Racist, Blue Labour Government Causes Division In Society

The racist, Blue Labour Government is creating division in society, by inciting hatred of immigrants to distract from its own failed policies, and its defence of the real parasites and causes of workers' problems, in Britain – the ruling-class. Just as with the failure of Brexit, rather than acknowledging that failure, it has simply doubled down on its lies, and increased the ferocity of its own reactionary nationalism and jingoism, as seen in the disgraceful statement put out by its Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmoud, in parliament on Monday. The vileness of its racist politics is indicated by the fact that its position is now welcomed and supported by Stephen Yaxley Lennon, aka, Tommy Robinson.

But, of course, the initial welcome and support from the likes of Yaxley-Lennon, will be only a staging post. Already, Farage has said that it is not enough, as the ratchet to the Far Right along which Blue Labour is now firmly tied, means that the calls to withdraw from the ECHR, will intensify. The godfather of Blue Labour, Maurice Glasman, has openly stated, on Newsnight, that he does not want Labour to be a progressive party, and raised the question of withdrawal from the ECHR, as being a necessary requirement if Blue Labour's anti-migrant policies are to be implemented.

Like all the other racists, Blue Labour has conflated refugees and asylum seekers with illegal migrants. Its position now calls for refugees and asylum seekers to be sent back, once the conditions that led to them becoming refugees, in their own country, have ended. But, logically, on that basis, the only Ukrainian refugees and asylum seekers, should have been ethnic Russians, fleeing the persecution they faced from the ultra-nationalist regime of Zelensky, and its neo-Nazi components of the Azov Battalion, and Right Sector. For ethic Ukrainians, there was no reason for them not to have simply moved into western and central Ukraine, other than that the reason many of them fled was to avoid being conscripted.

Blue Labour is scapegoating migrants, in order to divert attention from the real cause of the problems British workers, of whatever ethnicity, face, in relation to the cost of living, lack of housing, a collapsing NHS, education and social care system, crumbling infrastructure in roads, buildings, railways, telecommunications and so on. The proximate cause of all those problems is the lack of investment in them over a long period of time, and specifically in all of the period of austerity introduced after 2010. Rachel Reeves' budget will double down on all of that austerity, once more, just as Mahmoud has doubled down on the racist targeting of migrants, in order to divert attention from it.

The less proximate reason for all of those problems is Brexit. It is Brexit that has caused a significant drop in British economic growth, and a consequent loss of tax revenues for the government. It is costing the government £40 billion, each year, in lost tax revenues, as a result of the fall in economic growth. But, Blue Labour's hands are so steeped in the blood of Brexit, which it has now backed for the last six years, since Starmer became Leader, that it, also, cannot reverse that policy either, or even effectively draw attention to the damage it has caused, without simultaneously damning its own backing of Brexit for the last six years.

Of course, the reason it has not, and does not, do that is more complex. In part, it is because it has falsely concluded that opposition to Brexit cost Labour the election in 2019, and that, to win, it has to appease all of that reactionary petty-bourgeois nationalist section of the electorate. But, the facts are clear that in 2017, when Labour most vociferously opposed Brexit, Corbyn's Labour won 40% of the vote, increasing its seats by the most since 1945. It was the drift back towards Brexitism in 2019 that caused Labour to lose that support. 

Another factor in that was the attacks on Starmer by the agents of Blue Labour, who had been shocked at the size of Labour's vote in 2017, when they thought they could mostly sit back and see him fail.  After 2017, supported by money from Zionists, and channelled through various tax havens, they successfully and fraudulently equated anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, and launched their wrecking operation of Labour's electoral chances, ready to remove Corbyn, and the Left.  That, also, left Blue Labour beholden to the Zionist state, a debt repaid in its support for the genocide, but that, also, tied Blue Labour to Trump, a connection which, itself, went back at least to Trump's support for Brexit, and the cultivation of elements such as Spiked Online, itself with close connections to Glasman.

Moreover, in 2024, when Blue Labour won its parliamentary majority, it did not do so by winning over the votes of petty-bourgeois, nationalist Brexit voters. It won very few of them.  A continuation of Brexit, however, was baked in for Blue Labour, because of these previous debts to its sponsors, ideological and financial and organisational, even after the large majority of the electorate, itself abandoned Brexit, so that it became an electoral liability.  Blue Labour pursued Brexit, and could only do so by seeking to tie Britain closer to Trump's America.

It won only be default, as the reactionary, petty-bourgeois vote split between Tories and Reform. That period is over, as Reform has simply taken the place of the Tory wing of the Conservatives. It is not a fundamental change in politics, or of a shift in class based voting, merely a relabelling, like changing the packaging of a Marathon to a Snickers. Despite the superficiality of the bourgeois media reporting, that claims that some qualitative change bringing about the end of class based voting has occurred, no such change has happened. The Conservative Party always got its core vote from the petty-bourgeoisie, but it always had to serve the interests of the bourgeois ruling-class. All that has happened, much as when the Liberal Party split, with its working-class core creating the Labour Party, is that a strengthened petty-bourgeoisie has asserted its own reactionary interests, and split to the Right.

The Tories are dead, reborn as Reform. Nor has the class basis of voting changed on the other side. Just as the Liberals were replaced by a newly created Labour Party, at the start of the 20th century, so it only reflected that a strengthened working-class, now sought to assert its own interests, albeit by a continuation of the same social-democratic ideology it had pursued within the Liberals, and which is inherent to the main organs of that class, the trades unions, based on bargaining within, but, thereby, remaining within, the existing bourgeois system. That class basis of ideology, and voting has not changed, but as Labour has abandoned even that social-democratic ideology, in favour of a quixotic chase after reactionary, petty-bourgeois nationalist windmills, so its class base has increasingly deserted it in favour of other, superficially, more social-democratic alternatives be it the Greens, Liberals, Plaid, SNP or Your Party.

Already we see the fruits of Blue Labour's further ratchet of the racist screw. The racists and “patriots” also conflate the terms refugee and illegal immigrant, but, also, they conflate illegal immigrant with the term immigrant itself, by which they, also, mostly, mean anyone with a darker skin. Whether Mahmoud actually believed any of what she was shovelling in her statement or not, about illegal immigration stoking racist abuse against people like her, or whether it is just a consequence of knowing that spouting such nonsense is required to keep her job, the truth is that her own racist scapegoating of migrants, as it always has and does, only acts to validate the lies of the racists and stokes even greater division in society, greater hostility of anyone with a darker skin whether they are a migrant, or have lived in this country for several generations! The proof of that was seen the day of the Brexit vote, when racists immediately began openly attacking anyone that looked foreign, and demanding they went home!!  Its not migration legal or illegal causing division, but the racist demagogy of politicians like Mahmoud.

The racists like Yaxley-Lennon, Farage and so on will not simply acquiesce in Blue Labour's adoption of their own racist language and politics, but, will inevitably shift their own positions even further right, as has already happened.  Farage has even invited Mahmoud to join Reform.

The racists of Reform know that they are not going to lose any votes by adopting an even more hard-line racist stance. The truth is that they are pretty much at the limit of their vote, as has happened in the past, because their vote is limited to that petty-bourgeois mass and its periphery, which amounts to around 30-40% of the electorate. Moreover, as has happened elsewhere, and as Trotsky analysed in relation to the rise of the Nazis in Germany, in the 1930's, having reached that limit, its coalition begins to fragment as a result of the inherently amorphous nature of the petty-bourgeoisie, and its own internal contradictory interests.

But, if the Conservatives try to follow, they do risk losing more of their voters to the Liberals, having already shed their Tory vote to Reform. Its notable, therefore, that whilst Farage responded by simply turning the racist screw further to the Right, Bad Enoch responded by, instead, focusing on the other fascination of the reactionaries, welfare benefits and their recipients. As with Trump in the US, the attacks on migrants can only go so far, for a reactionary petty-bourgeois party, which still cannot address the real issues, which would attack the wealth and power of the bourgeois ruling class. The contradiction of that for Trump, means that his own petty-bourgeois, MAGA base is fracturing, because that petty-bourgeoisie of the self-employed, and small businesses, are themselves impoverished, many of them rely on various benefits too. They all are impacted by higher prices, which have resulted from Trump's attempts to keep asset prices inflated, and by his imposition of consumption taxes (tariffs) on many of the staple items of these households. Not surprisingly, Trump, as his base disintegrates, has been led to rapidly reverse many of those tariffs on food imports.

