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How thinktanks shape the agenda on Muslims in Britain

JamieSW — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 00:19:36 +0000

Over the last two months, a number of writers, journalists and policymakers associated with the Policy Exchange (PX) thinktank have taken up key positions on Boris Johnson’s London mayoral team. The most prominent of these appointments is that of former Times journalist Anthony Browne, who became policy director at City Hall in July 2008. Browne has been PX’s director since 2007 and is tipped for a senior role at Downing Street in any future Cameron government.

Founded in 2002, PX is regarded as having a considerable influence on David Cameron’s repositioning of the Conservatives as progressive and liberal, particularly on issues to do with multiculturalism and the ‘war on terror’. Two events in 2005 transformed the way that Conservatives present themselves on ‘race and immigration’ issues. Their general election defeat in that year led to a reluctance to repeat Michael Howard’s strategy of making immigration a key campaigning issue. And the London bombings a few weeks later shifted the focus from immigration per se onto questions of Muslims in particular, multiculturalism and Britishness – issues that PX has pursued vigorously since then.

The critique of multiculturalism

In the past, liberals tended to support multicultural policies while conservatives saw multiculturalism as a threat to national cohesion and social order. Since 7/7, many liberals have joined with conservatives in thinking that multicultural tolerance has gone too far and that the failure to defend western values has fostered ‘Islamic extremism’ leading, ultimately, to the creation of British suicide bombers. PX has led the way in promoting this argument across the political spectrum. Its critiques have focused not just on multiculturalism but also on the Muslim political leadership which multiculturalism has given rise to, in particular the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB).

In 2006, PX published a major report on the MCB, entitled When Progressives Treat with Reactionaries, criticising its ‘known links to the ideology of radical Islamism’.1 Following this report, Labour government ministers began to distance themselves from the MCB and promoted the Sufi Muslim Council as an alternative Muslim representative organisation that was more supportive of western foreign policy. The importance of these issues for Cameron’s ‘modernised’ Conservative Party was also highlighted by the report’s author, New Statesman political editor Martin Bright, who noted the willingness of the ‘Tory progressives at Policy Exchange’ to take up the issues and the ‘signs that the reformist Cameron wing of the Conservative Party’ would pursue them.

In January 2007, PX released a far more wide-ranging report on Muslims and multiculturalism, entitled Living Apart Together. Billed as an attempt to find ‘the reasons why there has been a significant rise in Islamic fundamentalism amongst the younger generation’, its answer was that multiculturalism and Britain’s failure to assert the superiority of its national values had encouraged young Muslims to feel victimised and adopt anti-western views.2 The report was released to the press to coincide with a speech by David Cameron attacking multiculturalism and Muslim ‘extremists’ who seek ‘special treatment’. A policy document published simultaneously by the Tories suggested that the MCB was dominated by such ‘separatism’.3 Munira Mirza, a co-author of the PX report, is now working as Boris Johnson’s director of arts.

Later in the same year, PX published a report on ‘extremist literature’ which claimed that ‘radical material’ was being distributed in a quarter of Britain’s mosques and called for greater regulation and a new ‘gold standard’ to promote a ‘moderate Islam’.4 The report was criticised by a BBC Newsnight investigation which suggested that book receipts collected by PX researchers had been faked.

Anthony Browne’s writings over the last six years exemplify this shift in emphasis from a general concern with ‘Third World immigration’ to a focus on Muslims in Britain. In August 2002, Browne wrote an article for The Times entitled ‘Britain is losing Britain’ in which he stated that ‘an unprecedented and sustained wave of immigration [is] utterly transforming the society in which we live against the wishes of the majority of the population, damaging quality of life and social cohesion, exacerbating the housing crisis and congestion’. He added that ‘in the past five years, while the white population grew by 1 per cent, the Bangladeshi community grew by 30 per cent, the black African population by 37 per cent and the Pakistani community by 13 per cent’; what he called ‘little Third World colonies’ had appeared in Britain.5 A few months later, Browne wrote in the Spectator (then edited by Boris Johnson) that ‘it is not through letting in terrorists that the government’s policy of mass immigration – especially from the Third World – will claim the most lives. It is through letting in too many germs.’6

Following 7/7, Anthony Browne turned his attention to what he called Islamic ‘fascism’. Political correctness, he argued, had ‘allowed the creation of alienated Muslim ghettoes which produce young men who commit mass murder against their fellow citizens’.7 Groups such as the Muslim Association of Britain, he said, are ‘like Hitler’ and Islamic ‘fascism’ has taken root in Britain because of the Left’s failure to break down Muslim separatism. The response to 7/7 must be a clamp down on arranged marriages, the deportation of imams who support the Muslim Brotherhood and possibly a French-style ban on the hijab in schools.8

Similarly, Charles Moore, the current chairman of PX and a former editor of the Telegraph and the Spectator, gave a speech in March 2008 outlining a ‘possible conservative approach to the question of Islam in Britain’. The government, he argued, should maintain a list of Muslim organisations which, while not actually inciting violence, ‘nevertheless advocate such anti-social attitudes that they should not receive public money or official recognition’ – in this category would fall any groups with links to the Muslim Brotherhood or the Jamaati-e-Islami, as well as individuals, such as Tariq Ramadan, the Swiss philosopher and fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford.9

Finally, there is Michael Gove, a founding chairman of PX and one of the young Conservative MPs who make up David Cameron’s shadow cabinet. In his 2006 book Celsius 7/7, Gove defines ‘Islamism’ as an ideology that is similar to fascism and includes Tariq Ramadan as a follower. He states that in the war against ‘Islamism’, it will be necessary for Britain to carry out assassinations of terrorist suspects, in order to send ‘a vital signal of resolution’. More generally, a ‘temporary curtailment of liberties’ will be needed to prevent Islamism from destroying western civilisation.10 Fellow Tories regard Gove as a leading expert on Muslims in Britain.

Reviving the cold war

What Browne’s, Moore’s and Gove’s comments illustrate is the attempt to justify illberal policies in the name of defending ‘liberal’ western values against an alien ‘totalitarian’ threat. This is the paradoxical project that is now the major theme of centre-Right thinking on multiculturalism and the ‘war on terror’. Indeed, the debate on multiculturalism has become a part of what many regard as a new ‘cultural’ cold war to promote a ‘moderate’ (i.e. pro-western) Islam across the globe – and particularly in Europe. This is a model that has been endorsed by Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who has spoken of a new cold war against ‘Muslim extremism’, fought through the ‘soft power’ of cultural influence.11 The role of thinktanks would then not only be to supply political parties with policy suggestions but also to popularise the idea of ‘Islamism’ as an existential threat to the West that requires a hardline, Cold War-style response. As Dean Godson, a research director at PX who has strong links to well-known Washington neoconservatives, wrote in 2006: ‘During the Cold War, organisations such as the Information Research Department of the Foreign Office would assert the superiority of the West over its totalitarian rivals. And magazines such as Encounter did hand-to-hand combat with Soviet fellow travellers. For any kind of truly moderate Islam to flourish, we need first to recapture our own self-confidence.’12

Encounter, of course, was covertly funded by the CIA. But Godson’s suggestion has been taken up with the launch of Standpoint magazine, published by another thinktank, the Social Affairs Unit (SAU). Its editor Daniel Johnson explicitly sees Standpoint as a 21st-century version of Encounter, except with Islamism replacing communism as the threat to western civilisation.13 By uniting around the formula of the ‘defence of the liberal West against the Islamists’, the magazine has been able to incorporate pro-Iraq war ‘liberal’ writers, such as Nick Cohen and Julie Burchill, with neoconservatives. Michael Gove serves on the magazine’s advisory board, as does Gertrude Himmelfarb (one of Gordon Brown’s favourite historians and wife and mother of the leading US neoconservatives Irving and William Kristol).

In Standpoint‘s first issue in June 2008, the historian Michael Burleigh praised Cameron’s approach to the ‘war on terror’, suggesting that, once in government, he would end Britain’s excessive multicultural tolerance and adopt a tougher counter-terrorist stance. Cameron, he says, has understood that ‘jihadism’ threatens the very existence of the West and that the way to fight it is through the dismantling of ‘state multiculturalism’, the banning of extremist groups such as Hizb ut-Tahrir, the deportation of ‘foreign agitators’ and withdrawal from European human rights commitments.14 In the same issue, there is an essay by the Bishop of Rochester Michael Nazir-Ali, arguing that ‘radical Islam’ is filling the gap left by the decline of Christian influence at the core of British identity.15

Like PX, the SAU has also published a series of reports on ‘Islamic extremism’. Its 2005 study of ‘terrorist and extremist activity on British campuses’ by Anthony Glees, entitled When Students Turn to Terror, was widely seen as exaggerated and flawed yet had a significant impact in fostering an atmosphere of suspicion in further and higher education.16 The report argued the need for greater monitoring and surveillance of students by police and security forces.17

The focus on campuses was repeated in a 2008 report by the Centre for Social Cohesion (CSC). Islam on Campus by John Thorne and Hannah Stuart claimed that involvement in university Islamic Societies tends to encourage extremism.18 In response, Wes Streeting, president of the National Union of Students, argued that the survey on which the report was based asked Muslim students ‘vague and misleading questions, and their answers were then misinterpreted’.19 The CSC is a project of the right-wing thinktank Civitas, which before 7/7 published a number of reports describing immigration as damaging to British life. Since the CSC was established in 2007, it has focused on what it regards as the threat to cohesion represented by British Muslim communities. Its neoconservative director Douglas Murray has stated that ‘conditions for Muslims in Europe must be made harder across the board’ and has called for a bar on immigration from Muslim countries.20 The CSC’s reports reflect this agenda.

