Labour and trade unions must challenge immigration myths

This article has been posted on the Workers Power website, and I think it really demonstrates some of the hypocrisy demonstrated by the main three parties.

The so-called ‘Bigotgate’ scandal – resulting from Brown’s comments after talking to an anti-immigration Labour voter – reveals a lot about how the mainstream parties all deal with the ‘immigration issue’.

If you look at the full transcript of Gordon Brown’s exchange with Mrs Duffy it’s clear that she is pretty typical Labour voter, frustrated with its failure to stand up for working people over the last thirteen years. With the recession having brought mass unemployment, cuts to workers’ pay and our public services, and with the mass media conducting a campaign against migrants, many people are now mistakenly blaming migrants for the effects of the economic crisis.


The right wing media has jumped on Gordon Brown’s comments and used it to argue he is out of touch with working people and has an aloof liberal attitude to immigration. It is a classic example of how the media, including even the so-called impartial BBC, has ‘framed’ the debate on immigration: it is always posed as “a problem” that the parties need to tackle and are failing to.

Migration is never presented as something to be welcomed.

In the conversation between Brown and Mrs Duffy the Prime Minister actually deals with her complaint about Eastern European immigration into Britain pretty effectively by pointing out that, while one million workers have come here, a million Britain’s are also working in Europe – “a million in, a million out” as he put it.

Gordon Brown should not be strung up and leached by the right wing press for a comment he made in a private conversation with his aide.

Instead we need to ask why Labour are letting the right wing media constantly dictate the terms of the ‘immigration debate’ and why no party is standing up for the rights of migrant workers from abroad to come to Britain with their families, and to join the workforce.

Gordon Brown may have dealt with the comment on Eastern European migrants fairly well, but his party policy is to ‘toughen up’ on immigration even further.

And it is Gordon Brown who first raised the idea of ‘British jobs, for British workers’ that was taken up in nationalistic strikes last year, when workers in the energy and construction industry took strike action under the slogan.

Whether ‘bigoted’ is a good choice of words is really not the point. Labour only has itself to blame for letting myths about immigration go unchallenged. 

Moreover, by using nationalist rhetoric themselves, the Labour Party has capitulated to the agenda of the political right. They have let the ‘genie out of the bottle’ and allowed an anti-migrant consensus to form in British society.

And when they are getting no leadership from their party telling them any different it is hardly surprising that millions of Labour voters buy into the idea of an ‘immigration problem’.

That’s why it is urgent for socialists, trade unionist and anti-racists, to get out there and challenge this consensus.

And to challenge it effectively we have to link it to the need for a fightback against the attacks on our services, on jobs, and on pay. Mrs Duffy spoke several times about her concerns for her grandchildren, how they face massive tuition fees if they go to university, and how they will enter a jobless economy.

The great challenge faced by socialists today, is to show how these young workers of the future, the “lost generation”, share interests with the wider working class and the often super-exploited migrant population.

Fundamentally if every migrant left Britain immediately tomorrow, there would still be unemployment, because migrants are not the cause of it.

It’s caused by the capitalist system and it’s failures. The strain on public services, housing and a lack of jobs comes about through the failure of the capitalist parties – Labour, Tory and Liberal to invest in social needs – and now they are all planning to cut provision back further. Labour cannot and will not promise to protect working people from the capitalist crisis, and that’s why we need to build a new, anticapitalist workers party. 

From the Workers Power website