LABOUR Party leader Miliband spoke yesterday on Labour’s ‘One Nation’ approach to cultural diversity and integration insisting that admission to this select body is for English speakers only.
After a ritual embrace of ‘toleration’, a lot of treacle about the Olympics, and some trailing of his family’s immigrant past, plus a declaration that ‘I love the diversity of London’, Miliband got down to business, with a big ‘BUT’.
He said: ‘But at the same time, as celebrating what is good, those of us who believe in this vision must face up to the challenges, not shy away from them…And there is profound anxiety about immigration. Some of this is economic…Some of this anxiety is about where money is spent within communities, including benefits. There is also anxiety about the pace of change…We have said we will learn lessons from Eastern European migration and ensure maximum transitional controls in future…’
It turns out that the slump, the jobs crisis, low wages, and savage cuts have unleashed, as well as the class struggle, some racism.
As it did when the Irish flocked to the UK in the period from 1830-1960, and when the Tsarist pogroms drove the Jews of Eastern Europe into Britain and when the Caribbean migration began in the 1950s. In all these cases, trades unions and socialists triumphed over the racists.
Miliband’s reaction to racism is not just to give into the racists, but to try and win their vote as well.
He says: ‘We are one of the few countries in Europe without a comprehensive strategy for integration.’
He adds: ‘First, we should start with language…So if we are going to build One Nation, our goal should be that everyone in Britain should know how to speak English. We should expect that of people that come here.’
As well: ‘In housing, we should act too. We can’t expect people to embrace their neighbours, to build a community, if 38 people have been crammed into the house next door.’ They used to say this about the Irish – ‘ten in a bed and two shifts, day and night’ – so how could good solid English people be expected to mix with such wild and uncouth fellows!
He adds: ‘We should eliminate the shocking practices of shift patterns that leave people working alongside others only from the same national or ethnic background. It’s illegal. And it’s wrong.’
Turfing immigrants out of their shift jobs, jobs that only they were willing to take just a few years ago, would certainly create more jobs for the one nation English!
Miliband continues: ‘The more diverse the public sector workforce, including from Eastern Europe, the greater the importance of English. That’s in the interests of everyone who uses our public services, wherever they are from.
‘So we should extend the requirements in many professions for English proficiency to all publicly-funded, public-facing jobs.’
If you don’t speak English you will not work, you will be barred from benefit and you will not eat – this seems to be the content of Miliband’s One Nation.
Why is it that the real melting pot society, the USA, has never found it necessary to tell all its immigrants that they must speak English. It is because such open racism would not be tolerated in the land of the American Revolution.
Miliband is a fraud. His policy would only apply to non-white migrants from outside the EU. There is no way that the European Court will agree that all EU nationals must speak English to live and work in the UK! After all, this does not apply to the masses of English who live in the EU.
Miliband, instead of pushing for socialist policies that can deal with the capitalist crisis and provide jobs and homes for all, appeases racism and dresses it up as ‘One Nation’. His English-only policy must be rejected, as must his attempt to get immigrants who dominate certain types of shift work sacked.
Fighting and beating racism means fighting for socialist policies to put an end to capitalism by bringing in a planned economy to provide jobs and homes for all.
We say workers of the world unite, you have a world to win and nothing to lose except your chains. You certainly don’t have to learn English to carry out this task!