The racists be it of the type of Yaxley-Lennon, or Farage or the remains of the Tory Party, will take Blue Labour's latest racist attacks on migrants as the cue to simply step up their own vile, racist demands, but, not only those racist attacks, but also their reactionary attacks on benefits recipients too, which again, they conflate with migrants, or the unemployed etc. Bad Enoch talked about the removal of the Two-Child Benefit cap as though these child benefits are only paid to the unemployed, long-term sick and so on. But, the reality is that two-thirds of those that receive these benefits, as also with Housing Benefit, are in work. They only get these benefits because the actual level of wages in Britain is itself so appallingly low, a process that has been going on since the regime of Thatcher in the 1980's.

Blue Labour's racist attacks on migrants, will inevitably lead to racist attacks on anyone who simply looks like a migrant, whether they and their families have lived here for generations or not. We have seen Blue Labour take up the demand for even settled migrants to risk being deported, and Farage and the Tories are now adopting the stance of Mosely in the 1960's, and the NF in the 1970's, of the repatriation of people from ethnic minorities, though where they would be repatriated to, remains a mystery, given that the majority of them were born here! In turn, that inevitably leads to attacks on the unemployed, sick and anyone on benefits, who the reactionaries need as their next additional scapegoat to distract from their own failures, to explain why the implementation of their previous policies, such as Brexit, have only made things worse.

All the time, whilst these reactionaries try to blame migrants, or those on benefits, for the failures of British capitalism, they signally fail to point the finger at the real parasites and scroungers, of whom the royals are only a minor, but visible representation. When the reactionaries talk about those not getting out of bed in the morning to go to work, they do not mean the royals who are paid millions each year to live the life of Riley, traipsing across the world by luxury jet and yacht, at tax payers expense. Nor do they mean the top 0.01% that owns the controlling majority of financial assets, bringing each of them in billions of pounds in interests/dividends, simply on the back of ownership of bonds and shares, or property, without needing to lift a finger. No wonder they have the time to associate with the likes of Jeffrey Epstein, and engage in the kinds of behaviour that characterised the decadence of the Roman Empire, prior to its fall.

Pointing the finger at those elements, and their role in holding back economic development, and causing the problems of working-people would, of course, be a useful act of creating division in society, a class division between the vast majority and this ruling-class. But, Blue Labour, the Tories, Farage, Bad Enoch, and also, the likes of Ed Davey will not do that. Their whole political system continues to depend on serving the needs of that ruling-class, even if they have to balance that with the need to rhetorically present themselves as champions of the petty-bourgeoisie, and even to engage in measures, such as Brexit to that end. The petty-bourgeoisie, itself, will not engage in a full on attack on the bourgeois, ruling-class, precisely because it deludes itself into thinking that it has some affinity with it, that this ruling-class is just them writ large, where they can aspire to being, at some future time, even though all the evidence shows that is an impossibility.

Only the organised working-class can consistently oppose the ruling-class and its interests, and does so based on advancing its own class interests, as a global class, based on the collective ownership of socialised capital, which, nowadays, only has a rational existence as multinational capital. The real division we should encourage in society is that division between the organised working-class, comprising around 60% of the population, and the ruling-class, which is insignificant in size, but has immense wealth and power, and control of the state. To do that we need a mass, communist workers party, and only it will be able, on that basis, to draw the rest of society behind it. It is for that reason that the existing bourgeois and reactionary petty-bourgeois parties, seek to prevent such a class based division, and instead to cultivate a division of the working-class based on ethnicity, nationality, sex, gender, religion, sexual preference and so on. We should not let them get away with it.

Blue Labour Government Sets The Course In First Hours

The reactionary, petty-bourgeois, nationalists of the new Blue Labour government have set the course we can expect from it, in its statements and actions of the first hours.

Starmer has claimed, in traditional populist and Bonapartist fashion that Blue Labour has been given a clear mandate.  Indeed, he claimed such a mandate in all four nations, despite the fact that Blue Labour did not even stand any candidates in Northern Ireland, where the petty-bourgeois nationalists of Sinn Fein, are now the largest party.  But, as I have pointed out over recent days, Blue Labour has no real democratic mandate, despite its huge number of seats and parliamentary majority.  Those seats, and that majority are not the result of electoral support for Blue Labour, or clever targeting by it of seats it needed to win, but purely a result of the corrupt nature of the electoral system, and the effect of Reform splitting the Tory vote in half.

As I pointed out, yesterday, Blue Labour vote, was lower than that obtained by Corbyn's Labour in 2019, and amounted to only, more or less the same vote share (34% as against 32%), and was a third fewer votes than Corbyn's Labour won in 2017, when Corbyn's Labour won 40% of the vote!  Indeed, given that the national turnout was also lower Blue Labour's actual support is worse than that.  It represents only 20% of the electorate!!  Yet, Starmer claims an overwhelming mandate.

As I noted, yesterday, the argument presented by the Starmtroopers that this simply reflects the fact that they cleverly used the electoral system to target the seats they needed to win, and so increased their votes in those seats is also manifestly untrue.  Take, Newcastle under Lyme, which was held by Labour for all of the last century going back to Josiah Wedgwood, following his move from the Liberals.  It was also the seat of Marxist, Stephen Swingler, unfortunately followed by the hard Right, John Golding.

The last Labour incumbent was Paul Farrelly, who stood down in 2019.  A look at Farrelly's vote and vote hare, itself illuminates many of the lies told about Corbyn's Labour.  In 2001, Farrelly obtained more than 20,000 votes, representing more than 50% of the vote.  As with other New Labour MP's, after 2001, that continually declined.  In 2010, he was down to 16,000 votes, representing just 38% of the vote, and that was barely changed in 2015.  In 2017, however, despite Farrelly being an ardent opponent of Corbyn, in the traditions of John Golding, he like other Labour candidates, was swept along in the surge of electoral support for Corbyn's Labour.

In 2017, his vote rose by 30% to over 21,000, and his vote share similarly rose from 38% to 48%!  So much for the unelectability of Corbyn's Labour, compared to New Labour, particularly given all the attacks on Corbyn by the Right of the party, supported by their friends in the Tory media.  In 2019, he stood down, and the unknown, new Labour candidate Carl Greatbach lost the seat to the Tories.

So, this was clearly a seat that Blue Labour would target - despite the fact that, as elsewhere, none of the parties had any great number of canvassers on the streets, or literature distributed, as their membership has collapsed.  So, if Blue Labour's win is the result of great planning to target such seats, and increase its vote and vote share in them, that should be clear in this seat.  It isn't.

In 2019, when he lost to the Tories, Carl Greatbach won 16,000 votes, representing 36% of the vote share.  In this election, as the sitting Tory, Aaron Bell stood down, Labour's Adam Jogee, managed to win less than 16,000 votes, i.e. less than the losing Carl Greatbach in 2019!  So, this win certainly was not the result of clever tageting by Blue Labour to increase its vote in target seats.  Jogee won, not as a result of Blue labour's vote rising, but of the Tory vote being split down the middle.

In 2019, Bell won more than 50% of the vote, with more than 23,000 votes, with the Brexit Party getting less than 2,000 votes.  In 2024, the Tory vote collapsed to less than 11,000, whilst Reform's vote rose to nearly 9,000.  Indeed, add together the Tory and Reform vote, and you get to nearly 20,000, which would have given the Tories a majority of nearly 5,000!

Without Reform, this result would have been repeated in seat after seat across the country.  In Newcastle, as in many other seats, the biggest gainers, besides Reform, was not Blue Labour, but the Greens, who more than doubled their vote and vote share.

So, the story being conveyed by Starmer and Blue Labour, in relation to this supposed mandate, continues in the same vein as their approach over the last four years, which is to blatantly lie.  They have no democratic mandate, and their seats and majority is founded on support from only 20% of the electorate, much of that only obtained as a result of hatred of the Tories, and a desire to get them out at almost any cost, including voting for the reactionaries of Blue Labour.  It spells disaster ahead.

