THE Tory Party yesterday called for restrictions on immigrant workers from Bulgaria and Romania when these countries shortly join the EU.
The Tory Party immigration spokesman Damian Green said ministers had to learn from the ‘unprecedented numbers’ who arrived in the UK after the last EU expansion, which saw Poland and the Baltic States amongst those joining the EU.
At that time the Labour Party publicly stated that it envisaged some 12,000 workers coming here from the new EU states.
In fact, the Labour government was aware that hundreds of thousands of workers would come here, and privately rejoiced that, organised by the gangmasters, they would play a role in keeping wages down and making super profits for big business.
The Tories yesterday stated that the government should control immigration to ‘reduce tensions’ and stop an acute strain on the social services.
The Labour government duly obliged with a declaration from the Trade Secretary Alistair Darling saying that immigration will be ‘properly managed’, pledging that there will be no ‘open door’ policy as far as workers from these two states are concerned.
Darling added: ‘What we need to do is balance the skills that we require – and yes, our economy does require skills in various areas – and at the same time having a system that is properly managed so we can take care of all the other things we need to consider, like the healthcare system, the education system and so on.’
The Home Secretary, John Reid prepared the way for this statement with his declaration of a few days ago that to question the number of workers coming here from eastern Europe was not racism, and such questioning should be encouraged.
In fact, the government has been adopting a racist and anti-working class policy on the issue of immigration, to cut wages and get rid of brown and black workers from Commonwealth countries.
It has used immigrants from eastern Europe to replace mainly Indian doctors who have worked in the NHS for many years. These are now being returned home because new regulations insist that doctors from the EU states must have priority over them. This is an obvious racist and cheap labour move.
The same tactic is now being used in relation to the foreign nurses who have kept the NHS going for years.
This is on top of the widespread use of Polish and other workers as cheap labourers in both agriculture and industry, on wages and conditions that British workers will not accept.
However, both parties feel that they have enough slave labourers for the moment, and that the tap must be turned off.
The News Line is opposed to all racist immigration acts and racist immigration measures, as the state encourages the rise of divide and rule racism, including its propaganda for racial profiling in the transport and other systems.
We insist that all workers must be welcomed to Britain and that the trade unions must organise them to push wages up not down, so that these workers become a major part of the British working class as have millions of Irish workers in the last 150 years.
We dismiss the crocodile tears that Tories and Labourites are shedding that mass immigration will undermine the NHS and the social services. These are the parties that want to abolish these services through privatising them!
The way to defend services is to unite all workers on a socialist programme to defend wages, jobs, the NHS and all services, through nationalising the banks and the major industries under workers’ control, to put an end to Britain as a billionaires’ paradise and bring in a socialist Britain, as part of a Socialist Europe.
