OVER 600,000 workers have come to work in the UK from the eight nations which joined the European Union in 2004, said Home Office minister Tony McNulty yesterday.
The figures show that 447,000 people from Poland and the seven other new EU states have applied to work in the UK. McNulty added that the figure would be nearer 600,000 if self-employed workers – such as builders – were included.
He said that migrants were helping the UK economy, but added that the figures will ‘fuel fears about strains on public services’.
He meant that hundreds of thousands of immigrant workers, working for private contractors at slave labour rates, were making billions for the employers, and were helping to hold wages down in the UK, at a time when workers’ wages are being slashed by massive increases in prices, particularly energy prices.
All the talk about worries about strains on the public services are rubbish, since both Labour and the Tories are working might and main to privatise these same services and put an end to both them and the Welfare State.
What the Labourites and the Tories really mean is that they have enough cheap labourers at the moment so that they want to turn the tap off.
As well, of course, behind both Tory and Labour talk that it is not racist to discuss imposing a cap on EU workers coming to Britain, is a sly encouragement of racism by attempting to focus the anger of workers concerning their falling standard of living onto immigrants, when the real source of ‘hard times’ in Britain is the Blair government and the employers who support it.
Racism is now being officially encouraged as part of a divide and rule tactic of the bosses and the government, to try and divert rising working class anger from the bosses and the government.
Take air travel. The Blair government has fully supported the imperialist attack on the peoples of Iraq, Palestine, and now the Lebanon.
It refuses to give up the struggle to steal Middle Eastern oil from the Arabs, and with this approach is encouraging terrorism and terrorist attacks on Britain.
It is the criminal driving force of ‘terrorism’.
Its solution to the problem that it is creating is to make a pariah of the Muslim community with massive police raids that register like one big frame up, from the so called ‘Ricin attack’ to the murder of De Menezes, to the Forest Gate house stormings and shooting.
Now it is considering an openly racist approach to airport security, with its propaganda in favour of ‘racial profiling’, which means stopping all Blacks and Asians from air travel.
That this is what it means is confirmed by the British passengers of a holiday jet who refused to return home on their aircraft until a number of Asian passengers, who had all come through security, were removed from the aircraft.
The Labour government’s policies on jobs, wages and cheap labour, Lebanon, Iraq and Palestine, and ‘security’ are all openly encouraging racism.
The News Line calls for the unity of the working class to fight and overthrow capitalism, imperialism and racism.
We are opposed to all immigration acts and racist measures that seek to frame Blacks and Asians for the problems being created by the crisis of capitalism.
We call on the workers’ movement to welcome all immigrants to Britain and to organise them into the trade unions and the struggle for the socialist revolution.
We call on the trade unions to fight capitalism and racism by bringing down the Blair government and bringing in a workers’ government that will carry out socialist policies at home and abroad, mobilising the working class of the world to carry through the world socialist revolution to smash capitalism and imperialism.
