Xenophobia - they are all in it together

In the wake of the threatened invasion by Romanians and Bulgarians that never was, anti-immigration demagogy continues to darken the political horizon. There is no shortage of politicians eager to exploit xenophobia of all kinds in the hunt for votes.

It’s not surprising, of course, that Nigel Farage, leader of the populist-nationalist Ukip should keep banging the anti-immigration drum. He insisted the other day that his hero Enoch Powell’s notorious “rivers of blood” speech in 1968 remains relevant for today.

But Labour is a close second to the Tories who are raging on about EU benefit claimants. Top of the list is former home secretary David Blunkett, who said in an interview aired last night that he stood by inflammatory remarks made last November. Then he singled out the vulnerable Roma community in impoverished parts of his Sheffield constituency as his target.

Blunkett demanded that Roma immigrants should make more of an effort to fit in with British culture. If not, he warned, there could be a repeat of the 2001 riots in northern cities. He subsequently claimed that his comments had been “misused” by the media.

Poet Benjamin Zephaniah, who interviewed Blunkett, gave him the chance to make a retraction. But no, Blunkett insisted that “I am saying it as it is” and “people need to know you are listening”.

The reasons for tensions between immigrant communities in the Page Hall/Fir Vale area of Sheffield are not hard to fathom. It is a deprived area that has some of the highest levels of poor quality housing in Sheffield, according to a recent report. 

Zephaniah’s programme showed that Page Hall’s poor conditions date back far longer than recent EU immigration. Its cramped streets and 19th century terraces reveal decades of neglect from central and local government (Blunkett was once leader of Sheffield Council).  

But lest anyone thinks we are singling out Blunkett unfairly, the Labour leadership as a whole is stoking up xenophobia, especially amongst working class and poor communities in a grubby search for votes from people they don’t care a jobt about.

Shadow cabinet ministers David Hanson (immigration) and Yvette Cooper (defence) were preying on workers’ fears just as the so-called “mass migration” from Bulgaria and Romania was being talked up.

To sweeten her anti-immigration stance, Cooper claimed the government had ignored calls to strengthen existing legislation that could stop employers undercutting British employees' wages by recruiting cheaper staff from overseas. Hanson concentrated his fire on recruitment agencies that recruit solely from eastern Europe. But ultimately, they were trumpeting the infamous “British jobs for British workers” line of former prime minister Gordon Brown.

Labour’s poster-boy, shadow education minister and historian Tristram Hunt has joined in with his colleagues to say that immigration should have been more controlled in the past. He claimed that “white British boys are not getting the education they want”.

And when asked in an interview for the Fabian Society if he thought that poor attainment in some schools was because of high levels of EU migration, Hunt said: 'Exactly. And that comes back to the supply side, we have to get in there.” 

The fears of the poorest and most vulnerable in society which are easy to stoke up into hatred, as researcher Paul Quinn notes: “There will be an eternal availability of receptive terrain for populist political forces that wish to rally support via negative stereotyping of vulnerable groups. Succumbing to the temptation to cast aspersions on such groups is analogous to lighting matches in a hayfield.”

Scapegoating Roma migrants is now so bad that a cross-party group of MPs has warned about provocative language after Tory council leader Philippa Roe accused tiny groups of Roma in Westminster of causing “a massive amount of disruption and low level crime”. Ironically, inflamer-in-chief Blunkett sits on this parliamentary group.

Of course, the rich are treated quite differently to Romanian workers. The government is inviting 100 wealthy foreigners to join a new visa service which the Home Office says will ensure their passage through the UK border system is “swift and smooth”. No racism where they’re concerned, proving once again that this is a class issue which demands unity in the face of a concerted campaign to divide and rule.

Corinna Lotz

AWTW secretary

Blunkett targets Roma in another shocking outburst

Demonising migrants and minorities is not just the privilege of the Tories. You only have to listen to the latest reactionary remarks of former New Labour cabinet minister David Blunkett to realise that.

Blunkett achieved notoriety during his time as home secretary in the Blair governments for all the wrong reasons. In November 2001, he persuaded parliament in a 90-minute debate to derogate – partially revoke – a section of the Human Rights Act dealing with lawful detention.

Blunkett declared that there was a permanent “public emergency” in the wake of the 9.11 attacks and Britain had to be able to intern terror suspects without due process. 

In April 2002, Blunkett turned his fire on another vulnerable group when he claimed that the children of asylum seekers were threatening to “swamp” some local schools. His incendiary remarks were denounced as “emotive” by the chair of the Commission for Racial Equality (since abolished).

Blunkett’s remarks then were compared to Margaret Thatcher’s talk of Britain becoming an “alien nation” by being “swamped by” newcomers. Now Blunkett has gone one further by declaring that Roma immigrants are responsible for community “friction” and “understandable tensions” in his Sheffield constituency.

Unless the Roma “change their culture” the community could “explode” and there could be rioting on the streets. "If everything exploded, if things went wrong, the community would obviously be devastated,” Blunkett said.

“We saw this is Bradford, Burnley and Oldham all those years ago when I first became Home Secretary. If things implode it’s not outside here that cops it, it’s the community.”