Not satisfied with forming its government from MP's that have no democratic mandate, it has taken the obvious further step to that by sending for some of the former, often disgraced members of Blair's government, and simply giving them peerages so that they can become Ministers, whilst being unaccountable, and sitting in the Lords.  Having said that he was going to base the government on honesty, service and a clearing out of sleaze, which, of course only the most voluntarily gullible believed, Starmer has breached all three in the first 24 hours!

We know that many of the Blue Labour MP's and, now, Ministers are connected to  private healthcare companies, as it prepares to privatise the NHS.  Now we also have former Blair-Right Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, who was involved in the expenses, scandal in 2009, on multiple counts, relating to claiming for the cost of dowloading porn, and to the use of a second home, has been ennobled by Starmer, so as to "serve" in his new government!  We can expect to see far more of this kind of sleaze, as the careerists of Blue Labour take the opportunity to get their snouts in the trough, as the NHS and other "services" are privatised.

Blue Labour secured the support of just 20% of the electorate, and only a third of those that actually voted.  Of this third, a large proportion will be core Labour voters who wanted above all to get rid of the Tories, and who did not have the option of voting for a more progressive candidate with a chance of winning, as with Corbyn in Islington North.  Yet, Blue Labour built its reactionary, petty-bourgeois programme on a search for the votes of the immiserated petty-bourgeoisie, and lumpen elements in the decayed urban areas, known as the Red Wall.  It largely failed to win their votes, as they went overwhelmingly to Reform, hence the failure of Blue Labour to win additional votes, and even to lose votes, in those seats to more progressive candidates from the Liberals and Greens.

Yet, Blue Labour has continued to orient its policy to those reactionary, nationalists whose votes it still failed to win over, and which, in doing so, is driving away its core working-class vote.  In the round of Sunday morning politics shows, Blue Labour politicians have prioritised their commitment to those reactionary nationalist policies, as they again scapegoat immigrants for the problems of British capitalism, made worse by the Brexit they also, now, champion.

Johnathan Reynolds, the new Secretary of State for Business and Trade, spoke about responding to the concern of the British people over immigration, for example.  But, poll after poll has shown that there is no such great concern by the majority of citizens.   Reynolds went on to say that the number of legal migrants needed to be reduced, which, of course, if you actually believed the first point would follow for a reactionary populist government that seeks to tail the prejudices of the people whose votes it seeks.  But, the first claim was false, as the majority of people are not concerned by immigration, as against concern over other issues such as the NHS, housing and so on, and many recognise that it is beneficial and necessary to resolve many of those other issues, it is more concerned about, despite attempts by reactionary nationalist, and racist bigots to blame immigrants for those problems.  

More importantly, as the Tories found out, the reality is that immigration is required to resolve those other problems, which is also why free movement of labour, and membership of the EU played such an important role.  The Tories tried to scapegoat immigrants, just as New Labour Home Secretaries had done, in the 2000's, but both found that they needed those immigrants to fill jobs, in conditions of rising labour shortages.  One reason the NHS has collapsed at a faster rate than it was already doing as a result of the austerity imposed after 2010, is that Brexit cut off the supply of trained doctors, dentists and other professionals from the EU.

Yet, Blue Labour whose Orwellian Doublespeak has "Change" meaning no change/stability, and genocide being peace and self-defence, wants us to believe that its continued application of Tory immigration policy, and scapegoating of immigrants to divert attention from its own contradictions and failures, represents "change", and is compatible with its own statements about dealing with health, housing and other problems, which it clearly isn't.

The Liberal leader Ed Davey, on the Sunday politics programmes talked about Blue Labour's failure to talk in its programme or after about social care, and the role of the millions of unpaid, family carers (many of them as young as 14).  But, of course, Blue Labour will not talk about that scandal, or offer any real support for those that provide it.  It is too busy engaged in its own Newspeak about "Service" in relation to itself, to actually recognise or support the actual service being provided by millions of ordinary citizens.

It cannot afford to recognise that actual service let alone to support it, and fund it, and even less to make it unnecessary by providing large-scale, good quality social care, because to do so would require greater government spending, requiring greater taxation, and ownership and control of the means of production, which is the last thing it is going to do.  It would also require large-scale immigration, to provide the workers required to undertake those jobs, which it has firmly set its nose against as it tails the ideas of the racist bigots whose votes it is forlornly seeking to win over.

As with Blue Labour's commitment to provide 40,000 new GP appointments, and cut hospital waiting times, at the same time that it not only continues this racist stance on immigration, and reactionary nationalist stance on EU membership, and free movement, whilst, also, refusing to pay the existing doctors adequately, it is pie in the sky, and more Doublespeak.  Starmer has said how he intends to do that, which is what I set out some weeks ago.  Rather than paying doctors properly for the work they already do, or employing more doctors (which would require more funding, which he has refused to commit to), not to mention increasing immigration to provide those doctors, he intends to simply work the existing doctors even longer and harder, on top of their already long hours!

In one of his first statements he pointed to the examples of having hours extended at night times, and weekends, and so on.  The result will be even greater burn out, an even greater exodus of NHS doctors and nurses from the NHS abroad, and into private healthcare, which, of course, fits well with all of those Blue Labour MP's, and Ministers that are seeking the privatisation of the NHS, and who act as lobbyists for the private healthcare companies.

And, this is just day one.

Labour Leaders Kick Workers In The Nuts Again

Leaks of what happened at Labour's Clause 5 meeting, to formulate the Manifesto, showed, as expected, that the Labour leadership have kicked members and the working-class in the nuts, by voting to ignore the overwhelming decision of party conference to demand that free movement be defended and extended. Corbyn was elected as Leader, promising to create a new type of party that is membership led. Clearly he lied. This is a weak and vacillating leadership that, time after time, ignores the wishes of the party members, and lines up with the forces of reaction and conservatism, in order to do so. The consequence is going to be that Labour will now suffer a serious defeat in the coming election. Labour started way behind the Tories, and the gap is widening.  The job of socialists now, is to prepare for that defeat, and to minimise the consequences of it. It means organising to fight the reactionary Tory government that we now face, and it means beginning to organise and fight within the labour movement, to rebuild it, and to democratise it. 

When, in 2015 it was announced that Corbyn was to stand for the Labour leadership, I warned that the danger would be that the campaign to get Corbyn elected would, all too easily, become yet another example of jumping on a band wagon, in which a celebrity cult would develop that again puts its faith in some individual arriving as a messiah that would solve all the problems of those seeking fundamental change. There is no shortage of such occurrences throughout history, and they always end badly. So too with Corbyn. Such celebrity cults involve giving uncritical support for the new messiah, and a failure to build a real mass movement that is able to hold any leaders to account, and be able to replace them, and go beyond them, whenever the need arises. The opposite has occurred with Corbyn. The mindless chorus of “Oh Jeremy Corbyn”, at party conference, as an alternative to an argument, in response to the leadership's betrayal of the policy of opposing Brexit, is a good example. 

We have seen this before with those that turned a blind eye to the reactionary regime of Stalin, and of other Stalinist regimes; we have seen it with those that lined up behind even reactionary left nationalist regimes such as that of Chavez in Venezuela, and Evo Morales in Bolivia; we have seen it in the actions of those that lined up with outright reactionaries, such as the mullahs in Iran, Hamas in Palestine, and Hezbollah in Lebanon. And, we saw it with those that lined up with reactionaries in Britain such as George Galloway. Support for all of these reactionaries was based on a form of cultism, of throwing in support behind reactionaries solely on the basis of their opposition to capitalism, or imperialism, and so on, without any consideration of whether this opposition is mounted from a progressive or a reactionary standpoint. In every case, the opposition has been mounted from a reactionary position. 

Preventing free movement is a  feature of slavery
and serfdom.  Free movement is a fundamental
 requirement for workers freedom.  Denying it
benefits the slaveholders against the interests of
serfs, slaves, and wage slaves.

