PEOPLE who do not speak fluent English will be barred from public sector jobs which involve working directly with the public, the government has said.
From September, NHS staff and council workers will be among those required to have language skills equivalent to GCSE grade C or above. Managers will have to test employees can ‘communicate effectively with the public’, and will be able to sack those who they judge cannot, handing the bosses a new tool for victimising trade unionists as well as sacking and then deporting immigrant workers.
Cabinet minister Matt Hancock said the measure was to help control immigration. The new practice is to be part of the government’s immigration bill, and will mean every public sector worker in a ‘customer-facing’ role will have to be able to speak at least school-leaver levels of English. This will root out immigrants and other undesirables from the police, from social work, from both teaching staff and assistants and council employees.
What you have here is a new form of Tory backed terrorism against workers, that will be put to work alongside the new anti-union laws. According to the 2011 census 138,000 people in the UK don’t speak English. They are now presumably fair game for the Toxic Tories.
Cabinet minister Hancock has revealed that the new measure was nothing at all to do with communication skills when he said yesterday: ‘We are controlling immigration for the benefit of all hard-working people.’ The Tories have also got it in for the sick and the ill.
They are proposing to strip obese or drug-dependent people of all state benefits as a punishment, and leave them hungry, homeless, depressed and suicidal if they reject the bread and water treatment and the psychological assault course that the Tories want to see handed out to them.
British Psychological Society President Professor Jamie Hacker Hughes commented yesterday that people should not be forced into having psychological treatment. He added: ‘There is a major issue around consent, because as psychologists we offer interventions but everybody has got a right to accept or refuse treatment.’
Paul Atkinson, a psychotherapist and member of the Alliance for Counselling and Psychotherapy, described the proposed benefit sanctions as an outrage. The Home Office is also using the situation in Calais to starve immigrants at home. Immigration minister James Brokenshire said rules will be changed to remove taxpayer support for more than 10,000 failed asylum-seekers living in the UK with their families.
In the UK, migrants can obtain accommodation and a support allowance worth £36 a week from the moment they claim asylum. This is withdrawn from individuals whose application fails, but failed asylum-seekers with families continue to receive support. They are now to be severely punished by the UK state. The migrant and immigration issues will however not go away.
In 2003 the UK’s Blair government joined with the USA in a war that destroyed Iraq, creating millions of refugees as well as the rise of Al Qaeda and ISIS. It was the same story in Libya in 2011, and then Syria immediately afterwards. Libya was destroyed by UK bombing and by its Islamist allies, who then tried to do the same to Syria. These massive attacks are responsible for creating the conditions where millions are willing to risk their lives crossing deserts and then the Mediterranean.
Having helped create the crisis in the first place the Toxic Tories are seeking to resolve it by hammering both immigrants and the mass of the working class at home, by smashing the NHS and the Welfare State and by chaining up the trade unions with new anti-union laws – while the bankers and the bosses are loaded with cash and getting richer by the hour. There is only one way to resolve this crisis. The working class in the UK, including all immigrants, must unite to organise a massive strike action, in fact a general strike to bring down the Tories and bring in a workers government and socialism.
A planned economy will then be developed to provide everybody with a decent life and show the way forward to socialism throughout the world.