The lack of an alternative vision

While PX, the SAU and the CSC have focused extensively on the crisis that they say has been caused by multiculturalism and on the Muslim presence in Britain, thinktanks which locate themselves on the left of the political spectrum have tended to approach these issues through the concept of community cohesion and the new identity politics of Britishness. The notion of community cohesion directs attention to local policy initiatives that might bind communities together more strongly. The new concern with Britishness is a way of responding to right-wing attacks on multiculturalism that favours a ‘third way’ on identity, rooting national belonging in liberal values. These have been the approaches adopted by the Institute of Public Policy Research (IPPR), the Smith Institute and the Fabian Society.21 In effect, this has meant that the right-wing thinktanks’ definition of a ‘crisis of multiculturalism’ has not been challenged and the Left has differed only in the sorts of solutions it proposes. While IPPR, in particular, has over the last few years published reports that question the perception of an ‘immigration crisis’, it has not done the same to challenge the idea of a ‘multiculturalism crisis’ or a ‘Muslim problem’.

The only major thinktank that has attempted an alternative approach to notions of Muslim extremism is Demos. Its research has sought to challenge the conflation of Islamism, Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism. In July 2008, as part of this research project, Demos decided to host a session at the Islam Expo in London Olympia on the subject of ‘The Islamist Threat: myth or reality?’.22 But Demos’ involvement drew a storm of protest as critics such as Martin Bright branded the event ‘Hamas at Olympia’.23 Nick Cohen accused Demos of ‘appeasement’ and ‘collaborating’ with a fascist enemy.24 Demos’ then director Catherine Fieschi resigned on the following Monday.

What of the political magazines of the liberal centre and centre-Left? Again, rather than challenge the tenets of the Right’s framework on these issues, the approach has been one of borrowing and adaptation. The liberal Prospect magazine, for example, has promoted a debate on whether the Left’s support for multiculturalism has been misguided. Its editor David Goodhart argued in his influential 2004 essay, ‘Too Diverse?’, that multiculturalism should be dropped since the welfare state was incompatible with ethnic diversity – a view that was influential with the Labour government. On British Muslims, Goodhart has written that he hopes that a ‘moderate’ leadership will emerge to defuse the Islamist threat and foster integration. What, though, makes a ‘moderate’ Muslim? Tariq Ramadan was one for a while, and was even held by Goodhart to be a positive example of a pro-integrationist Muslim leader, but was then rejected after arguing in the Guardian in 2007 that ‘a link exists between terrorism and foreign policy’.25 Ramadan’s article was denounced by Goodhart as a ‘grievance-seeking, responsibility-avoiding diatribe’. And in an ‘open letter’ to Ramadan, Goodhart announced that his liking for him had come to an end: ‘You, I thought, were different. You were modern, confident, educated, in favour of Muslim integration against religious and ethnic balkanisation. ... I was wrong about you.’26 At the centre-Left New Statesman, the political editor Martin Bright has launched a number of attacks on the MCB and called for the Left to define Islamists as ‘Islamic fascists’. Only individual columnists, such as the New Statesman‘s Ziauddin Sardar and, at the Guardian, Seumas Milne and Madeleine Bunting, have tried to offer a positive view of multiculturalism and a more complex account of Muslim politics.

An atmosphere of suspicion

A number of questions can be raised about the methodologies of the reports that PX, the SAU and the CSC have produced on Muslims in Britain. But the deeper issue is their disproportionality and selectivity, which – in the absence of an alternative perspective from other thinktanks – end up reinforcing a systematic and unchallenged conflation of extremism and the wider British Muslim presence. The publication of these reports is often followed by incendiary newspaper headlines on the ‘Islamic threat’. As Ronan Bennett has written: ‘Hardly a day goes by when they [British Muslims] are not lectured and scolded by writers claiming to be the champions of true liberalism.’27 This gradual ratcheting up of an atmosphere of suspicion and crisis contributes to Labour government policies that erode civil liberties and democratic freedoms. Yet, in the next general election campaign, the Conservatives are likely to take a tougher approach to multiculturalism and Muslim organisations – as they did in the London mayoral elections. The interpretation of ‘Islamic extremism’ that has been fostered by PX, the SAU and the CSC is likely to feed into this process.

It is of course true that some interpretations of multiculturalism have been counter-productive and that Muslim political leaders need to be held to account by the communities they represent. But that is a far cry from the political agenda implied by these writers. Certainly, their writings can be seen as contributing to an ideological atmosphere in which attacks on multiculturalism and demands to restrict civil liberties, suppress democratic Muslim voices and downplay the legitimate issues that fuel Muslim anger at western states all become increasingly acceptable and part of a common political agenda across the party divide.28

Arun Kundnani is the editor of Race & Class and the author of The End of Tolerance: racism in 21st century Britain (Pluto Press, 2007).

1. Martin Bright, When Progressives Treat with Reactionaries: the British state’s flirtation with radical Islamism (London, Policy Exchange, 2006).
2. Munira Mirza, Abi Senthilkumaran and Zein Ja’far, Living apart together: British Muslims and the paradox of multiculturalism (London, Policy Exchange, 2007).
3. Will Woodward, ‘Tories set sights on separatist British Muslims‘, Guardian (30 January 2007).
4. Denis MacEoin, The Hijacking of British Islam: how extremist literature is subverting mosques in the UK (London, Policy Exchange, 2007), p. 7.
5. Anthony Browne, ‘Britain is losing Britain’, The Times T2 (7 August 2002), p. 2.
6. Anthony Browne, ‘The secret threat to British lives‘, Spectator (25 January 2003).
7. Anthony Browne, The Retreat of Reason: political correctness and the corruption of public debate in modern Britain (London, Civitas, 2006), p. xiii.
8. Anthony Browne, ‘Fundamentally, we’re useful idiots’, The Times (1 August 2005).
9. Charles Moore, Centre for Policy Studies, Keith Joseph Memorial Lecture, 10 March 2008.
10. Michael Gove, Celsius 7/7 (London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006), pp. 45, 103, 136.
11. George Jones, ‘Terrorism fight is our cold war, says Brown’, Telegraph (3 July 2007).
12. Dean Godson, ‘The feeble helping the unspeakable‘, The Times (5 April 2006).
13. Daniel Johnson, ‘Moving the world‘, Standpoint (June 2008).
14. Michael Burleigh, ‘How to defeat the global jihadists‘, Standpoint (June 2008).
15. Michael Nazir-Ali, ‘Breaking faith with Britain‘, Standpoint (June 2008).
16. Anthony Glees and Chris Pope, When Students Turn to Terror: terrorist and extremist activity on British campuses (London, Social Affairs Unit, 2005).
17. David Renton, ‘Document on student extremism seriously flawed‘, IRR News (10 April 2008).
18. John Thorne and Hannah Stuart, Islam on Campus: a survey of UK student opinions (London, Centre for Social Cohesion, July 2008).
19. ‘FOSIS and NUS criticises report by Centre for Social Cohesion‘, press release by Federation of Student Islamic Societies.
20. Douglas Murray, ‘What are we to do about Islam?‘, speech to the Pim Fortuyn Memorial Conference on Europe and Islam, The Hague, February 2006.
21. See, for examples, Rick Muir, The New Identity Politics (London, Institute for Public Policy Research, 2007); Nick Johnson (ed.), Citizenship, Cohesion and Solidarity (London, Smith Institute, 2008).
22. Peter Harrington, ‘Myths and monsters‘, Progress (10 July 2008).
23. Martin Bright, ‘Hamas at Olympia‘, New Statesman (10 July 2008).
24. Nick Cohen, ‘Demos and IslamExpo‘, Harry’s Place (16 July 2008).
25. Tariq Ramadan, ‘Blair can no longer deny a link exists between terrorism and foreign policy’, Guardian (4 June 2007).
26. David Goodhart, ‘An open letter to Tariq Ramadan’, Prospect (Issue 135, June 2007).
27. Ronan Bennett, ‘Shame on us‘, Guardian (19 November 2007).
28. For a more detailed analysis, see Arun Kundnani, ‘Islamism and the roots of liberal rage‘, Race & Class (Vol. 50, no. 2, October 2008).

Notting Hill Carnival crackdown targets young black men

JamieSW — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 18:36:28 +0000

London’s Notting Hill Carnival is rightly hailed as a celebration of multi-ethnic Britain.

But it turned into a nightmare for hundreds of young black men as heavily armed police swooped on buses carrying them to the street party.

In a pre-planned operation, police boarded buses in the Oval area of south London to take off those who fitted their profile.

The first of dozens of partygoers were corralled into a side street next to the famous cricket ground from around 2pm onwards.

Hundreds of police, some carrying machine guns, sealed off the surrounding area and fingerprinted and searched the mainly teenagers inside the cordon.

Over the course of the afternoon the police raided bus after bus. By 7pm around 200 men, overwhelmingly black and some appearing to be as young as 13, were being held.

Teenagers walking on nearby streets weren’t safe either. One young man, who had been with a group of friends returning from a birthday party, told Socialist Worker that police had put him and his friends into the cordon.

