He was eligible although he was homeless. They were wrong again because with refugee status he would have been eligible. They were wrong yet again because he didn’t have refugee status, he was simply an asylum seeker asking for refugee status. And as such he was eligible because his treatment was urgent. How did they get all this wrong? I would guess it’s because these particular rules, part of the government’s hostile environment towards migrants since 2017, are complicated, strict and presented in such a way that the pressure is on staff to err on the side of refusal rather than follow their instinct to care.
Happily, another hospital interpreted the rules in a different way. Whittington Hospital in North London looked at their patient, looked at the rules, and refused to be panicked or pressured into doing “harm or injustice” to him. His treatment continued.
My point is this: capitalism corrupts everything, It has no respect for human decency. It even tricks people sworn to a duty of care into thinking that they now have no need to care. It demands what this article describes as payment “upfront for many forms of hospital-based medical care, even though such patients are usually penniless and often destitute, like Welday.” Complicated and hard-to-interpret government rules imposing a hostile environment seemed to lock the NHS bureaucracy and then its staff into a scenario that would have ended in Esayas’s death (at 29) if another solution had not been found by other staff.
We definitely need a general election. But we need more than that. We need to overturn a system of markets and money and profits and a culture of xenophobia and racism that insists that “they” are not equal to “us”. Are our alternative leaders up to the job? I hope so. But I don’t know.
The article:
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