THE UK authorities issued National Insurance numbers to 713,000 overseas workers in the year to April 2007.
The WRP and the News Line are pleased to welcome all these workers to Britain. We urge them all to join the trade unions, so that they do not condemn themselves to low pay and through this help to hold down the wage rates of the working class as a whole.
Many overseas workers are already joining the trade unions and insisting that they are not cheap labour fodder for the bosses.
In fact, the Wimbledon tennis tournament experienced what was for it a major crisis this summer, when there was a strawberry shortage after thousands of foreign workers decided that they did not want to become agricultural serfs for profit-hungry farming combines.
That this was a blow against the plans of the bosses there is no doubt.
The chairman of the Bank of England, in a number of speeches, has revealed that the bosses regard overseas workers, particularly from the new EU states, as their ‘secret weapon’ to keep wages down in Britain, and then cut them severely.
The truth however is that overseas workers come to Britain looking for a better life. They are not looking to be cheap labour slaves for the bosses.
What the latest figures show is that the quantity of National Insurance numbers issued in the year up to April 2007 to non-UK nationals was more than twice the 349,000 issued in the year to April 2003.
The numbers of workers from new EU countries working in the UK for the first time, rose to 321,000 from 277,000 a year earlier. Of these workers almost 250,000 were Polish.
For the rest, 145,000 workers came from Asia and the Middle East, 103,000 came from the old EU countries, 61,000 came from Africa, from Australia and Oceania came 33,000, from the Americas 32,000, and from Non-EU Europe 16,000.
The Department for Work and Pensions figures show 583,000 of all the new National Insurance numbers were for people under the age of 35, with 35,000 more men than women.
This big growth in the number of foreign workers has given the bosses and their political representatives an opportunity not just to try and cut wages, but to also play the race card.
We are now being told that the country is being overrun by foreigners, with heavy hints being made that unless this is stopped and immigrants returned home, Britain is heading for race riots.
Last week, Conservative MP Nicholas Soames warned in the House of Commons of the ‘profound changes’ taking place in British society and ‘dangerous shoals ahead’ unless the UK cuts immigration.
During that debate shadow immigration minister Damian Green said the Conservatives would set an annual limit on the number of immigrants, to fit the country’s economic requirement.
All three main parties have rejected calls for an amnesty for the estimated 600,000 ‘illegal immigrants’ in the UK, although in the debate the Lib Dem home affairs spokesman Nick Clegg said it was ‘fanciful’ to believe they could be deported.
But there are those politicians who do want to see police raids to capture ‘illegals’ and send them back in handcuffs.
The WRP calls for the unity of the working class and for the trade unions to launch a national campaign to recruit all foreign workers into the trade unions.
Such a campaign must stand for the right of workers to move to any part of the world that they wish to make their living in. It must also stand for the abolition of all racist immigration acts and racist quotas, and for every inhabitant of the UK to have a legal status.
Our maxim is that of Marx and Engels: Workers of the world unite, you have a world to win and nothing to lose but your chains!