He explained how they had been on the way to the park to play football when a police van screeched to a halt and officers piled out.

Outside the cordon Socialist Worker spoke to many people who had just been released and were now waiting, hoping their friends would emerge soon.

Handcuffed

While some were resigned, saying that this kind of policing had become the norm, others were incensed. “This is some Rodney King shit going on here,” said one, referring to the beating of a black man by police that led to the Los Angeles riot in 1992.

“The Feds [the police] had us up against the wall and some of us on the floor being handcuffed until they searched us. Then they just let us go because they know we hadn’t done anything wrong.”

By early evening parents were joining the crowds outside the cordon, arguing with police about why their children were being held, and angry that a trip to carnival should be the pretext for such a clampdown.

The police commandeered buses to take more than 100 young people to police stations – though only seven were charged with any offence.

For some who made it to carnival, things were only a little better. Outside Notting Hill tube station, among the diverse mix of tens of thousands of revellers, gangs of police swooped almost exclusively on young black males.

It was the first of many hurdles that they would face. In the 200 metres between the station and the road where carnival floats were parading there were five separate police lines.

Socialist Worker stood behind one line of police that formed a “control point”. There was no sign of the much publicised “knife arches” that were supposed to keep carnival safe – instead there was old fashioned stop and search.

We witnessed dozens of black males being searched. The only white men we saw being held were part of racially mixed groups.

One young black teenager told Socialist Worker that this was the fifth time the police had searched him this year. “I have even been stopped twice in one day,” he said.

Those who have responded to the tragedy of knife crime by calling for police crackdowns ought to take note. The criminalisation of a generation of black youth will undoubtedly lead to explosions of anger in the future, just as it did a generation ago with the riots that swept Britain’s inner cities.

Romany roads

Ellie Keen — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 20:14:00 +0000

Discriminatory policies against Italy’s Romany Gypsy population, including the fingerprinting of children, are said to have their origins in the fascist policies of Mussolini. Many were shocked by the apathy shown when two Gypsy girls drowned on a beach near Naples, as people carried on enjoying their day out only yards away, regardless of the small bodies laid out on the sand. But how different is Britain when it comes to prejudice against its own travelling people?

According to a report last year from the Children’s Society, almost nine out of every 10 children and young people with a Gypsy background have been the victim of racial abuse. The report also stated that nearly two-thirds have been bullied or physically attacked.

Few campsites are provided for British Gypsies, and draconian powers allow local authorities to crack down on new encampments. Shelter Scotland points out that if you are a Gypsy and you own your own land, you can still be evicted by your local council. Ernie Rutherford, Romany Gypsy and professional boxing trainer, told me:

There ain’t no life on the road no more. You’ll end up living in a house – that’s just the way it is. That’s how they’re killing it out. They take away our lifestyle and make us fit in with everybody else’s … In the end there won’t be no Gypsies – that’s the way it’s going. We can’t even buy some land and put nothing on it, because they’ll bulldoze it down. At the end of the day they don’t want to give us nowhere to live, they don’t want us to drive about on the road, they don’t really want to give us houses.

When I ask him whether he thinks Gypsies are discriminated against, he says, “Yeah, you’re not wrong. We’re the only people now that you can call pikey and things like that on the telly and get away with it. Catherine Tate takes the piss out of us every week mate.” This makes me glad that Tate didn’t win the British Comedy award.

Rutherford grew up in St Mary Cray, in south-east London, which is the largest settled community of Romany Gypsies, or Travellers, in the UK. Like many Gypsies, the Rutherfords lived in pre-fabricated asbestos housing until the site was eventually closed down and they were moved into houses. “Them houses were the worst houses in the area – they were dangerous,” he recalls. Not Kushti Atchin Tan, or a good stopping place, in the Roma language.

Ernie tells me how some of his family have had bricks thrown through the windows of their caravans when they’ve been on the road. “Some people don’t like you in their area, they don’t want you there. They look on us as we’re the worst kind of people in this country,” he says. He just wants to be treated with respect. The government does not provide sites for the Travellers, but he would love to buy a plot of land and put a mobile home on it. He accepts that at the moment this is an almost impossible dream.

“If the government can’t control ya, then they don’t want ya,” he believes. “They talk about China and all these places, they’re just as bad. They ain’t no different, they just do it craftily.” He complains that there are no schools for Traveller people. “They’re killing our culture that’s what they’re doing. They’re doing it slowly, but they’re doing a good job of it.”

Kicking away the ladder

Alex Doherty — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 18:47:45 +0000

The administrators of the British economy and UK plc have openly admitted that the recent large scale immigration into the UK has acted to depress wages, something they welcome as a positive development. Meanwhile, the middle class left condemns anyone who acknowledges the possibility that immigration might being used as a weapon of class warfare by business against the domestic working class as reactionary, racist and right-wing, a stance that benefits no-one except the BNP. What might be a progressive, pro-working class position on this most contentious of issues?

1) ‘The business case for quality and controlled immigration’

Back in April, the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee published its report ‘The Economic Impact of Immigration’[1]. The report looked at the effects of the recent high levels of net immigration into the UK, described within the report as “reaching a scale unprecedented in our history” (over 300,000 in 2006). The report’s headline finding was that there was “no evidence for the argument, made by the Government, business and many others, that net immigration -immigration minus emigration- generates significant economic benefits for the existing UK population… immigration has very small impacts on GDP per capita, whether these impacts are positive or negative”.

However, while it seems that net immigration has had little or no effect on overall GDP per capita, the report found that it has had certain distributional effects: “In the short term, immigration creates winners and losers in economic terms. The biggest winners include immigrants and their employers in the UK. Consumers may also benefit from immigration through lower prices. The losers are likely to include those employed in low-paid jobs and directly competing with new immigrant workers. This group includes some ethnic minorities and a significant share of immigrants already working in the UK”. Specifically, the report finds that, with regard to wages, “immigration has had a small negative impact on the lowest-paid workers in the UK, and a small positive impact on the earnings of higher-paid workers”. On training and apprenticeship, the report noted that “there is a clear danger that immigration has some adverse impact on training opportunities and apprenticeships offered to British workers”.

None of this should come as a great surprise to the observant. In 2002, Richard Layard of the London School of Economics, also a Labour peer and economic adviser, and one of the authors of the Lords report, wrote in the Financial Times: “For European employers and skilled workers, unskilled immigration brings real advantages. It provides labour for their restaurants, building sites and car parks and helps to keep these services cheap by keeping down the wages of those who work there. But for unskilled Europeans it is a mixed blessing. It depresses their wages and may affect their job opportunities. Already unskilled workers are four times more likely to be unemployed than skilled workers and it is not surprising that they worry”[2].

Specifically with regard to the recent UK experience, the governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, stated in 2005: “The Home Office estimates that around 120,000 workers entered the UK from the new member countries of the European Union between May 2004 and March 2005. That is not far short of the average annual increase in the labour force over the past decade. Without this influx to fill the skill gaps in a tight labour market it is likely that earnings would have risen at a faster rate, putting upward pressure on the costs of employers and, ultimately, inflation… Private sector regular pay growth has been subdued, which is somewhat puzzling in the context of 30 year-high employment rates, and 30 year-low unemployment rates, which we would usually associate with a tight labour market. It is possible, indeed likely, that inflows of migrant labour have eased labour market pressure”[3].

In his testimony to the Lords committee, David Blanchflower of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee (the nine person committee that sets the UK’s official interest rate) submitted that: “The flow of workers from the A8 and the A2 [the ten Eastern European countries admitted to the EU since May 2004] appear to have increased the ‘fear’ of unemployment, which tends to have a downward impact on pay especially in the non-union sector. The ‘fear’ of unemployment refers to the probability of a worker losing their job, and may increase if the competition for jobs rises, for instance, through immigration or the threat of greater outsourcing to lower-cost economies. Both these channels can be used to explain an increase in the ‘fear’ of unemployment in the UK since the accession of the A8 nations in May 2004… Consistent with a rise in the ‘fear’ of unemployment, wage growth has been depressed in both the UK and Ireland since A8 accession. According to the UK Average Earnings Index (excluding bonuses), wage growth has fallen from 4.2% in 2004 to 3.9% in 2005, 3.8% in 2006 and 3.5% in 2007Q2. Average weekly earnings growth in Ireland has fallen from 5.0% in 2004 to 3.1% in 2006. Given the strong growth rates of both economies, many economists have struggled to find an explanation for this apparent weakness. I believe a rise in the ‘fear’ of unemployment is the only realistic candidate explanation”. It should be noted that Blanchflower, like Mervyn King, doesn’t see this as a bad thing: “An easing in wage growth has helped to offset inflationary pressures emanating in other areas of the economy, such as increases in the prices of energy and food. Immigration has therefore helped the Monetary Policy Committee to hit its inflation target”[4].

Traditionally, one thinks of the right wing as being hostile to immigration and immigrants of every hue. However, as the above shows, in our era of unfettered, unchallenged, globalised neo-liberal capitalism, the recent large-scale net immigration into Britain has, in fact, been perfectly in keeping with the interests of UK plc, although perhaps not with those of the general population. As the Lords report puts it: “Although clearly benefiting employers, immigration that is in the best interest of individual employers is not always in the best interest of the economy as a whole. If, as [immigration minister] Liam Byrne MP says, the Government is “not actually running British immigration policy in the exclusive interests of the British business community”, it is important to examine the economic basis of the arguments that immigrants are needed to fill and reduce vacancies, and that immigrants have a superior work ethic, and thus are needed to do the jobs that British workers cannot or will not do”.