The decision of party conference to call for all immigration controls to be scrapped, so as to defend and extend free movement, was passed by a sufficient majority that it should automatically have been included in Labour's Manifesto. Either way, it is a progressive and fundamental policy that any progressive social-democratic party should defend. The right to free movement is one that workers have struggled for for centuries. It was feudalism that tried to prevent free movement, and, in the twentieth century it was fascist and Stalinist regimes that tried to prevent free movement, so that they could imprison workers the better to enslave them. Rejection of the right of free movement puts workers in that same position of being imprisoned and enslaved, of being unable to move to where they can at least sell their labour-power freely to the highest bidder. At the same time, it says to workers in any given country that their problems are caused not by capitalism, not by the deliberate policies of reactionary and conservative governments, but rather by their fellow workers from other countries. It is fundamentally racist. 

Workers win freedom of movement by smashing
 the Berlin Wall 30 years ago.  Now Labour wants to
support restrictions of workers movement.  We should
build unions not barriers.

But, Labour's weak and vacillating leadership has capitulated on this basic principle, and lined itself up with the racists and reactionaries. That Stalinoid forces such as Len McCluskey, and those in Corbyn's inner circle, push this reactionary nationalist agenda is no surprise; it fits entirely with their reactionary economic stance in relation to Brexit. It also fits with the economic nationalist traditions of Stalinism that sought to imprison and enslave workers in that way. Its most vile manifestation being the Berlin Wall, which was only pulled down by workers 30 years ago, and prior to which illustrated the logic of such opposition to free movement, as workers were mowed down by machine gun fire, stuck on barbed wire fences, as the Stalinists tried to prevent workers from escaping the horrors of life under Stalinism, and who simply wanted to get a better life for themselves. 

Labour's Manifesto is due to be published on Thursday, which means there is still time for Labour's half million members to rise up in revolt against this reactionary position, adopted by the leadership in defiance of the will of the vast majority of party members. Asked the question should immigration be higher or lower, Labour leaders are unable to give a straight answer, in just the same way that they cannot give a clear answer over Brexit. Such is the extent to which they lie, and equivocate to try to hide their lies. The truth is that they should say they are in favour of greater immigration, just as they should be in favour of greater emigration, as workers break free from their imprisonment within the confines of nation states, and assert their right to free movement. Even looking at the issue from a purely selfish, nationalistic standpoint, they should be able to say that they favour greater immigration, because the reality is that Britain has an ageing population that requires large numbers of young immigrants who can do the work to provide all of the goods and services that this growing number of retired, and older people require. Yet, Labour's leaders are not even able to say that for fear of upsetting a minority of racists and bigots; usually the same racists and bigots that voted for Brexit. 

The Tories have proposed introducing visas for the NHS, but that means imposing a tax on workers who would come to Britain to provide this vital service. Its not clear whether their families would be able to join them, if they came to Britain, but, even if they can, it means that visas would have to be paid for for the other members of their family, making it uneconomical for them to do so. Moreover, who would come to work in Britain on such a visa, whilst being given no rights of citizenship, no right to vote, no right to stay without the risk of being told to leave at a moment's notice. Any EU workers, such as those on which the NHS and Social Care system depends, will obviously reject Britain in favour of moving to another EU country, where none of those restrictions and deprivation of rights exist. The latest employment data shows that the number of people in work fell by 53,000, at the same time that unemployment also fell by 23,000. The reason for that is obviously that the UK workforce is shrinking, as EU workers, in particular, give up on Britain and move to other EU countries. That will enhance the labour shortages that already exist in some spheres, but a smaller population also means that the economy will shrink along with it. 

The Tories say that no one should be able to come to Britain and get benefits until they have paid taxes and national insurance for five years. But, no other insurance scheme works on that basis. Suppose you take out car insurance, the insurance company can't turn round to you and say you can't make a claim until you have been paying premiums for five years! The same with house insurance. The whole point about insurance, including social insurance, is that everyone that pays into it is able to enjoy cover from the moment they take out the insurance. But, workers should be aware of what the Tories are really after when they make this proposal. Having made this case, in relation to immigrants, they will apply it to everyone. The logical next step is to say that no one can claim benefits unless they have first paid a minimum of five years into the tax and national insurance scheme. They have already used this method to say that if you are out of the country for more than three months, which applies to many retired people, who take extended Winter holidays, to avoid the bad weather, you are no longer entitled to NHS treatment. 

The reality is that for decades, after State pensions were introduced, workers paid into the National Insurance scheme without the majority of them living long enough to be able to get the pensions they had paid for. The tax and National Insurance scheme has just been a way of the capitalist state itself exploiting workers, by charging them for these services that they never get in full. As soon as workers began to live long enough to start getting pension for a few years, the state moved the goal posts telling workers they had to work longer before they could get that pension, a good example of which is seen with the WASPI women. 

Corbyn's leadership is weak and vacillating, and continually capitulates to reactionary and conservative forces. As a result, its now clear that Labour is going to lose the election badly. It is only a matter of whether Labour loses lots of seats to the Liberals, or whether the Liberals just take sufficient votes from Labour to allow a reactionary Tory government to get a sizeable majority. Either way, the betrayals of the Labour leadership are setting up the Tories to win a clear majority. It is now up to socialists and the rank and file membership of the party to minimise the damage and prepare for that defeat, and the struggle that follows it. 

Immediately, we must say that if the leadership can ignore conference decisions, and the will of the vast majority of the party, over free movement, and over Brexit, then we can ignore the leadership and tell it to stick its reactionary manifesto policies up its arse. On Andrew Marr this morning, Corbyn again made clear his support for a reactionary Brexit position. He said to Marr that he was in favour of a close relation to the EU, which means that he is in favour of Brexit, because you can't have a close relationship with the EU unless you are outside it. Corbyn phrases his reactionary position in this duplicitous manner, because he does not have the decency or the confidence even to argue openly for his reactionary agenda. At least Johnson does that. 

We can have no confidence in Labour's Manifesto. It may have some vaguely progressive populist policies, such as its policy in respect of broadband, but that cannot outweigh the overall reactionary, economic nationalist agenda that characterises the position of Corbyn and the Stalinists behind him that have captured the higher levels of the party machinery. Even the populist measures such as on broadband have the appearance of ideas that have been developed on high, and thrown out there, desperately, as Labour's leaders see the Tories surging ahead of Labour in the polls. They have every appearance of not having been thought out clearly, they are halfhearted, and no work has been done, over the last four years, to win support for them amongst the working-class. It is typical top down, Stalinoid left populism. 

Anything good in the Manifesto, we can give critical support for, whilst warning workers that the weak and vacillating record of the Labour leadership means that they will almost certainly drop these proposals like a hot potato, no sooner they face opposition to them. Moreover, most of these proposals themselves depend upon stopping Brexit, whilst the party leadership are pushing forward with Brexit. But, its now clear that, in order to minimise the damage, we need to build a rank and file movement and election campaign, based upon a Socialist Campaign for Labour and Europe. We should adopt a set of demands such as those I have previously set out, to revoke Article 50, to defend and extend free movement, by scrapping all immigration controls, we should aim to build an EU wide labour movement, and so on. 

On that basis, at least we can throw all of our support behind those Labour candidates that support this progressive agenda, and reject the reactionary agenda promoted by Corbyn and the other party leaders. We need to get as many of these progressive Labour MP's elected as possible, so as to be able to mount a resistance against a reactionary Tory government, and the carnival of reaction that will undoubtedly accompany it, and the Brexit it brings about. But, that rank and file campaign, unlike the hero worship nature of the cult behind Corbyn, must be based upon the idea of building a mass social movement of resistance to that reaction. It must take that resistance on to the streets, and into the workplaces, organising general strikes, where possible, to oppose the reaction. We need to use it to get progressive Labour Councillors elected who will oppose cuts, mobilise communities to take over estates, and defend minority communities. We need to rejuvenate party branches and CLP's, alongside rejuvenating the trades unions and cooperatives, to turn them into democratic fighting organs of the working-class. 

