YESTERDAY Home Secretary John Reid showed that patriotism is indeed the last refuge of a scoundrel when he attacked foreigners for ‘stealing our benefits’. He also accused them of undermining the minimum wage, and stealing free NHS treatment.
He only had to extend the list to include ‘stealing our women’ to sound just like one of the Mosleyites of the 1960s who marched through North Kensington behind rows of Union Jacks carrying that very same message.
Of course the ex-Stalinist cum opportunist Reid was only sounding like a fascist or racist, he is neither.
He knows well enough that the only force in Britain that is massively stealing benefits is his Labour government. Currently it is conducting a campaign to force single parents off of benefit and into work, and is about to abolish Incapacity Benefit, to deprive millions of people of benefit.
As far as the NHS is concerned everybody can see that it is Labour that is destroying it. Then along comes Reid to say that migrants are to blame!
He also knows that at the same time as his political friend Jack Straw is saying that Indian women should not be allowed into Britain unless they can speak English, hundreds of thousands of Eastern Europeans are arriving in this country who cannot speak more than a word of English, and at the same time are being exploited by rapacious employers and gangmasters to work for well below the minimum wage.
In fact, these migrants have been welcomed to Britain by the ruling class. The reason is not just that they are all white.
The Bank of England chief, only recently pointed out how the arrival of Eastern European workers had given great assistance to his task of holding down the wages of the whole working class, at a time when prices are rising rapidly.
Of course, the reason why Reid and Straw are whipping up fears about workers from the former commonwealth countries, and the menace that they allegedly represent to ordinary people is that they want to stampede the British people into accepting identity cards as the way of stopping the ‘benefit thieves’, and they want to win the sizeable racist vote in the next general election.
They are trying to stoke up people’s fears in order to bring in a police-ridden state where every worker is seen as a potential criminal, on a national finger print and DNA data base, and all are guilty until they prove themselves to be innocent.
Reid’s list of ‘must have’ measures against foreigners include a ‘Watch list’ of people not entitled to public services; enforcement teams to track down bosses employing illegal workers, compulsory ID cards for foreign nationals, text alerts for people overstaying visas, possible £20,000 fines for landlords housing illegal immigrants, pilot schemes to use ID card data to ensure migrants pay for NHS care.
The WRP and the News Line rejects the Labour government’s cowardly attacks on commonwealth migrants. We are opposed to all racist immigration laws, we are for the defence of all basic rights, and we are for the unity of the entire working class to defend all benefits and the NHS to go forward to socialism.
We are for the trade unions fighting to organise every worker in Britain in a trade union on a basic minimum trade union rate of pay.
We reject the divide and rule tactics of the Labour government and the bosses, who are the big benefit thieves.
In fact, we urge the trade union movement to put an end to this reactionary and diseased Labour government
The trade unions must strike a huge blow for workers’ unity against racism by taking action to bring down the Blair-Brown government.
The trade unions must bring in a workers’ government that will expropriate the bankers and the bosses, withdraw all troops from Iraq and Afghanistan and allow the free movement of the working class by repealing all racist immigration laws.
It was Marx who called for the ‘Workers of the World to Unite’, saying that they had ‘nothing to lose but their chains’. That message is truer today than even when it was first penned.
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