These ‘arguments’ were handily summarised by one of British capital’s most prominent spokesmen, Digby Jones, the former Director-General of the Confederation of British Industry and Gordon Brown’s personal appointee as current Trade Minister, in 2006. Jones declared: “Stop immigration and you stop building houses, schools, hospitals, roads and offices in the UK. If “they” were to “go home”, you can forget this year’s harvest in our fields. In a tourism industry that contributes some 8 per cent of the nation’s wealth, 17 per cent of the workforce was not born in the UK… It’s about time we looked to our own failings in the world of work. You cannot blame a migrant for the fact that we don’t have sufficient numbers of skilled British-born people to do the jobs. Half the kids who took GCSEs last year did not get grade C or above in English and Maths. One in five of the adult population in this country cannot read and write to the standard required of an 11-year-old. You cannot blame a migrant for being prepared to work hard for the minimum wage. It is not the migrant’s fault that so many in western Europe have become lazy, complacent and picky. We live in a world where China wants your lunch and India wants your dinner - and either work is done at competitive rates here or it’s not done here at all. We have a tight labour market in the UK and yet wage inflation has not been a problem. Immigrants are doing the work for less”.

On this basis, Jones contends that: “Business must make the case for quality and controlled immigration. You will speak English, you will bring a skill, you will have a National Insurance number and participate in the transparent economy, pay tax and enjoy the protection of employment and health & safety legislation. The colour of your skin or the God you worship doesn’t matter. Play by these rules and this fair-minded country will welcome you. Come here, work hard, help create wealth - and show us up for what we are becoming: lazy, poorly skilled and complacent, often using “immigration is a bad thing” as an excuse for our own inadequacies” [5].

2) Creating the reserve army of labour

It’s a familiar refrain, and one heard as much on the middle class left as on the right: the domestic working class -including previous generations of immigrants- is ‘lazy, complacent, picky and poorly skilled’, in contrast to our East European counterparts who are willing to do the dirty work the pampered, soft-bellied and feckless British are not, and it is only this which is still keeping the country competitive in these lean, mean, hungry times.

Racist garbage, of course: Eastern Europeans are no more or less pre-disposed to hard graft than the British or anyone else, they are simply economically and politically weaker than the native population, and are thus more easily exploitable. As Jones himself pointed out in his statement (without commenting on the significance of it): “No migrant from the EU accession states can claim state benefits until they have been here for 12 months - they must work or go home”. It is not so much that migrant labour is more willing to accept the minimum wage than the domestic population, it is that they have less choice other than to accept it, whereas domestic workers are at least eligible for welfare, and can rely on family support for accommodation, for example (this is what Jones means by “lazy, complacent and picky”). It is also easier to force migrants -legal or illegal- to accept less than the minimum wage, as the Lords report finds: “some employers and agencies imposed various charges on immigrants’ salaries, thus reducing their pay below the minimum wage… Our concern is to avoid the development of a specific demand for immigrant workers that is based on immigrants’ lower expectations about wages and employment conditions or on a preference for labour whose freedom of employment in the UK is constrained by the worker’s immigration status”.

On the assertion that “immigrants are needed to fill and reduce vacancies”, the Lords report instead explains that “because immigration expands the overall economy, it cannot be expected to be an effective policy tool for significantly reducing vacancies. Vacancies are, to a certain extent, a sign of a healthy labour market and economy. They cannot be a good reason for encouraging large-scale labour immigration”. Likewise, in his response to the report, the chief economics commentator of the Financial Times, Martin Wolf, wrote that it is “unambiguously untrue in the long run and for the economy as a whole” that “immigration lowers vacancies and relieves job and skill shortages… despite record immigration, there has been no change in the number of vacancies. In a flexible labour market, vacancies and the number of jobs adapt to the size of the labour force”[6].

The government responded to the Lords report on the 11th of June, publishing separate reports by Liam Byrne’s department, the Home Office, and the Department of Work and Pensions. The Home Office report claimed that, in contrast to the findings of the Lords report, “we estimate that recent immigration has raised the GDP per head of the non-migrant population by about 0.15 per cent per annum in real terms (over the ten years to the end of 2006)”[7]. The press reported that this translated as £1,650 per capita over the ten years, and £300 per capita over the previous year alone[8] (the £300 per capita figure is a longstanding assertion of Byrne’s[9]). This is the government’s stock position: that recent immigration, far from being used to dampen down the wages of domestic workers, has actually increased their incomes. The Socialist Workers Party support this stance, praising the joint evidence submitted by the Home Office and the DWP to the Lords committee in October 2007 as a “blow” to the “right wing consensus that immigration leads to job losses and lower wages”[10].

The 0.15% per annum estimate (and it does appear to be just an estimate, no further justification for the figure is given) in the Home Office report is attributed to a 2007 study by the Low Pay Commission (paragraph 2.5). This very same study actually finds that “although the overall effect of migration on wages is positive, wages at the low end of the wage distribution are held back, while wages in the middle of the distribution increase”[11], which would appear to back up the conclusions of the Lords report, rather than debunk them. Also, given that the day before the Home Office and DWP reports were published, communities secretary Hazel Blears admitted that the government was unaware of the number of immigrants living in the UK[12], and that in May a Treasury sub-committee found the government’s migration figures were “not fit for purpose” and was “stunned to learn that there was simply no reliable source of information”[13], it is hard to understand how the government could credibly come up with such a precise figure on how much recent immigration has supposedly benefited the native population per capita.

The more sophisticated DWP report[14] found “no statistically significant impact of A8 migration on claimant unemployment, either overall or for any identifiable subgroup. In particular we find no adverse impacts on the young or low-skilled. Nor do we find a statistically significant impact on wages, either on average or at any point in the wage distribution, although the evidence here is less complete”. But again there are problems with this paper’s statistical base. It uses the Worker Registration Scheme as the data source for the level of immigration, while acknowledging that “anecdotal evidence of non-registration amongst some A8 migrants has been reported” and that “self-employed workers are not required to register”, which includes many of the skilled tradesmen who make up a significant proportion of Eastern European immigrants. The WRS also fails to pick up at all on illegal immigration. The authors state that “we see no reason why such omissions should be systematic and they should therefore not bias the results”. Is this credible? Another difficulty is the income data used. Like David Blanchfower, they take their income data from the Average Earnings Index, but unlike Blanchflower they don’t exclude bonuses, which are disproportionately earned by the wealthiest, and thus inflate the income figures for all workers upward. With better information, how would the analysis work out? The authors themselves state that “Our estimates of the average impact on wages are not inconsistent with those found in Dustmann [the Low Pay Commission paper], although they are somewhat smaller” (i.e., statistically insignificant), and also acknowledge that they do not know the ‘counterfactual’ - what would have happened to employment and wages of natives if migrants had not arrived.

But despite these deficiencies, the Independent seized upon these government reports as definitive proof that the findings of the Lords committee were “spurious” and no more than a sop to the “blinkered tenacity of the anti-immigration lobby”[15]. The DWP paper also stated that “the generally poor labour market outcomes of low-skilled natives in the UK do not reflect either a lack of available jobs, structural factors in the labour market, or a lack of formal qualifications -since A8 migrants find it relatively easy to find employment- but rather issues around basic employability skills, incentives and motivation”. This is simply a more polite expression of Digby Jones’ opinion of British workers as “lazy, poorly skilled and complacent”, and the Independent enthusiastically endorsed this statement too, stating that “we should not seek to shift the blame for our own social shortcomings on to hard-working migrants” (something that none of the material cited above does). Likewise, the first sentence of the Home Office report declares that “The Government is clear that carefully controlled economic migration [emphasis added] benefits both our economy and our exchequer”, before stating that “The Committee notes - and we agree - that migration can keep down inflationary pressure in the labour market”, again both sentiments that Digby Jones would wholeheartedly endorse. Here, the Labour party and the Independent reveal themselves as being fully in tune with the neo-liberal agenda.

So, among those to concur with the Lords report (whose authors included two former Tory Chancellors, Richard Layard, former Thatcherite frontbenchers John Wakeham and John MacGregor, former chief executive of BT and current Lib Dem trade and industry spokesman Iain Vallance and former head of the CBI Adair Turner, among others) that current immigration policy is beneficial for capital but not necessarily for the domestic working class are the Bank of England, the Financial Times, Digby Jones and the Low Pay Commission. Those who insist otherwise are the Labour government (using a flawed statistical base), the Work Foundation[16], the Independent and the Socialist Workers Party. The Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics found that “The evidence so far suggests that, overall, immigration has had few adverse effects on the labour market performance of the UK-born workforce, though this average may disguise some negative effects in the low wage market and positive effects in the higher wage labour markets”[17]. It seems that the masters of the British economy are quite open about who gains and who loses from current immigration policy (something they generally approve of), while the middle class ‘left’ either denies or seeks to obfuscate the issue. The reader is invited to make up his or her own mind.

