The Logic Of Racism
Posted on June 8, 2008
If you thought the British Labour Party’s long journey from the party of social democracy and social justice to the party of managerialism, privatisation and lowest common denominator politics — aka ‘New Labour’ — had reached its nadir, you were wrong. The process of political triangulation set in motion by Neil Kinnock, which was intended to make the party electorally palatable to the petit bourgeoisie and those déclassé elements aspiring to claw their way over the petit-bourgeoisie, has moved the Labour Party ever further to the centre, to the point where it is in serious danger of becoming a party of the right. Socialism is ‘out’ — labelled as ‘loony’ — while pandering to the interests of the ruling class and prostration before the prejudices of the most reactionary and ignorant sections of the electorate is ‘in’.
The most worry manifestation of this drift is ‘New Labour’s’ record on immigration and asylum seekers. Now the ‘New Labour’ MP for Chorley, Lindsay Hoyle has come up with the suggestion that a special army battalion — to be based in Britain’s major ports — should be created to keep ‘illegals’ out and furthermore, that the government should negotiate with the government of France, to allow British troops to be stationed on French soil for the purposes of patrolling French ports as well!
The MP told the [Lancashire Evening Post] that constituents are desperate for the government to take tough action against illegal immigration [...] “Clearly illegal immigration is bothering people. What we have got to do is put security forces in”.
Hoyle’s proposal is precisely the sort of knee-jerk pandering to isolationism and little-englander nationalism which was once the preserve of the Tories and their outgrowth the UKIP, a narrative in which crime is committed by ‘foreigners’ and ‘illegals’ who make no useful contribution to the life and economy of Britain, and whose behaviour and character is determined not by their objective circumstances but by — semi-mystically — their ethnicity (or even ‘blood’), while the sturdy English yeoman is their honest and law-abiding victim. Racist scaremongers constantly strive to manipulate public opinion by associating asylum seekers and migrants with words like ‘terrorist’, ‘rapist’ and ‘murderer’ while carefully drawing attention away from the fact that the overwhelming majority of crimes, including all but one bombing, in Britain are committed by — white — British citizens, when asylum seekers are themselves fleeing war, terrorism, rape, torture and murder.
Compounding this are the myths that asylum seekers, who are barred from working, live the ‘life of Riley’ on government handouts (of £38.96 per week, barely enough to feed yourself, let alone wallow in the lap of luxury) and that migrants are ’stealing British jobs’, when the reality is that migrants from poor countries are willing to take low-paid and often unsafe work in appalling conditions without workers’ representation — remember the death of cockle-pickers in Morecambe Bay in 2004 — they are not in competition with British workers who will not, quite correctly, work in such exploitative conditions — and neither should migrant workers. Hoyle’s constituents should be demanding a fair living wage and safe working conditions for all. And far from overloading the social welfare system, asylum seekers comprise only one in every two hundred people in receipt of government benefits.
Lindsay Hoyle has plumbed new depths of vileness in the ‘New Labour’ project and should be expelled from the party — in fact our preference would be for his head to displayed on a pike — but we hold scant hope of either course of events ever coming to pass.
No racist immigration controls. No sans papiers. No detentions. End deportations.
Stop throwing people out of hospital beds and leaving them to die — a practice it should be noted, used as partial justification for prosecuting the 1990 Gulf War.
Solidarity with the oppressed.
No One Is Illegal!