The problem with Corbynism, as I said from the start, was that it began from Corbyn, and only saw an upsurge in membership afterwards, where as any sustainable forward movement can only start with the building of a mass movement, based upon solid principles, and a high degree of class consciousness, with the election of leaders then flowing naturally from that. It is now clear that Corbyn cannot provide that leadership. He and those around him are a road block to further progress. They must be replaced with solid class fighters. Building a Socialist Campaign for Labour and Europe enables us to do that. It means we can minimise the damage caused by Corbyn's betrayal of workers; it means we can begin to create the kind of organisation that will be required to organise the fightback, and it means we can begin to create the kind of rank and file movement required to democratise and rejuvenate the party and the rest of the labour movement. 

Yes, Labour Should Be Wedded To Free Movement. No, Immigration Is Not Too High

Labour's message on immigration is indecisive.  The answer's to journalists questions should be clear and decisive.  Yes, Labour is wedded to the principle of free movement, as should be any self-respecting civilised person.  No immigration is not too high, and the arguments behind the suggestion that it is or might be are based upon fallacious economic concepts such as there being some fixed number of jobs etc.  Those that argue for controls on immigration may not be racists, but the demand for immigration controls is itself a racist demand.

In previous societies such as the slave societies of Ancient Rome and Greece, or in the feudal societies of the Middle Ages, individuals had no freedom, unless they were a part of the tiny ruling elite.  Everyone else was controlled by those elites in what they could do, where they could live and so on.  One of the great achievements of the bourgeois revolutions of the 19th century, which was made possible by the bourgeois ideas developed in the previous two centuries, was to sweep away all of these restrictions on the liberty of the individual, that meant, for example, that serfs were destined to live the whole of their lives in the same village, serving the same master, unable to step out in search of a better life somewhere else.

It meant, for example, that ordinary workers could set out for America, and create a new, more prosperous life for themselves.  Even the ability to find better paid work in a different occupation, or in a different town or village was an improvement for many workers and peasants compared with their previous position.  As Marx put it in "The Communist Manifesto", it rescued millions from the idiocy of rural life.

It is not just socialists or social democrats that should support the principle of free movement but every self-resping civilised person, every consistent bourgeois democrat, because the right of free movement is a basis human right that every human being should enjoy, the right to move across the planet unhindered in your lawful activities, free from restrictions by any state or other power.

In the 1980's, during the miner's strike, we had a glimpse of what a denial of that right of free movement means.  It saw an oppressive state apparatus, seal off mining villages, impose police roadblocks and stop miners moving from one area to another, so as to prevent them giving support to their comrades.  Similar restrictions on free movement were imposed to prevent protesters going to demonstrations and so on, over nuclear disarmament etc.

The 1980's also gave another example, of why workers should oppose restrictions on free movement.  The support for immigration controls and restriction of free movement stems from a feeling that somehow there is a restricted number of jobs, and or resources available, and that in times of economic distress, allowing foreign workers to come to Britain means that these jobs and resources are thereby spread out more thinly.  The economic basis of this idea is fallacious.  There is no fixed number of jobs or resources, and, in fact, both grow as the population grows, whether that growth comes from natural growth of births over deaths, or from immigration.  In fact, the latter more quickly creates additional jobs and resources than the former, because immigrants are generally adult workers who immediately put additional value and surplus value into the economy, whereas a natural growth of population involves a long period during which children suck value and resources out of the economy without putting any back in.

But, the idea itself depends upon a situation in which, for the last two hundred years, Britain has been one of the most prosperous economies on the planet.  The idea involves a perception that foreigners are coming here to take some of our prosperity from us.  But, if you are a worker in Sierra Leone, for example, you might view things differently.  You might see the need for free movement as essential to your right to seek out a better life for yourself, and what applies to the Sierra Leonian worker today, could just as easily apply to a British worker tomorrow, if Britain's economic status in the world changes.

Indeed, there was a period in the 1860's, when unemployment in Britain was rampant, due to the US Civil War, which restricted the supply of cotton to the textile mills, and when workers sought to escape to the US and elsewhere, just as Irish workers sought to escape the famine by emigrating to the United States.  As Marx describes in Capital I, the bosses at that time sought to restrict workers free movement, despite the massive unemployment, fearful that when things changed, they would no longer have available workers.

Marx quotes from a letter to The Times by Edmund Potter, the grandfather of author Beatrix Potter.  Potter represented the interests of the textile manufacturers.

“He” (the man out of work) “may be told the supply of cotton-workers is too large ... and ... must ... in fact be reduced by a third, perhaps, and that then there will be a healthy demand for the remaining two-thirds.... Public opinion... urges emigration.... The master cannot willingly see his labour supply being removed; he may think, and perhaps justly, that it is both wrong and unsound.... But if the public funds are to be devoted to assist emigration, he has a right to be heard, and perhaps to protest.” 

“Some time ...,one, two, or three years, it may be, will produce the quantity.... The question I would put then is this — Is the trade worth retaining? Is it worth while to keep the machinery (he means the living labour machines) in order, and is it not the greatest folly to think of parting with that? I think it is. I allow that the workers are not a property, not the property of Lancashire and the masters; but they are the strength of both; they are the mental and trained power which cannot be. replaced for a generation; the mere machinery which they work might much of it be beneficially replaced, nay improved, in a twelvemonth Encourage or allow (!) the working-power to emigrate, and what of the capitalist?... Take away the cream of the workers, and fixed capital will depreciate in a great degree, and the floating will not subject itself to a struggle with the short supply of inferior labour.... We are told the workers wish it” (emigration). “Very natural it is that they should do so.... Reduce, compress the cotton trade by taking away its working power and reducing their wages expenditure, say one-fifth, or five millions, and what then would happen to the class above, the small shopkeepers; and what of the rents, the cottage rents.... Trace out the effects upwards to the small farmer, the better householder, and ... the landowner, and say if there could be any suggestion more suicidal to all classes of the country than by enfeebling a nation by exporting the best of its manufacturing population, and destroying the value of some of its most productive capital and enrichment .... I advise a loan (of five or six millions sterling), ... extending it may be over two or three years, administered by special commissioners added to the Boards of Guardians in the cotton districts, under special legislative regulations, enforcing some occupation or labour, as a means of keeping up at least the moral standard of the recipients of the loan... can anything be worse for landowners or masters than parting with the best of the workers, and demoralising and disappointing the rest by an extended depletive emigration, a depletion of capital and value in an entire province?”

Even the Times wrote a reply criticising the ideas that Potter had put forward, but Marx concludes that the public opinion was with Potter.

"The Times’ article was only a jeu d’esprit. The “great public opinion” was, in fact, of Mr. Potter’s opinion, that the factory operatives are part of the movable fittings of a factory. Their emigration was prevented. They were locked up in that “moral workhouse,” the cotton districts, and they form, as before, “the strength” of the cotton manufacturers of Lancashire.” (p 539-41)

“Parliament did not vote a single farthing in aid of emigration, but simply passed some Acts empowering the municipal corporations to keep the operatives in a half-starved state, i.e., to exploit them at less than the normal wages. On the other hand, when 3 years later, the cattle disease broke out, Parliament broke wildly through its usages and voted, straight off, millions for indemnifying the millionaire landlords, whose farmers in any event came off without loss, owing to the rise in the price of meat.” (Note 1, p 541)

And anyone who lived through the 1980's would have been familiar with a similar situation, represented in the series "Auf Wiedersehen Pet", about unemployed Geordie building workers enjoying the benefits of free movement to escape the misery of Thatcher's Britain, and chronic unemployment, to find work on building sites in Germany.

As Britain's economy continues its long relative decline, a decline which will be rapidly accelerated by Brexit, British workers may again soon come to see the right to free movement in a different light, as they face falling living standards and unemployment at home, whilst economies in Europe, and elsewhere around the globe experience more rapid growth.

And Labour should say clearly that immigration is not too high.  In the last year, or so, Germany has taken in over a million refugees.  Yet, Germany is now at near full employment, and its economy is growing strongly.  That is not despite the 1 million immigrants during that period, but because of it.  The argument against immigration is nonsensical, and can be seen to be so when the two contradictory strands of it are put side by side.