No, this is not UKIP, or a spokesman for far right parties. This is a senior figure in so-called One Nation Labour. Blunkett claimed he did not want to “stir up hate”, but his calls for police to intervene to discourage Roma people “not to spend all their time in the street” points the finger in a provocative fashion.

His remarks on BBC Radio Sheffield came the day after an anniversary of an historic attack on a minority that presaged murder on an industrial scale. On 9th/10th November 1938, Nazi storm troopers led a wave of violent attacks on Jewish people and property throughout Germany and Austria.

Many Jews were killed, thousands sent to concentration camps, synagogues destroyed and Jewish-owned shops smashed. Many fled abroad but as a statement by prominent British Jews points out, Britain was already in the grip of an “aliens scare”.

Newspaper headlines declared: “Alien Jews Pouring In”, and claimed that “Refugees Get Jobs, Britons Get Dole”. The media accused Jewish asylum seekers of “over-running the country. Sounds familiar? In a statement to mark the attack on German Jews, they say:

“75 years after Kristallnacht, racists and fascists inspired by the Nazis continue to attack minorities in Europe. In Hungary neo-fascists target Gypsies and Jews. In Greece Golden Dawn members and supporters brutally attack migrants and political opponents. Here in Britain, minority communities, especially Muslims, have been targeted in an atmosphere that is increasingly hostile towards migrants and refugees. 

 “As Jewish people mindful of this history, we are equally alarmed at continuing fascist violence and the toxic sentiments expressed by many politicians and much of the media against migrants, asylum seekers, Gypsies and travellers. 

“We stand shoulder to shoulder with migrants, refugees and asylum seekers in their efforts to live here in freedom and safety, to contribute to society, and be treated as equals. As Jews we stand together with all communities seeking to combat racism and fascism here and elsewhere.”

When it comes to the statement’s reference to “toxic sentiments”, Blunkett’s are notoriously up there with the worst of them.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Health check reveals electoral politics is sick

Parliamentary election results across the Channel indicate that Francois Hollande’s Socialist Party will gain a majority in France’s National Assembly. But in case anyone gets too excited about a revival of the European “left”, a quick health check of electoral politics is needed.

Only 57% of French voters took the trouble to cast their votes. Former President Nicholas Sarkozy’s conservative UMP party lost support due to its austerity policies. Marine Le Pen’s neo-fascist National Front party took third place in the polls. It increased its proportion from 4% in 2007 to a total of 14% today.

In the former mining town of Henin-Beaumont in the Pas de Calais, the National Front leader has taken the lead over Left-Front coalition leader Jean-Luc Melanchon. Le Pen used scurillous dirty tricks, distributing flyers depicting Melenchon in Nazi garb or featuring messages in Arabic script.

The National Front’s electoral success may still not win it a seat in the French Assembly, but it is a clear sign of discontent in an area haunted by the ghosts of the mining industry. The fact that the Front won 42% of the vote in one of France’s most populous areas on the basis of openly anti-Muslim, anti-Europe and racist demagogy is sobering.

Meanwhile, British politicians are busy making their own bids to stir up nationalism. Ed Miliband used the jubilee flag-waving atmosphere to make crude attacks on Scottish independence with ludicrous statements that a vote to leave the UK would mean that Scots were no longer British!

New opinion polls indicate that Labour is outflanking both the Coalition parties. No doubt, this is fuelled by fears about the ConDems’ vicious austerity policies as well as the Conservative’s bad showing at the Leveson inquiry. But Miliband’s party is also playing along with backward sentiments on race and so-called welfare benefit “cheats”.

Home secretary Teresa May is close on his heels with her own anti-immigration attacks and is attempting to wave the nationalist flag even harder than Miliband. May has repeatedly demanded that the Human Rights Act be scrapped. She has now issued a warning to judges that she intends to override their powers. She wants Parliament to set out guidelines for courts that would render parts of the European Convention on Human Rights null and void.

She said on BBC1 that the right to family life (enshrined in the Convention) was “not an absolute right. So in the interests of the economy or of controlling migration or of public order... the state has a right to qualify this right to a family life”.

(Of course, the ConDems are not going to allow even their nationalism to over-ride their class-monetary “principles”. May’s willingness to break up families and deny people’s right to bring their spouses into Britain is tempered by financial considerations. While you cannot bring your wife or husband into Britain from outside the European Union if you are poor, if you earn £18,600 or more a year, there won’t be any problem.)

But in her crude attempts to ride roughshod over the “legal niceties”, her assaults on human rights are simply another way of whipping up crude nationalism. Sadly for those who hoped that the legislation would undermine endemic racism in Britain’s institutions, years of New Labour government simply made matters worse.

But for anyone who believes that Labour offers an alternative, May is merely following in the footsteps of New Labour’s Home Secretary David Blunkett. As human rights expert Dr Parnesh Sharma has noted “the Human Rights Act never really had much of a chance with Labour disowning it almost as soon as it became law.”

Samuel Johnson’s nostrum that patriotism is the last resort of a scoundrel has never been more true than today. It is the desperate resort of political elites in a discredited system that is losing legitimacy for increasing numbers of people.

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary