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

The EU, Blair and a sense of disgust

Amid all the speculation about Tony Blair seeking to become the first president of Europe, any questions about democracy are put to one side. No wonder the polls show a growing contempt for politicians.

When the Czech Republic is finally browbeaten into signing the Lisbon Treaty, the carve-up of jobs will begin. There is absolutely no suggestion of elections for any of the posts that will the follow the treaty’s implementation.

Instead, candidates will be appointed to jobs like the president of the European Council or put in charge in of foreign policy after the usual horse-trading that goes on between member states. This is yet one more example of the undemocratic nature of the European Union project in particular and the general tendency towards bureaucratic forms of political rule.

Few countries were allowed a vote on the Lisbon Treaty itself and where they were, as in Ireland, voters were in fact compelled to vote twice until they came up with a “Yes”. Yet the treaty imposes sweeping changes to the way the EU is run and deepens the role of the market in the economies of member countries.

For example, public services will be subject under article 16 to new “economic and financial conditions”, meaning that services like health care and education, would be subject to the rules of competition. This will inevitably result in further privatisation.

The European Council and Commission is given 100 new powers across a wide range of policy areas and the new voting arrangements will reduce the voice of the smaller of the 27 nations. National parliaments are given minimal oversight powers but no real clout in relation to decisions taken in Brussels.

Increasingly, the EU is seen as a counterweight to the US and China when it comes to fighting for a share of world markets in a period of economic crisis. The EU, for example, is resisting proposals for a new climate change treaty so as not to be put at a disadvantage against rival trading blocs.

The spectacle of Blair being manoeuvred into position to become president only feeds the sense of disgust with the whole business and encourages an anti-European xenophobia that benefits the Tories and the far right. They are able to play the nationalist card and stoke up hostility to anything “foreign” or non-British. New Labour’s response is yet more undemocratic politics and a contrived pro-Europe attitude which is everything to do with promoting big business (and their own careers) and nothing to do with ordinary working people’s interests.

As we mark 20 years since the 1989 revolutions that swept Eastern Europe, it is the appropriate moment to consider how we renew and take that movement forward. Countries like the Czech Republic won and then quickly lost their new political freedoms to the EU while in Britain, the old political system has decayed beyond recognition.

The perspective has to be one of extending democracy in new ways across the whole of Europe to prevent the right-wing and nationalists seizing the initiative, as they threaten to do. A new democracy cannot be built, however, on the foundations of an old capitalist system but needs to be brought together with a transfer of economic, financial and political state power to the disenfranchised majority in every country. That has to be our internationalist perspective.


Paul Feldman
Communications editor