On the one side, the argument is, immigrants take our jobs.  On the other side the argument is, immigrants are a strain on our resources, such as schools, houses, healthcare.  But, these two arguments contradict each other.  Firstly, if immigrants put a strain on resources that means an additional demand for those things arises.  That additional demand means that more of those things need to be supplied, and bringing about that supply creates additional jobs - hence Germany's economic growth, and full employment on the back of large scale immigration.  In other words, the immigrants create a demand for commodities and services, and that demand creates additional jobs.  The immigrants can then fill some of those jobs, and so rather than being a strain on the country's resources they add to them - they dig coal, build houses, etc - and because capital only employs workers if they produce profits, those workers by creating those profits also create the basis for the accumulation of additional capital, which then employs additional workers.

The strain in resources such as for houses, hospitals, schools and so on has nothing to do with immigrants, and everything to do with the policy of austerity imposed by the Tory government.  All of those additional immigrant workers pay "taxes" most of which are actually the price paid for a series of goods and services sold by the state.  But, the state then swallows up these taxes, but does not supply the corresponding goods and services, instead funnelling the money into its own coffers.  It is not immigrants that are to blame for the lack of housing, hospitals, schools and so on, but the capitalist state, because of the policy of austerity, which has seen the money that should have bought those goods and services instead channelled into covering the bail-out by that state for the banks, and to keep the prices of fictitious capital, of bonds, shares and property astronomically inflated.

The vast majority of resources do not simply fall from the sky available for consumers to consume, but are produced by labour, and to the extent that more labour is employed, be it immigrant labour or any other, it increases the mass of resources available to consume.  Its not immigrants that are to blame for the shortage of houses, but the failure of successive governments to build to them, and of the policies of successive governments to keep property prices inflated, via money printing and government bribery, to a level where they become unaffordable for a large number of people, at prices that would allow builder to make average profits, and which thereby restricts private building.

Nor is the shortage of housing due to the old wives tale about Britain being a crowded island.  Residential property accounts for just around 1.5% of Britain's total land area!  In fact, a greater percentage of Britain's land area is accounted for by gold courses than is accounted for by residential property.  It is one reason that Britain has the smallest average property sizes anywhere in Europe.  The high prices and inadequate property sizes in Britain are a result of the ridiculous perpetuation of the idea that we are a small overcrowded island, whilst all residential building is restricted to within this tiny percentage of the land mass.

Even taking into consideration all urban areas, so including the land used for roads, and commercial and industrial buildings,90% of the land mass in Britain is rural not urban, and the rural land mass continues to be in the hands of a tiny class of landed proprietors, like the Prince of Wales, Duke of Westminster and so on.  The number of residential properties in Britain could be doubled without hardly any effect on the percentage of the land mass developed.

The problems of unemployment, of lack of houses, hospitals, schools and so on are not the fault of immigrants, but of capitalism, and indeed of specific conservative policies of money printing to keep asset prices inflated for the 0.001%, and of austerity to to pay for the bail-out of the banks, and to keep interest rates low so as again to keep asset prices inflated.  That is why calls for restrictions on free movement, or for control on immigration are racist.  They falsely accuse foreigners of being responsible for those deficiencies of capitalism, and of conservative policies, in just the same way that in the past Jews were blamed for a variety of economic ills.  It is scapegoating.

Any self-respecting bourgeois democrat would oppose limitations on  free movement, but both liberal democrats and social democrats have failed to hold a principled position.  That is because both buckle and compromise in the face of conservative and reactionary electoral pressure.  It is a fallacy to believe that racism is beneficial to industrial capitalism.  Racism arose due to the contradictions faced by mercantilism and colonialism.  The racist ideas that fermented have been carried forward into modern societies.

But, modern industrial capitalism actually requires free movement of labour, which is why it is enshrined in the principles of the EU.  The old racist ideas inhibit that free movement, because it is not the capitalists themselves, at least not the big industrial capitals, that seek to impede it, but all those sections of the working class, middle-class, and the small capitalists, still trapped in those old colonial dogmas that seek to restrict it, and who thereby put electoral pressure on parties accordingly.  That is why the policies of governments have been so contradictory for decades.  On the one hand they introduce anti-discrimination laws, whilst at the same time introducing immigration controls that send out the message that it is immigrants that are at fault, and thereby encourage discrimination.

Labour fudges on the issue, because here and now a clear statement of principle would risk losing electoral support.  But, ultimately, not only Labour, but all social democratic forces will have to tackle the underlying racist nature of calls for limitation of free movement, whatever the short-term electoral consequences.

A Reply To Paul Mason on Remain and Free Movement

The following is a response I wrote recently to Paul Mason to a post he had written on Mosquito Ridge. Paul who has previously said that he thinks that the philosophical argument of Brexit wins, but that he believes in current conditions its best to vote to Remain, because Brexit would mean the coming to power of a reactionary regime in Britain, that would be bad for British workers. As I've written before, this approach, also taken by some members of the Labour Party, of starting from what is good for Britain, or even good for British workers, is necessarily nationalistic.

As with the same issue in relation to the 2014 Scottish referendum, it starts from an assumption that workers in one country have different interests to those of workers in other countries, which then can be better furthered, by lining up behind their own nation state, and ruling class. In fact, the interests of workers in one country are inseparable from the interests of workers in other countries, and for Marxists the starting point is that, and building a programme, and undertaking activity to break down borders, and to forge such international unity. As I have written many times in the past, that is the position Trotsky took in relation to the question of the United States of Europe, and in the Programme for Peace, for example.

Paul ends up here, desperate for a Remain vote, however, and ends up losing sight of the real reason for opposing leaving the EU, which is to forge that unity with European workers. The result is that, he argues for assuaging the reactionary views of a section of the electorate in relation to immigration, by calling for consideration of limitations on free movement and so on. If that were the price of remaining it would be too great. The fact remains that the referendum is just a vote. Whatever the result, on Friday, workers in Britain, as in other parts of Europe will still have the task of building that unity, and fighting for a different kind of Europe. British workers if they vote to Leave will have made that more difficult for themselves, and in part cut themselves off from that forward movement. I am strongly in favour of Remain for that reason, but Remain or Leave, the fight goes on, to paraphrase the slogan that Marxists adopted in the 1960's.

***********

Labour should not make concessions on free movement and migration. Its not migrants that are the problem, but British capitalism, and immediately the Tory administration of it, particularly the crazy application of austerity.

Yes, if the population rises that means additional demand for goods and services, including education and healthcare, but that applies whether the population rises due to increased births over deaths, or immigration. What would you propose if the increased demand for those goods and services was down to people having larger families, a Chinese style, one child policy, or some Malthusian warning that workers will just have to starve because production only increases arithmetically whilst population rises geometrically?

Marx, and James Anderson showed long, long ago that this Malthusian argument is wrong. Increases in population drive increases in production, and because increased production takes place on the basis of economies of scale, it is more effective, more profitable production that facilitates increased capital accumulation and growth. We shouldn’t still need to be having these arguments that were settled a long time ago.

In fact, an increased population due to migration has considerable benefits over an increased population from an increased live birth rate. Generally speaking, new workers that are born cannot add any production into the economy for the first 15–16 years of their lives, and so are an absolute drain on the economy for that time. Migrants are usually young, healthy and able to start adding production to the economy straight away. Yes, they take value out of the economy in the form of various commodities, including healthcare, but because capital only employs labour if it creates a surplus value, the value these workers newly create by their labour is greater than what they take out.

As a consequence the surplus value these migrant workers produce is available to be accumulated by capital from the profits it receives, to be used to cover pensions and other revenues from the interest that money-capitalists obtain out of the profits of those companies, and to be used to cover government expenditure on the provision of schools, hospitals and so on, out of the taxes that the government levies on those profits.

As with any other worker, migrant workers are not a drain on resources but a net provider of resources. In fact, they are a larger net provider of resources than home grown workers.

There is only a point in winning this referendum if it is won on the basis of offering a socialist solution to workers problems. The socialist case for staying in Europe has never been about staying in for staying in’s sake, or any misguided notion that the EU is good in itself. The socialist case for staying in Europe, is that it facilitates unity and solidarity, and collective action by European workers themselves. If the cost of winning the referendum is that we abandon the latter, by accepting all the Tory arguments over migration, and driving a wedge between workers across the EU, by blaming them for what immediately is the crisis created by conservatism, that cost is too great.