People have always migrated, of course, and always will: it is part of human nature to travel, explore, mix and intermingle. However, current migration into the UK is of a somewhat different type from that of the pre-neo-liberal period. During the ‘Golden Age’ of capitalism between 1950 and 1973, unemployment in the UK was historically low, around 2%. During this period -particularly the early part of it- there was often a real labour shortage: due to unprecedented economic growth, there were genuinely not enough people to build the cars, lay the bricks, dig the roads, drive the buses and work in the hospitals, and so it was necessary to import people from Ireland, the Caribbean and south Asia. However, there is no labour shortage today: officially, current unemployment is 5.2%[18], which translates as 1.62 million people[19]. Unofficially, it is probably somewhat higher. Any skills shortage among the British workforce is therefore not due to any shortage of numbers or innate deficiency, but to the poverty of the training and education system. UK plc wants a certain level of “quality and controlled immigration”, not because it is benevolent or kind hearted, but because this dampens wages down and keeps the working class insecure through the creation of what can only be described as a reserve army of labour: immigration is being used as a weapon of class warfare. The importation of skilled labour from overseas also represents a free gift to capital: why spend time and money investing in British workers when you can simply steal much needed skilled labour from poorer countries instead?

3) Freedom for capital, not labour

Net migratory pressures are ultimately driven by the differential in wages between countries: for someone in Eastern Europe or beyond, even the minimum wage -or less- in the UK may be better than what can be earned at home (if the wage gap were the other way round, of course, British workers would be heading East). The greater the differential, the greater the incentive for labour to migrate. However, the signs are that the wage gap between the UK and Poland, at least, has closed, and thus, as was reported in February, “for the first time since they began arriving en masse four years ago, more UK-based Poles are returning to their homeland than are entering Britain”. As one Polish painter and decorator based in London explained: “Two years ago I could make five times the amount of money here than I could in Poland. Now the wages are about the same and the living costs in the UK are much higher. There is a lot of work in Poland, probably more than in the UK. It’s a good time to go back”[20]. If Polish workers are beginning to head home, this raises the question of where the UK, and the other wealthy EU countries, will find their next tranche of migrant labour. Further exploitation of the Baltic states is one option; the newly integrated EU states of Romania and Bulgaria are others; the further expansion of the EU (to include Ukraine, Belarus, the former Yugoslav states, Turkey and maybe even Russia) is another; looking outside the EU altogether is another option still. Similarly, the greater the differential in wages between rich and poor countries, the greater the incentive for capital to export manufacturing jobs, and even certain service sector jobs such as call centres, abroad to where labour costs are lower (”either work is done at competitive rates here or it is not done here at all”, as Digby Jones puts it). This has been a significant (although not the only) factor behind the decline of heavy industry in the UK.

Supposedly, this is all the natural, organic, inevitable outgrowth of economic development. However, this ignores perhaps the most significant feature of globalisation, at least as far as immigration is concerned: the global movement of labour is largely restrained and regulated, but the movement of capital is, by and large, completely unrestricted. Indeed, the term ‘neo-liberalism’ is perhaps best understood as ‘freedom for capital, not labour’. The political choice to remove state controls on capital movements -real and speculative investment funds- following the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system (beginning with the US in 1974, Chile in 1975 and the UK in 1979, with the rest of the developed world gradually following suit throughout the eighties and nineties)[21] is perhaps the most significant, and defining, feature of capital’s post-1973 triumph. Current immigration policy, like everything else, is now predicated solely on capital’s terms, and no longer on the terms of the 1945-1973 post-war settlement between capital and labour. The ‘business case for quality and controlled immigration’ dictates that labour is only permitted to move insofar as it benefits capital (one result of the EU expansion has been -and presumably will continue to be- the opening up a large supply of cheap labour to western European capital). Capital, on the other hand, is free to move around the world as it pleases, playing off not just international workforces but also states against each other, forcing them to compete to offer the most attractive environment for capitalist investment.

For instance, amid the recent furore over Labour’s 10p tax hike, it went largely unremarked that Gordon Brown’s 2007 budget also cut corporation tax from 30p to 28p. This was done in response to falling corporation tax rates overseas, to where British-based businesses (mostly services and finance) were beginning to relocate their HQs and submit their tax receipts. In a survey of more than 80 countries, the auditors KPMG found that since 1997 average corporation tax rates have fallen from 33.2% to 27.1%; and from 35.5% to 25.8% within the EU. In the same time period, corporation tax in the UK has fallen from 33% to 28%, while capital gains tax has fallen from 40% to 18%. As Richard Lambert of the CBI commented: “The chancellor has acknowledged the need for the UK to compete with the tax regimes in other developed countries… The challenge for government now is to get a grip on public spending so as to create the headroom that will be needed for further tax cuts in the years ahead”. In this case, one of the ways the Treasury clawed back some of this lost tax revenue was to raise tax on smaller companies and cutting capital allowances for firms that invest in equipment and buildings (that is, manufacturers)[22]. The tax burden is relaxed on those who can easily move to where the tax structure is more amenable, and increased on those less mobile (small business and manufacturers in this particular instance). At about the same time, the clothing company Burberry shut down its (profitable) factory in south Wales, at the cost of 300 jobs, and relocated production to China where production costs for their £55 shirts are £4 per item as opposed to £11. The move has saved Burberry £2m in the first year[23]. On the bad publicity that Burberry attracted for this, their PR adviser, former Sun editor and Harvard Business School graduate David Yelland, said: “Who’s going to invest there [Wales] now? They’ll look at the headlines and go to Ireland instead. I can tell you now that I know of more than one company that has already made that decision”[24].

The current frustration regarding fuel and vehicle taxes (which are not just restricted to the sectional interests of haulage companies, although they tend to be the most vocal) are similarly rooted in the burden of taxation being shifted away from the wealthiest to those on low and middle incomes who cannot ‘regime shop’. Such is Labour’s eagerness to offer capital a welcoming home that in 2007 the IMF included the UK in its list of ‘offshore financial centres’ -tax havens- alongside such luminaries as Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, Jersey, Panama and Vanuatu[25]; HM Revenue and Customs estimate that tax avoidance is now somewhere between £11 and £41 billion a year[26]; and the Health and Safety Commission has had its staff levels cut by 1,000 over the last five years, resulting, predictably, in a five year high in the number of people killed at work[27]. Meanwhile: “Workers in the UK have the lowest sense of job security out of employees in 18 of the world’s leading economies, a bi-annual survey has found. Some 24.2% of British workers think it is very probable or somewhat probable that they will lose their job over the next 12 months”[28]; “Ernst & Young’s annual discretionary income study showed that after tax contributions and monthly household bills, the average family has just under 20% of its gross income left over, compared with 28% in 2003. The average household now has £772.79 to spend each month after total fixed monthly outgoings, compared with £909.84 in 2003/04″[29], and inequality is at its highest level since records began in 1961[30]. For the British working class, the pressures of neo-liberal globalisation have produced insecurity, depressed wages and lost jobs; whereas for capital, these self-same pressures have driven taxes and regulation down.

In addition, the creation of a reserve army of labour in the UK through immigration is also placing an increased burden upon an already underfunded and neglected infrastructure. For instance, the Lords report points out that “Immigration is one of many factors contributing to more demand for housing and higher house prices. We note the forecasts that, if current rates of net immigration persist, 20 years hence house prices would be over 10% higher than what they would be if there were zero net immigration”. This, inevitably, can lead to tension and conflict between the pre-existing and migrant communities (the recent violence in South Africa being an extreme example of this). However, it is not Digby Jones’ and Richard Lambert’s constituency that suffers in any fight among the lower orders for ever more scarce resources. The failure of the left to fully tease out and expose the relationship between neo-liberalism, the globalisation of capital and current immigration policy; to recognise the legitimate concerns of the domestic working class, and acknowledge how net immigration is being used as a weapon of class warfare against them (not to mention the tendency to denounce as racist anyone who points this out) plays perfectly into the hands of Digby Jones and his constituency.

4) Kicking away the ladder at home and abroad

No-one should be compelled to leave their home in order to make a decent living: a decent living should be available to everyone, everywhere. As pointed out above, it is inequality between nations -the wage gap- that drives migratory pressures, whether legal or otherwise, and naturally capital manipulates and regulates these pressures to produce outcomes favourable to them (what else would you expect capital to do?). During the ‘Golden Age’, the UK -typically among the developed nations- became markedly more egalitarian, and the insecurity faced by workers today was far less prevalent. The late Oxford economist Andrew Glyn has written of the 1960s and ‘70s: “the level of unemployment benefits rose substantially compared to pay, and eligibility for benefit became more relaxed. Unemployment, as well as being less likely, was also less costly financially to those affected, thus reducing the pressure to take the first job that became available regardless of conditions. Employment protection legislation, against arbitrary dismissal and generally limiting employer prerogatives over hiring and firing, was also extended in this period… Another very significant gain for workers was a sharp fall in average hours worked from around 2000 per year in 1950 to 1750 in 1973 - the equivalent of more than half a day less work per week”[31].

