THERE has been an outpouring of rage over the speech by Labour prime minister Keir Starmer on Monday unveiling the government’s immigration White Paper designed in his words to ‘curb’ net migration, which he claimed risked the UK becoming an ‘island of strangers’.
Parroting the dire warnings of previous Tory governments, Starmer insisted the Labour government would ‘take back control of our borders’ and end the ‘squalid chapter’ of inward immigration.
Such rhetoric from the leader of the Labour government was immediately condemned for using language closely associated, not just with the vicious anti-immigrant propaganda from recent Tory governments, but directly drawing on the infamous ‘rivers of blood’ speech made in 1968 by the extreme right-wing Tory MP Enoch Powell.
Powell’s speech warned of a multi-cultural Britain that would inevitably lead to a situation where white workers ‘found themselves made strangers in their own country’.
Powell’s speech became a rallying call to every racist and would-be fascist in Britain in the 60s, but earned the hatred of workers and youth who rejected outright his clarion call for a war on immigrants.
Starmer has resurrected this racist past and placed it at the heart of this Labour government programme. Immigrant workers, according to Starmer, are responsible for the economic crisis crushing British capitalism.
They are responsible, Starmer insists, for low wages in the public and private sector, while at the same time being a drain on the NHS and social services, along with single handedly creating a housing crisis. In a rant right out of the right wing handbook Starmer proclaimed: ‘Public services and housing access have been placed under too much pressure. Our economy has been distorted by perverse incentives to import workers.’
Many of the Labour and independent MPs who have responded to Starmer’s ravings and condemned the plans to end, or massively restrict, legal immigration, along with the expulsion of tens of thousands of immigrant workers, already in the country, have focused on this being an attempt by Starmer to ‘win over’ voters lost to the Reform Party.
This misses the point – these plans were drawn up by Labour ministers well in advance of massive losses incurred by the right wing Labour government in the recent local and mayoral elections.
Thousands of workers turned away from Labour in these elections out of disgust at a Labour government that completely betrayed every election promise of ‘no austerity’, and instead immediately ended pensioners’ fuel allowance, retained the Tory two-child benefit cap, and cuts to disabled benefits, that have driven hundreds of thousands of families into absolute poverty. However, it is not just immigrant workers who are blamed for the economic crisis engulfing British capitalism.
NHS workers are being told that their pay demands, if met, would cause the health service to collapse, and the same message is being pumped out to every public service worker – while the elderly and disabled are being damned as being unproductive as far as exploitation by the bosses for profit is concerned.
For Starmer’s government, and the ruling capitalist class it faithfully serves, the burning issue today is to hold back the increasing tide of revolt against a bankrupt capitalist system that is intent on dumping its crisis onto the backs of workers and youth.
Starmer’s attack on immigrant workers has only one aim – to try and split the working class along racist lines, to divert workers and youth and above all to hold back the growing tide of socialist revolution.
The enemy of all workers is not migrant workers but a Labour government and a bankrupt capitalist system, that can offer no future except poverty and the destruction of even the basic essentials of life.
For the working class and youth, the burning issue today is to unite in demanding that the TUC and trade unions organise a general strike, to kick out this treacherous Starmer government, replacing it with a Workers Government that will open the doors and welcome workers and youth from across the world, to join in the task of building a planned socialist economy worldwide to replace bankrupt capitalism with world socialism!