Its not migrants demand for housing, healthcare and education that is responsible for the crisis in UK public services, but the austerity measures of the Tories. Migrants are providing the profits, interest and taxes to fund those services, so where are the Tories spending that money?

I am strongly in favour of Remain, but only as the best basis of building unity of workers across Europe to create a different kind of Europe. In the end, whether the vote is to Remain or Leave, the fight against capitalism goes on. We should not diminish the fight against capitalism and the need to build the unity of a European working-class simply to win an ephemeral vote, on the basis of pandering to the reactionary, and bigoted views of a section of the working-class. Our task is to challenge and to change those views, not to collapse into them ourselves.

Reasons To Remain – Migration

The Punchline

The right to free movement should be a basic human right. Capital moves to wherever in the world it desires in search of profits, and workers should have the same right to search out a better life. Economies can grow without increases in population, but increases in population, including from migration, are a driver of growth, and improvements in living standards.

If You Are In A Rush

• If the first humans had not migrated from the African plains, we would not be here today.
  
• From the earliest times, humans have migrated from one place to another, partly to escape harsh conditions, partly out of natural curiosity and a sense of adventure, partly in search of a better life.
  
• That migration has benefited all of us. Not only would we not be here had they not engaged in such adventures, but as humans settled new areas of the globe, they developed the new and varied resources of those areas, which opened up the potential for trade, and an enrichment of the range of products that everyone could enjoy.
  
• The point at which such migration is first restricted coincides with a period when human freedom is itself restricted.
  
• Under systems of slavery and serfdom, workers were forced to stay in one place, or only to move to where their master dictated.
  
• Under feudalism, people were considered to belong to the land, rather than the land belong to the people. They became tied to the land, and the vast majority rarely travelled outside their own village. Such restrictions not only limit human freedom and spirit, they breed parochialism, distrust, fear of outsiders, idiocy, and xenophobia.
  
• One of the great freedoms achieved by bourgeois revolutions was to break that tie to the land, and enable free movement of labour. It is only recently that restrictions on such free movement have been imposed.
  
• As capital began to run out of labour in the Industrial Revolution, it again sought to prevent workers from emigrating, and continued that even during periods of stagnation, fearful that when activity resumed, it would lack the workers required.
  
• At the start of the last century, the drive for immigration restrictions, such as the Aliens Act, of 1905, was more to do with xenophobia, by reactionary elements within the ruling class, and a fear of revolutionary ideas, than any concern that British workers might lose jobs, or that resources might be pressured.
  
• In the 1950's, Britain needed additional workers, which it actively sought out in the West Indies, and elsewhere, alongside drawing married women into the workforce.
  
• It was again a response to demagogic, and reactionary politicians, like Enoch Powell, which led to the introduction of general immigration controls for the first time, not any need of capital for such controls.
  
• The ability for capital to obtain labour-power when required is an important aspect for capital accumulation, and workers should favour such capital accumulation, as in both their short and long-term interests. The free movement of labour not only enables workers to move to where they think the best opportunities exist, but enables the frictions on employment, of the right kinds of workers being available in the wrong places to be remedied.
  
• Contrary to the facile claims of the Brexiters, increases in population, including from immigration do not cause a pressure on available jobs and resources. There is no fixed amount of work, or resources that can only be shared out. The amount of available work and resources is itself a function of the size of the population, and number of workers. It is workers and their families that create a demand for goods and services, and thereby provide employment for other workers, in producing goods and services to meet that demand. It is workers, who produce the resources that the population requires to meet their needs, whether it is the production of natural resources such as coal that workers dig from the ground, or resources in the form of houses, schools and hospitals, which workers build, and work in.
  
• Throughout history, it has been increases in population that have driven economic growth, and because capitalism always produces more efficiently when it produces on a larger scale, increases in population enable production to be undertaken on a larger scale, to meet the increased demand, and so to produce more efficiently and profitably.
  
• Free movement, means that not only can workers move to where they can obtain the best standard of living, whilst working, it also means that they can move to where it is most advantageous for them and for society, when they retire. It makes sense, as happens in the US with many workers retiring to Florida, for older people to retire to better climates, where they will not be so prone to the illnesses that afflict older people brought on by cold and damp weather.

If You Have Time

The right to free movement, to be able to live and work anywhere in the world SHOULD be a basic human right. However, what SHOULD be the case is a moral question, whereas Marxists are concerned not with moral imperatives, but with actual realities. There is no such thing as absolute or inalienable human rights, because all rights are determined by human beings acting in society, and the rights that any society determines are themselves a function of the economic and social relations existing within that society. It is utopian to demand rights, that are beyond what any particular society can guarantee, and dangerously misleading to suggest that rights, which may be morally desirable, are, in fact, absolute rights which exist. As Marx puts it,

“Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.”

Ctitique of the Gotha Programme, Chapter 1

No individual can logically stake a legal claim to any part of the Earth's surface, because every other individual can stake an equally valid claim to it. All that any individual can do is to stake a claim of possession over it. In other words to say, I got here first, and now its mine. Rousseau, in The Social Contract, makes this distinction between possession and ownership. If all that exists as a consequence of total freedom, in a state of nature, is possession, then all such possession is contingent upon power and force. If you have merely possession of a piece of land, then if I can organise more force than you, I can replace your possession with my possession.

Property, therefore, can only arise in a system of laws, whereby it is not a matter of mere possession, but of a legal right of ownership. However, as Marx sets out in Capital, there can be no real legal right to land either. The fact that land is repeatedly bought and sold does not mean that anyone has a legal right to it. As Marx says, slaves were regularly bought and sold in market places too, but the fact that someone bought a slave from someone else did not mean they could thereby obtain a legal right to another human being, because the person from whom they bought the slave had no such legal right either.  Yet a property right to land has been established by some powerful individuals and used to restrict free movement.  In the past, workers and socialists organised mass trespasses to challenge the right of the landed aristocracy to prevent them using the land on their estates.  In so far, as the EU establishes a right of free movement across at least part of the Earth's surface, it is a right that we should support.

The first humans moved freely across the globe, and its only because they did so that we exist today. Had the first humans continued to live on the African plains they may have well been wiped out by some natural disaster. The fact that they spread out in a diaspora across the globe, meant that they evolved a range of different characteristics determined by what was most advantageous for the conditions in each area. So, for example, humans, when they migrated into colder northern climates, developed white skins, and blue eyes. These genetic variations in the human race give it strength, whereas continual in breeding of a people contained within a specific area, breeds weakness and idiocy. The same thing can be seen where in breeding takes place within small castes or classes, for example, the aristocracy, and royalty.

When humans began to settle in particular areas, the land was not considered as belonging to the people, but the people to the land. They saw themselves as its custodians. The right to free movement ceases alongside the appropriation of the land by individuals. Slaves and serfs were tied to one place, or to wherever their slave-owner or feudal lord dictated. But, even free peasants tended to be tied to the same village in which they were born. That necessarily led to a very narrow parochial outlook, it meant that all kinds of myths about the wider world could develop, which in turn bred fear, distrust and xenophobia. It also leads to the kind of in breeding and idiocy discussed earlier. Village life, that involves a monotonous routine, day after day, year after year, decade after decade, century after century with very little change itself results in idiocy, because those bound up in it, have no reason to think on a wider scale, to question anything, to innovate and so on. It is what Marx refers to when he and Engels say in The Communist Manifesto,

“The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life.”

One of the achievements of capitalism then was to re-establish this right of free movement, in part because capitalism itself required such free movement to function effectively. That remains true today. It was Maggie Thatcher's boot boy, Norman Tebbit, who told unemployed workers in the 1980's, to “Get on their bike”, and look for work, and of course, as the 1980's TV series, “Auf Wiedersehen Pet”, described, many unemployed workers from the UK and elsewhere, did take advantage of free movement within the EU, to move to jobs in Germany and elsewhere.