This increase in equality within the developed nations did not occur in isolation: the world as a whole became more egalitarian during the period 1950-1973, perhaps for the first time in recorded history, as the gap between the richest and poorest nations shrank: “Within the capitalist epoch, one can distinguish five distinct phases of development. The ‘golden age’, 1950-73, was by far the best in terms of growth performance. Our age, from 1973 onwards (henceforth characterised as the ‘neoliberal order’) has been second best… Although our age is second best, and international economic relationships have been intensified through continuing liberalisation, the overall momentum of growth has decelerated abruptly, and the divergence in performance in different parts of the world has been sharply disequalising. In the golden age the gap in per capita income between the poorest and the richest regions fell from 15:1 to 13:1. Since then it has risen to 19:1″[32]. These gains in equality within and between nations -and the concomitant increased strength and security of the working class that came with it- both went into reverse at the same time, beginning in the mid-to-late 1970s, with the political triumph of capital, neo-liberalism and Chicago school economics. The Observer’s Will Hutton has noted: “There has not been a gap between the rich and poor on the current scale ever in history… It is unstable. Sooner or later, there will be popular outrage and a political response”[33]. As inequality increases, migratory pressures -and insecurity- will only increase too. Those who have a little will fight ever harder to keep it; those who have nothing will fight ever harder to get it; those who have everything will continue to accumulate ever more.

The Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang has in recent years revived the “kicking away the ladder” hypothesis of the 19th century German economist Friedrich List. The hypothesis has it that the developed nations, by and large, became developed in the first place not through the ‘free market’ but via state activism such as protection of fledgling industries through tariffs and subsidy (from the protection offered to British wool by Henry VII, to the stewarding of the US economy by Alexander Hamilton, to the growth of the Asian Tiger economies post-World War II, right up to the development of the internet and the bale-outs of Northern Rock, Bear Stearns and the US mortgage industry). However, once development is obtained, the dominant countries would “kick away the ladder” of state-led development and protectionism from the developing countries, imposing free trade and open economies upon them instead, keeping them in their place as sources of cheap raw materials, cheap labour, and captive markets. For Chang, the modern day manifestation of this is loans and debt relief to the developing world from the World Bank which are conditional on the implementation of neo-liberal IMF policies such as privatisation, deregulation, the removal of protectionist tariffs and the opening up of their economies to foreign capital (the ‘Washington Consensus’ policies). This stands in contrast to the models of independent national development that were prevalent in the developing world during the ‘Golden Age’. The consequence of forcing neo-liberalism on the developing world has been that “average per capita growth rate among developing countries has fallen from around three per cent p.a. during the period 1960-1980 to 1.5 per cent p.a. for 1980-1999″[34]. During the period 1960-1980, average per capita growth in Latin America was 3.1%, while it was 1% for sub-Saharan Africa; during the period 1980-1999 these figures fell to 0.6% and minus 0.7% respectively[35] (Chang also notes that the two coming powers, India and China, have been strong enough to avoid the diktats of the IMF and World Bank, and develop and liberalise their economies on their own terms). As Chang explains: “the plain fact is that the neo-liberal ‘policy reforms’ have not been able to deliver their central promise - namely, economic growth. When they were implemented, we were told that, while these ‘reforms’ might increase inequality in the short term and possibly in the long run as well, they would generate faster growth and eventually lift everyone up more effectively than the interventionist policies of the early postwar years had done. The records of the last two decades show that only the negative part of this prediction has been met. Income inequality did increase as predicted, but the acceleration in growth that had been promised never arrived… So we have an apparent ‘paradox’ here - at least if you are a neo-liberal economist. All countries, but especially developing countries, grew much faster when they used ‘bad’ policies during the 1960-1980 period than when they used ‘good’ ones during the following two decades”[36].

The distribution of wealth is an indicator of the balance of political power. The redistribution of wealth towards the top that has taken place across the world over the last thirty years is a product of capital’s triumph, and is also a wedge capital uses to further strengthen its position: increased global inequality creates and increases the gains to be had in moving jobs from the developed to the low-wage countries; causes the movement of labour from poor to rich countries, depriving developing nations of skilled labour while creating an excess of labour in the developed world; and produces increased latitude for playing international workforces off against each other. Neo-liberal globalisation has succeeded in kicking away the ladder at home and abroad: at home the working class is weak, defeated and divided, our wages undercut, our jobs moved overseas; abroad, the once strong Third World movements that contributed so much to the increasing equality of the immediate post-war era are similarly beaten; all are increasingly helpless against the power of unrestrained global capital, and keeping the developing world poor and insecure goes hand-in-hand with keeping the working class in the developed world weak and insecure. Ethnic and identity politics are increasingly filling the vacuum where there once existed strong working class and national independence movements.

There are those who argue for a ‘no borders’ position, for no immigration restrictions at all. This is an admirable ideal, but at present it is not only politically infeasible, it completely neglects the crucial political points, namely that of who controls capital. So long as control over the economy remains concentrated in private hands - and there remains no worthwhile opposition - capital will simply manipulate and regulate net migratory pressures (which ultimately derive from inequality between nations) according to its own requirements. The ‘no borders’ position is simply the liberal flipside to the BNP position of closed borders, and is no more a pro-working class position than ‘send the bastards back’ is necessarily a pro-capital one. Likewise, it is impossible to see how ‘no borders’ would benefit the poorer nations: far from reducing inequality, such a policy would actually make it easier for wealthier nations to steal their skilled labour from them. No matter how superficially liberal the ‘no borders’ approach might appear to be, it has no practical application at best, and at worst stigmatises those who might express genuine concerns about the impact of large scale immigration as xenophobic and racist. A policy that serves as a recruiting sergeant for the BNP as well as allowing capital a free hand can hardly pretend to be progressive or pro-working class. Withdrawal from the EU may reduce the democratic deficit and allow greater domestic and democratic control over immigration policy, rendering capital less able to import workers from overseas and hurt the domestic working class through the creation of a reserve army of labour.

But ultimately, there is only one pro-working class resolution to the problems outlined above: democratic control of the economy. This is the only way of producing a migratory framework -indeed, an economic framework- that is geared toward human needs (of the domestic population as well as of migrants), not just the sectional needs of capital. However, the very idea of economic democracy has, to the left’s eternal and deserved shame, been off the ideological menu for decades, during which time the left has allowed the debate to become fossilised into a stale ‘neo-liberalism vs. state control’ false choice. Recent developments in Latin America have shown that a progressive, popular opposition to neo-liberalism can be built (although one must be wary of the possible development of autocracy and authoritarianism, as has been so often the case before with the left). As yet there is no indication of any counterpart materialising in the developed world.

Notes:

[1] Available in full at http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200708/ldselect/ldeconaf/82/8...

[2] Letter to the Financial Times, 15 May 2002, (link).

[3] Mervyn King, speech at Salts Mill, Bradford, 13 June 2005, http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/speeches/2005/speech248.pdf.

[4] Blanchflower’s testimony is available at http://www.parliament.uk/documents/upload/EA218%20Blanchflower.doc

[5] Digby Jones, ‘Pride and prejudice about immigration’, Daily Telegraph, 19 August 2006, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2006/08/20/ccimmi...

[6] Martin Wolf, ‘Four Falsehoods on UK immigration’, Financial Times, 3 April 2008, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a008241a-0189-11dd-a323-000077b07658.html?ncli....

[7] Home Office, ‘The Economic Impact of Immigration’, June 2008, available at http://www.bia.homeoffice.gov.uk/sitecontent/newsarticles/economicimpact....

[8] Andrew Taylor, ‘Migrants win support over jobless fears’, Financial Times, 12 June 2008, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/af8f3d86-37dc-11dd-aabb-0000779fd2ac.html?ncli... and Alan Travis, ‘British workers lack skills and drive of east Europe’s migrants, says study’, The Guardian, 12 June 2008, http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/jun/12/immigration.immigrationpolicy1.

[9] Liam Byrne, ‘The case for a new migration system’, 6 February 2008, http://press.homeoffice.gov.uk/Speeches/sp-lb-lga-feb-08; and Byrne’s submission to the Lords committee, 15 January 2008, http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200708/ldselect/ldeconaf/82/8....

[10] Simon Basketter, ‘Report shows benefits of immigration into Britain’, Socialist Worker, 27th October 2007, http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=13313. The Home Office/ DWP submission can be found at http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/documents/economic-impact-of-immigration?vi....

[11] Christian Dustmann, Tommaso Frattini, and Ian Preston (2007), ‘A Study of Migrant Workers and the National Minimum Wage and Enforcement Issues that Arise’, Low Pay Commission, available at http://www.econ.ucl.ac.uk/cream/pages/LPC.pdf, p11-12.

[12] Jim Pickard and Jimmy Burns, ‘Ministers unaware of present migrant numbers’, Financial Times, 10 June 2008, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/1d9176b0-373c-11dd-bc1c-0000779fd2ac.html?ncli....

[13] Simon Briscoe, ‘UK migration data ‘not fit for purpose’, Financial Times, 19 May 2008, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/2be2f4a2-2524-11dd-a14a-000077b07658.html?ncli....

[14] Sara Lemos and Jonathan Portes (2008), ‘The impact of migration from the new European Union Member States on native workers’, http://www.dwp.gov.uk/asd/asd5/wp52.pdf.

[15] ‘Brickbats and Slurs’, The Independent, editorial comment, 12 June 2008, http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/leading-articles/leading-article-br....

[16] David Coats (2008), ‘Migration Myths: Employment, Wages and Labour Market Performance’, http://www.theworkfoundation.com/Assets/PDFs/migration2.pdf.

[17] Centre for Economic Performance, ‘Immigration to the UK: The Evidence from Economic Research’, http://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/pa010.pdf.

[18] Office of National Statistics, http://www.statistics.gov.uk/instantfigures.asp

[19] ‘UK jobless level increases again’, BBC News, 16 July 2008, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7508816.stm.

[20] Alexi Mostrous and Christine Seib, ‘Tide turns as Poles end great migration’, The Times, 16th February 2008, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article3378877.ece.

