Right Step
Posted on June 1, 2009
A man walks into a bar — the barman says, ‘we don’t want your kind in here, get out’. A man lands at an airport — the Border Agency says, ‘we don’t want your kind in here, get out’.
One of these things is just like the other.
The British National Party launched its European Election campaign with a ludicrous stunt which featured ‘workers’ in hard hats ’seeing to’ men in suits with stick on pig noses, as if the BNP represents the interests of the industrial proletariat (such of it as remains). And there’s that slogan again, British jobs for British workers.
At the Manchester launch of the No2EU — Yes to Democracy campaign, which was attended by eight people, a member of the Communist Party of Britain
proclaimed that immigration controls are a great British tradition and that British workers should be protected from immigrants coming over here and taking their jobs. It took but a second for the real politics of the campaign to come out.
While admitting that No2EU ‘does seem to veer into nationalism’, various kitsch-left commentators advocate a vote for No2EU on the basis that the candidates are ‘likeable’ or ‘impressive’. How far right do these candidates have to move before admiration turns to disgust and they are finally repudiated? In what way can this bourgeois nationalist campaign be adjudged ‘promising’? Antiracist ‘credentials’ count for little when you sign up to a nationalist platform. Racist immigration controls are not ‘progressive’.
Better to fight for a United Socialist States of Europe and for the right of people to live where they want, for the right to work where they live, and for a proper wage — that is, the highest possible under captalism, until it is destroyed — for all.