But, the bourgeoisie having railed against the activities of the old feudal ruling class, seeks to copy it in many ways, when it has achieved its own dominance. Marx describes in Theories of Surplus Value, the way the bourgeoisie having once denounced the unproductive elements of society, such as the clergy, and state flunkeys itself establishes a state with such unproductive elements as a means of supporting its own rule. The same rights and bourgeois freedoms under which it fought a revolution against the feudal aristocracy, and which it thereby established, it seeks to limit and constrain when they are used against it by the new revolutionary class, the proletariat.

In the early 19th century, as what first appeared as unending supplies of labour-power from the countryside, began to dry up, the industrial capitalists began their own slave trade, shipping workers and their families from workhouses, in all parts of the country, who they bought from agents in those workhouses, sending boat loads of them to northern industrial towns and factories. When a period of economic stagnation set in, with large numbers of workers starving, the employers sought to prevent them emigrating to the United States, fearful that when economic recover came, they would find themselves without an exploitable workforce.

One of those making such a case was the father of Beatrix Potter. Edmund Potter, former President of the Manchester Chamber of Commerce wrote.

“He (the man out of work) may be told the supply of cotton-workers is too large…. and …. must….in fact be reduced by a third, perhaps and then there will be a healthy demand for the remaining two-thirds….Public opinion…urges emigration The master cannot willingly see his labour supply being removed…. Encourage or allow the working power to emigrate, and what of the capitalist? …Take away the cream of the workers and the fixed capital will depreciate in a great degree, and the floating will not be subject itself to a struggle with the short supply of inferior.”

Potter’s letter was referred to as the “Manifesto of the Manufacturers” in the House of Commons. Even The Times which had printed Potter’s letter on 24th March 1863 was prompted to respond unfavourably. 

And, the reason that workers emigrated was clear. In the United States, there was vast amounts of open land. Workers who had emigrated to its East Coast, found that their wages were high, because firms could not retain workers. In a short time, workers saved enough to be able to buy a piece of land, and turn themselves once more into peasant farmers. This right of free movement was more or less taken for granted, as a basic achievement of the bourgeois revolution. Restrictions upon it have been quite recent.

The Aliens Act of 1905, was nothing to do with limiting immigration to prevent unemployment etc. As TUC President James Sexton, said in a speech at the TUC Conference that year in Stoke, it was an “appeal to stupid blind prejudice” to gain votes at the next election. “It is claimed,” he said, “that this Bill will relieve sweated workpeople by prohibiting the introduction of cheap labour from other countries. The political dishonesty of the measure needs no other argument than the fact that while the promoters profess to shut out undesirables from the UK in order to help the British workman here, they rushed a measure through to introduce the most undesirable kind of cheap labour into South Africa.” 

In fact, the Act was aimed at Russian Jews, emigrating to Britain. The background to the Bill would be familiar to anyone today. It was the result of widespread moral panic drummed up by the media of the time. As today, they were aided and abetted not only by right-wing Tory politicians, but also by right-wing extra parliamentary forces. In 1905, that took the form of The British Brothers League, which was formed in 1902, by Captain William Stanley Shaw under the slogan “England for the English”. The aim, as with later fascist organisations, was to create a paramilitary organisation. The Brothers League quickly made alliances with right-wing Tories such as the MP major Evans-Gordon, and Howard Vincent MP. 

In the period after WWII, British capital found itself short of labour-power, even after it had encouraged married women into the workforce, made possible, in part, by the introduction of a range of domestic consumer electronic products, to increase the productivity of domestic labour. It was then led to encourage large scale immigration from the West Indies. The introduction of immigration laws in the early 1960's, were again not prompted by a need to share out jobs, to prevent unemployment – at the time there was full employment – but in response to the support obtained by right-wing racist politicians such as Enoch Powell.

In fact, the idea that immigration has to be controlled to prevent unemployment, or to prevent a strain on resources is economically illiterate. It comes from the same Malthusian heritage that also leads environmentalists to make calls for a limitation of growth, and even controls on population growth. In the early 19th century, Thomas Malthus, who as Marx says was a paid lackey of the landed aristocracy, plagiarised the work from twenty years earlier by James Anderson. In doing so, Malthus deliberately falsified it. Anderson was a Scottish farmer, and he wrote polemic arguing for protection of agriculture against imported corn, because he recognised that it would cause corn prices to fall, and agricultural profits to fall with it.

Malthus, in 1815, plagiarised Anderson's work, and used it to support his theory of population where he claimed that population rose in geometric progression, whereas agricultural production rose only in arithmetic progression. From that he argued that as industrial capital grew, and more and more industrial workers arose, the cost of producing food for them would continually rise, so that workers would then starve. David Ricardo used the idea also as an explanation for the rate of profit to fall, as wages rose to cover these higher food costs. 

But, in fact, Anderson had showed that agricultural production could easily meet the demands of population. What is more, Anderson showed that there was effectively no limit to the extent by which agricultural production could continue to rise year after year, and thereby meet the needs of any conceivable rise in population. Even worse for Malthus, Anderson argued that every past rise in production had been driven by a rise in population. As I wrote a while ago, this was illustrated also by Colin Clark, who showed that it was possible to quite easily support a global population many times greater than its current level.

The idea that there is some fixed amount of work to be shared out or that there is some limited amount of resources to be shared out is complete nonsense. Let us take resources first. James Anderson recognised that even in agriculture, the greatest element in the fertility of the soil was not its natural fertility, but the fertility that was established in it as a result of the application of capital, and its repeated cultivation. That resource of the soil, its ability to produce food for more and more people, is then not something that simply exists to be shared out, but something that is itself created by human activity. The more people involved in that activity of providing this resource of the soil, the greater the resource itself.

If we think of another resource such as coal, yes, it exists naturally in the ground, but its not much of a resource there! To be a resource, it needs to be dug out of the ground and transported to markets. That does not happen magically of its own accord, it requires workers to bring it about, and the more workers there are, the more that can be achieved. The same applies to fish in the sea and rivers that need to be caught. But, the same is true of other kinds of resources. If we think of houses, schools, and hospitals or roads, and rail lines, they do not simply appear from nowhere. They require workers to construct them. Rises in population, whether that rise comes from increased births, or whether it comes from immigration is the basis of providing the very workers that create the resources which everyone requires in order to consume them!

And in the same way, there is not some fixed amount of work that is simply shared out, so that if the population rises, each person has less work, leading to unemployment. That is quite obviously the case, the reason being of the need to consume resources that have been created. Because farmers know that the population tends to rise every year, and that the additional people require food, they plan on increasing their own output so as to sell food to this increased market. In the process of increasing their own output, they need to employ additional workers, they need additional materials and so on, which have to be produced, which in turn requires additional workers. So, all of these additional workers then also have wages to spend, which means that they can buy the additional food that the farmer has produced.

But, Marx shows that, contrary to Malthus, when production increases – and this applies even more in industry – rather than this additional production being more expensive it is cheaper, because capitalism always produces more efficiently when it produces on a larger scale, because it enjoys economies of scale, it can use more bigger, and more efficient machines, and so on. So, rather than being a disadvantage, the increased demand that results from a rising population, whether caused by births or by immigration, by enabling capital to operate on a larger scale, actually reduces the prices of commodities, which can now be produced more efficiently. Just think about agricultural production in the US, which, because it produces food on a gigantic scale, to meet the needs of a large population, can use vast amounts of modern technology to reduce the value of agricultural commodities on an unprecedented scale.

When an immigrant comes into an economy, they need food, shelter, clothing and so on, just as does someone born into that society. That means that jobs are created for a range of other people producing those commodities. The advantage for an economy of an immigrant over someone just born into the society is that the former can also work, and produce commodities that are thrown into the market, whereas the latter cannot, and can only draw commodities out until such time as they are old enough to work. Moreover, every worker, on average, produces a value by their labour, which is greater than the value they take out of the market, as wage goods. So, every additional worker thereby adds to the surplus value produced in society, which means that profits are then produced which can be invested, and thereby increase the output and wealth of the society.

Far from being a drain on resources and the economy, immigrants are vital to the increase of resources produced in an economy, and to the growth of an economy. Workers, as set out in previous posts in this series should be in favour of such economic growth, and the accumulation of capital, because it raises our own living standards in the short term, creates the best conditions for us to advance our own interests, and it creates the productive forces we require for building the socialist society of the future.