[21] Age Bakker and Bryan Chapple (2002), Advanced Country Experiences with Capital Account Liberalization, IMF Occasional Paper No. 214 (Washington: International Monetary Fund).

[22] John Willman, ‘City and services are big winners’, Financial Times, 21 March 2007 (link); and John Willman, ‘Business relieved its voice heard at last’, Financial Times, 22 March 2007 (link).

[23] Lucy Killgren, ‘Enthusiastic US lifts Burberry’, Financial Times, 29 May 2008, (link).

[24] Carole Cadwalladr, ‘Squaring up to Burberry’, The Guardian, 25 March 2007, http://lifeandhealth.guardian.co.uk/fashion/story/0,,2040157,00.html.

[25] Ahmed Zorome (2007), ‘Concept of Offshore Financial Centres: in search of an operational direction’, IMF Working Paper WP/07/87, http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2007/wp0787.pdf.

[26] Vanessa Houlden, ‘’Tax gap’ estimated at £11-£41bn’, Financial Times, 13 March 2008, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a44427b6-f13c-11dc-a91a-0000779fd2ac.html.

[27] David Hencke, ‘Number of deaths at work rises to five year high’, The Guardian, 26 July 2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2007/jul/26/immigrationpolicy.

[28] ‘UK staff top job insecurity table’, BBC News, 16 November 2005, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4443406.stm.

[29] Kathryn Hopkins, ‘Disposable income hit hard by rising mortgages and energy bills’, The Guardian, 4 July 2008, http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/jul/04/consumerspending.mortgage....

[30] Mike Brewer, Alistair Muriel, David Phillips, Luke Sibieta (2008), ‘Poverty and Inequality in the UK: 2008′ (London: Institute of Fiscal Studies), http://www.ifs.org.uk/comms/comm105.pdf, p1.

[31] Andrew Glyn (2006), Capitalism Unleashed: finance, globalization and welfare (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p4-5.

[32] Angus Maddison (2001), The World Economy: a millennial perspective (Paris: OECD), p125, 126.

[33] Will Hutton, ‘Feeble government lets the superclass soar over the rest of us’, The Observer, 4 May 2008, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/may/04/globaleconomy.econom....

[34] Ha-Joon Chang (2003), Kicking Away the Ladder: development strategy in historical perspective (London: Anthem), p133. A précis of the book is available at http://www.paecon.net/PAEtexts/Chang1.htm. An hour long lecture by Chang is available to view at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5-ojv5-b3U.

[35] Ibid., p132, 134.

[36] Ibid., p128, 129.

Truth truck or lie lorry?

tim — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 19:46:36 +0000

“After months of research, we have come up with a better way of spreading the ‘Nationalist Message’ right across this country,” says the message that the British National Party has been sending out to its supporters for several weeks.

“Our very own personal advertising lorry, a ‘Truth Truck’ – brand new and custom-built, complete with a high definition special lighting system for night-time use, and a massive audio system for addressing the public. Can you imagine it?” continues the appeal in terms designed to pull hard at the purse strings of “nationalists”.

There have been personalised letters from Nick Griffin, the party chairman, headed and “last chance to help ‘Operation Truth Truck’”, imploring in underlined type: “Just imagine how you will feel, being part owner of our very own British National Party advertising lorry …”. The party website has carried a picture and online donation form for several weeks.

But behind all the excitement lurks yet another dodgy deal by the BNP to hoodwink its own members.

One appeal letter puts a figure on the cost of buying and equipping the “truth truck” of £39,550, arrived at after Griffin personally “worked very hard researching this project”. It then suggests that “we can knock £13,000 off the amount needed” by opting for a “used lorry in first class condition”. Yet there is no indication on the website appeal that the lorry will be anything other than “brand new and custom built”.

Such a compromise could be explained away as a better use of members’ hard-earned and generously given donations, though that is no excuse for pulling the wool over potential donors’ eyes long after the decision to go for a second-hand vehicle has already been taken. But the lies go further than this.

At first the excitement rubbed off onto BNP members. Posting on the members’ internet forum, one person, who claimed to have “surprised myself by not even hesitating to donate £100 towards the campaign”, said the truck would also “counter commie smear leaflets”.

One discerning poster was more cautious. “Just one thing What happened to Bodicea [sic]?” asked “the benwell hopper”. “Boudica”, as “Captain Black” was quick to correct, was a second-hand “battle bus” and the target of an appeal in 2006 for money to put it on the road. Agreeing that “a few people will be very miffed that it has never been seen by the rank and file”, Captain Black could only plead that “the failings of the Boudica hobby horse should not detract from the ambitions of this new venture”.

Others smelt a rat. Despite Griffin’s claims to have carried out “months of research” before coming up with this “new, innovative” idea, if it comes to fruition the BNP will not be the first organisation in the UK to pin its hopes on a “truth truck”.

Two years ago the anti-abortion UK LifeLeague boldly announced the “Launch of Britain’s first ever ‘Truth Truck’”. A press release on 21 April 2006 thanked supporters who “donated generously to make this project possible” and claimed this would be: “the most innovative and what will possibly be the most effective campaign in UK Pro-life history”. “Operation Truth Truck” would: “enable the pro-life message to reach the unreached across the towns and cities of Britain. These vehicles are wholly owned and operated by LifeLeague activists,” it continued.

There was a picture. And it was no coincidence that the only difference between the LifeLeague’s “truth truck” and the BNP’s one was the particular lie on the billboard, because it was the same vehicle.

The UK LifeLeague and the BNP had milked their gullible supporters twice over for the same truck.

This is not the first time the BNP has had dealings with the UK LifeLeague, and more particularly its founder and national coordinator, James Dowson. Earlier this year many BNP members were angry when they found out that the party was sending key BNP officers on management training courses in Spain. Why could the training not be held in the UK, asked irate, xenophobic party members on a popular nazi internet forum until the site administrators pulled the discussion thread.

The courses were organised by Dowson’s Belfast-based fundraising and management training business, the Midas Consultancy, which has signed a three-year consultancy contract with the BNP. Whether it was because of the BNP’s growing financial difficulties or because Griffin was reacting to criticism of his poor administrative skills, the party has handed over key organisational functions to the self-styled vicar and militant anti-abortion campaigner.

It was Dowson who wrote the “truth truck” appeal letters in professional fundraising style. The Building to Grow appeal at the end of last year was also his work. The BNP claimed that appeal had raised £70,000, which paid for the party to move into the new Excalibur warehouse and buy “a vast array of new equipment” including “an envelope stuffing machine”, which by June had mysteriously disappeared when Simon Darby, the BNP’s deputy leader, appealed for volunteers to stuff election leaflets into envelopes by hand.

The involvement of Dowson has already upset some BNP members who do not share his extreme anti-abortion views and think he is a Catholic, which is anathema to many in the nationalist party who view the Battle of the Boyne as one of England’s greatest historical triumphs. In fact Dowson is a Protestant but has been linked to far-right Catholics in Ireland, including Justin Barrett, an anti-EU campaigner and vocal opponent of immigration, which he describes as a “genetic” problem. Back in 2001, when Searchlight first exposed Dowson, Barrett had donated £50,000 so that Dowson’s outfit could produce anti-abortion hate CDs and videos to distribute in schools and churches in Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Dowson is a former member of the Orange Lodge in Northern Ireland and has admitted involvement with hardline loyalist groups in the West of Scotland. His tattooed arms are evidence of his extremist hate connections.

The LifeLeague, which is secretive about its finances, uses highly provocative tactics, such as publishing the home addresses of abortion clinic staff. Similar actions by anti-abortion groups in the US have resulted in the murder of doctors.

Dowson’s professional “begging letters”, as one disillusioned party member described them, have not been universally welcomed in the BNP. Some see their “tone of desperation” as indicative of the BNP’s “very serious financial trouble”, according to the blogsite set up in support of Colin Auty’s failed attempt to challenge Griffin for the party leadership.

One member is quoted saying: “These bloody letters are an embarrassment, I’ll not pay another penny so he can go and waste it or lose another blimp”, in a reference to the BNP’s helium balloon that slipped its moorings in June because, Darby suggested, David Shapcote failed to secure it properly. The BNP later blamed the loss on a faulty rope.

The letters themselves may have been professional, but Dowson fell down in compiling the mailing lists. Naturally he needed to dispatch the letters to a much wider audience than the BNP’s members, who have little left to give after constant appeals at branch meetings and to support election campaigns. However Searchlight has received a stream of complaints from anti-fascist trade unionists and members of the Jewish community who have received them.

The website appeal for the “truth truck” shows it adorned with the BNP’s ubiquitous election picture of Nick Cass and his family alongside the slogan “Decent people vote British National Party”. The picture, which adorned election leaflets and newspaper advertisements all over the country in this year’s May elections and several by-elections, concealed Cass’s less than decent “tree of life” tattoo.

The symbol, also known as the life rune, is a favourite among nazi groups worldwide and, under Hitler, was used to represent a project that encouraged SS troopers to have children out of wedlock with “Aryan” mothers and kidnapped children of Aryan appearance from the countries of occupied Europe to raise as Germans.

A lying picture for a lying appeal. How appropriate.

Report on Abuse of Refugees and Asylum Seekers

JamieSW — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 21:01:23 +0000

The British government has been implicated in the abuse of refugees and asylum seekers, according to a report published this month by a group of human rights campaigners and medical legal experts.

