‘WE were wrong to allow so many eastern Europeans into Britain,’ says Ed Balls, referring to the large number of migrants from Poland and the Baltic States that Labour allowed into the UK specifically to serve as cheap labour for the ruling class.
This BNP-type racist sentiment has been adopted by Balls a little late in the day, with over one million true Brits living in foreign parts from France, to Spain and Greece and even further eastwards.
In fact, the ‘Little Englander’ Balls’ determination not to allow the BNP a monopoly of the racist vote comes ironically just weeks after the same party was electorally smashed in the May 6 General Election and council elections. Its racism definitively did not win it votes.
The ‘starting point’ of the new Balls is: ‘I know, like most of my fellow citizens, that I am British before I am European.’
This turns out to mean that like the Tory Party he believes that the ‘Free movement of goods and services works to our mutual advantage. But the free movement of labour is another matter entirely.’
He is for the free movement of capital, and capitalists, but workers must not have the same right.
Putting himself in the same boat as the Tories, he wrote in the ‘Observer’: ‘But neither our tough points system, nor the Tories’ flawed immigration cap, applies to migration within the EU. . . As Labour seeks to rebuild trust with the British people, it is important we are honest about what we got wrong. In retrospect, Britain should not have rejected transitional controls on migration from the first wave of new EU member states in 2004, which we were legally entitled to impose. . .
‘So what is to be done? . . While net migration has eased because of the recession and will ease further when Germany and France remove restrictions next year, the temporary restrictions on migration from Romania and Bulgaria should be maintained – for longer than currently planned. . .’
He dodges the issue of repatriating the workers from Poland and the Baltic states who are already here and whom the good lady from Rochdale objects to.
Since this is the type of voter that he is set to appease, the logic of his position is that they should be sent home. He cannot spell this out, since this is the policy of the BNP.
Instead, he chooses to unveil the ‘spectre’ of millions of Turks flooding into the UK.
He counsels further: ‘But wise voices in Britain’s existing Turkish communities accept that Turkey’s accession can only be made to work with continuing restrictions on the ability of unskilled Turkish labour to move across the EU, certainly for an extended transition period.’
However, he does suggest ways of dealing with the Poles and Baltics, stating the need for ‘re-examining the relationship between domestic laws and European rules which allow unaccompanied migrants to send child benefit and tax credits back to families at home’.
His position is that if you make it more difficult for ‘them’ to maintain their families many will be forced home.
He concludes: ‘I make these arguments in the spirit of pro-European realism.’
It seems that the Blairites and Brownites, having declared the ‘end of New Labour’, have continued to announce the beginning of the end of the EU as a bloc of 27 states, since a legal wall to keep eastern Europeans out will mean the break-up of the 27-state EU, with all of its revolutionary consequences for Eastern and Western Europe.
They want an EU to which their bosses can export their goods and services with the working class being kept at bay to appease the racist vote.
They have undergone a qualitative transformation almost from ‘arch-globalisers’ who believed that bosses had a duty to shift their capital out of Britain if they could get a better return elsewhere, into Little Englanders, who dislike ‘Johnny Foreigner’ and want to keep him out at all costs.
The News Line rejects the petty racism of Balls and those Labour Party leadership contenders who are vying with him to see who can be the most anti-Polish.
We are for the repeal of all of the Immigration Acts and for the free movement of workers. We are also opposed to the European Union of the bosses and the bankers. We fight for a Socialist United States of Europe to transform the whole of the continent in the interests of the working class.