The report, Outsourcing Abuse: the use and misuse of state-sanctioned force during the detention and removal of asylum seekers, contains a detailed dossier outlining cases of systematic physical and verbal abuse against refugees and immigrants who face deportation to their country of origin. Most of the alleged assaults took place at the hands of security guards during transit between detention centres, during deportations to airports, or removal from places of residence.

Outsourcing Abuse was a response to a demand by the Home Office to corroborate an earlier dossier, which hit the headlines after the Independent published details in October 2007. Home Office ministers and officials dismissed the claims of abuse as unfounded, saying that many of the alleged victims had not come forward with further information to prove their mistreatment.
The new report contains nearly 300 cases of alleged assault, which took place between January 2004 and June 2008, and draws on a wide range of sources including solicitors, journalists, airline passengers, hospital staff and doctors. Many refugees and asylum seekers were also prepared to recount their ordeals, despite fears of retribution from the Home Office or the private security companies it employs to detain and deport them.

The report states that “Many additional allegations of assault have been reported to us that we simply have not had the resources to consider and therefore have not been included in the dossier. Because of this, coupled with the fact that other victims are fearful of coming forward, we feel our dossier is just the tip of the iceberg.”

Outsourcing Abuse paints a picture where appalling physical and verbal abuse is condoned and accepted, if not actively encouraged. People are routinely kicked and punched, or otherwise injured by excessive use of force, and many are subjected to racist verbal abuse.

Some victims allege they were given injections to sedate them or forced to take pills. Others tell how they were denied access to emergency hospital facilities after sustaining injuries.

Typical of the 48 case studies contained in the dossier are:

A 19-year-old Congolese man who claims that in 2007 he was thrown to the ground and kicked in the face, whilst being transferred to a segregation unit. An independent doctor advised care for head injury and noted abrasions to the forehead, bruising and swelling around the face.
A Malawian man in the same year who alleges that he was pinned to the floor by Detention Custody Officers (DCOs) and “kicked all over his body, including his head”, at Dungavel detention centre.
A Sudanese woman whose escorts repeatedly jabbed her in the eye and assaulted her after the pilot refused to fly.
An Armenian man was left with a punctured lung after escorts stamped on him in the back of a van and then left in an immigration holding bay without medical support for hours.
A Cameroonian man who claims he was detained without sufficient food or water and denied medication for treatment of hepatitis C. When, because of his illness, he refused to co-operate with efforts to move him on board a Kenya Airways flight for deportation he said, “They started beating me, kicking me all over. They put me on the floor and continued to kick me everywhere. I was agonising of pain. I thought that they will kill me.”

The report comments that,

“Usually removals are stopped when the pilot refuses to proceed, which may be because the detainee is screaming and / or because there is a physical struggle with escort staff occurring and the pilot considers it will be unsafe to fly.”

A total of 78 charter flights were arranged between February 2006 and March 2007, 60 of which were flights to Eastern Europe and 14 to Afghanistan. It is not known how many airlines are contracted out by the government for deportees, or what the budget is for this policy, though it is likely to be in the millions.

Many of those affected by this process are small children and babies, who may be separated from their parents for days or weeks. John Wilkes, chief executive of the Scottish Refugee Council, said,

“The UK government has signed up to protect the rights of children under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, but shamefully except for children in the asylum and immigration system.”

Many refugees and asylum seekers are suffering mental health problems as a result of the abuse they are subjected to. The report reveals that 85 percent have chronic depressive symptoms and 65 percent contemplate suicide. In 2007 there were 1,517 immigration detainees on “suicide-watch”.

Many of the abused immigrants were of uncertain legal status when they were detained or deported. In some cases the state “pre-empted” the legal process altogether by intervening before they had access to legal representation—clearly breaching the Geneva Conventions and International law.

The situation is so bad that the former Chief Inspector of Prisons, David Ramsbotham was forced to caution the government in the introduction to Outsourcing Abuse.

He states,

“Of course there will always be cases that are less than genuine, and they must be dealt with accordingly. But every case must be investigated and, in line with the law of the land, individuals regarded as innocent until proved guilty. That applies to those whose cases are outlined in this dossier. If the Home Office, Ministers and officials alike, is sensible it will pay due attention to the dossier, which is not written in an emotive way, but contains constructive advice that should not simply be rejected.”

Ramsbotham’s exceedingly modest appeal is likely to fall on deaf ears.

Requests for further information under the Freedom of Information Act regarding forced removals on charter flights, as well as the government’s contract with the private security firms, have been rejected by the Home Office on the grounds of “commercial secrecy”. The same secrecy surrounds the detention centres used to hold asylum-seekers pending the outcome of their application. Seven out of 10 in the UK are managed by private companies on behalf of the Home Office.

Labour’s immigration minister, Liam Byrne, boasted in May, “We now remove an immigration offender every eight minutes—but my target is to remove more, and remove them faster.”

The government announced in August 2007 that it intended to “fast-track” the deportation procedure and in May this year announced a 60 percent increase in the number of detentions. Despite a 72 percent fall in asylum applications between 2002 and 2007, there has been a 106 percent increase in the number of applicants detained.

In Europe, in the name of combating “illegal immigration”, a Return Directive is being set up across the continent to send undocumented workers to neighbouring countries without any administrative formalities. This legislation will allow states to hold immigrants for up to 18-months and impose a five-year ban on their return to the EU. According to a representative of the European Association for the Defence of Human Rights, the Directive will establish detention as a “norm”.

The website Inter-Movement Committee for Evacuees commented on the new directive, “Retention has been slipping little by little into the logic of internment, transforming these centres into camps.”

Is This A Free World?

Ellie Keen — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 22:59:00 +0000

Liverpool stories of the invisible ones

It is a wet and windy late summer afternoon of 2007 and I find myself sitting in a living room, waiting for the man who over the next months is going to show me through the ugly face of the asylum system in Britain, one that is far from the blatant lies told by the tabloids.

I don’t know it yet but soon I will find out that this man, let’s call him Maxi, was a quite important and respected person in his country. But here and now, this seems a distant past; all he has left now is his dignity, for this man is destitute.

In the Home Office's jargon, Maxi is a ‘failed asylum seeker’; this means that his claim for asylum has been refused and the meagre support that he receives from the government has been withdrawn (no free mobiles or other perks as the urban myth goes). Maxi is in this country on borrowed time, frantically trying to gather fresh evidence that may help him convince the government that his life is in danger if he is sent back to his country.

The trouble is, unable to work and without a place to stay, he relies on friends and other kind souls to get some kind of support.

So it comes as a surprise when this man enters the room smiling, almost beaming and says: ‘I’ve just found my first job in England’, which in itself is an interesting comment since he’s not allowed to work. Without any apparent resentment, he then tells me how he feels he needs to break the law, no matter how dangerous this is for his case, as he has no other option left.

He just wants to earn some money to be able to do some things that most of us take for granted; simple and mundane acts such as topping up a much needed mobile phone to stay in touch with loved ones and friends and perhaps, if things go well, buy a camera in Argos because he sent the one he had to his son back home (who doesn’t know dad is seeking asylum in a far away country).

I ask about food; that is provided by a soup kitchen in the city centre and a weekly parcel from a local charity that supports asylum seekers.

It is not difficult to see why someone in his circumstances would not resist the temptation of resorting to casual work, the only source of income possible, despite the fact that the jobs available are often appallingly and predictably underpaid, under conditions few people would ever dream of tolerating in 21st century Britain.

Maxi's 'first job' consists in delivering leaflets around Liverpool for a fast food shop, the kind of unsolicited and annoying promotional stuff all of us often find in the box mail.

For £20 a day, Maxi has to deliver one thousand leaflets, a hard task, especially for someone whose health is still suffering from the injuries sustained back in his country, courtesy of the political enemies who did not share his views.

However, and against the odds, Maxi stoically manages to deliver them, if only to prove to this country that he is an honest man who feels betrayed by a system that refuses to believe his claims.

I can clearly see this when - in an unexpected confession after a hard day's work, he openly talks about his life - which he describes as a "dog's life", confined to an underground existence, far from the hectic and respected professional life he once enjoyed.

In Britain, he has been reduced to nothing; an outcast, an asylum seeker, but one whose chances have been squashed; a man strangled by a present, terrified by a bleak and uncertain future.

Over the months spent with whom by now is considered a friend, I met other people in similar circumstances, people from a range of countries and backgrounds. People from Iran, Russia, Cameroon, Poland, some of them even stateless, people fighting for survival in hostile conditions, all of them roaming the streets of Liverpool, trying to fill their time as best as they can.

These are people who are in public libraries, in benches in a park or working if they can, sleeping in someone else's spare rooms, unable to take their destiny in their own hands, trapped in a vicious circle, a limbo of unbearable uncertainty, waiting for a final decision, perhaps a deportation order - or who knows? - the dreamed leave to remain.

In a poignant moment in Ken Loach’s latest film, a character who earns a living by exploiting desperate migrants tries to justify her actions by claiming that we live in a free world and nobody forces them to work for her.

A free world it may be for some, but it is clear that this is not true for everyone, as Maxi knows all too well.

Find out more:
www.stillhuman.org.uk (Campaign to end the destitution of refused asylum seekers)
www.strangersintocitizens.org.uk (Call for a pathway to legal status for long-term migrants)