Single Aspect Blog

I found this the other day while browsing some Facebook pages I link to. While one hears from time to time about the New Labour Polish influx in 2004 it’s easy to forget about the effect that had on the country unless you go to buy a coffee of course. When’s the last time you were served by somebody British born?

I’m certainly not a racist and I spent half my working life traveling the world so I’m not going accept lessons on foreign cultures and their problems. But I think the text below by Simon Elmer is a well written and timely reminder of how immigration has altered our country.

MULTICULTURALISM, CLASS AND BREXIT

Under the New Labour government of Tony Blair the policy and laws on immigration in this country were changed to allow an enormous rise in the number of work permits granted to migrant workers. With the expansion of the European Union in 2004, UK labour markets were opened to workers from the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia. This was not done out of a sudden conversion to the politics of peace, love and harmony between peoples, but to drive down the rising cost of the labour of the working-class population of the UK. By 2014, ten years later, 43% of workers in elementary process-plant occupations (industrial cleaning and packers, bottlers, canners and fillers), 33.6% of workers in cleaning and housekeeping, and 32% of process workers in the food, drink, tobacco, glass, ceramics, textile, chemical, rubber, plastic and metal industries were foreign-born. The increase in the share of migrant labour has been greatest among process workers, up from 8.5% in 2002 to 32.0% in 2014.

The situation we have today, where a UK worker’s request for unionisation, a living wage or a contract is legal grounds for dismissal, is a direct result of this flooding of the labour market. When outraged protesters ask how it is possible that Phillip Green can buy a third luxury yacht with the pensions of 20,000 ex-BHS workers, or sack any employee who strikes for a wage she can live on, they might want to consider where the employment rights, recourse to industrial action and wage bargaining power of the working class in this country went.

Capitalist employers call it ‘competition’, and back it up with eagerly received propaganda in the media and entertainment industries denigrating the British working class as lazy, choosing to live on benefits, and lacking in a work ethic for not accepting the same conditions of employment as Polish construction labourers and Romanian cleaning women. Even these are now standing up and protesting against those conditions. But those same workers who have had the economic value of their labour and skills undermined by the deliberate importing of migrant labour into the UK, who have had their unions made impotent or illegal by successive governments in thrall to the City, and who have seen the social services on which their increasingly impoverished communities rely cut by the politics of austerity, know exactly what it is – the means by which the rich have grown richer beyond avarice and the poor have been driven into greater and more abject poverty.

What the middle-class technocrats of neo-liberal capitalism call ‘multiculturalism’, which has been adopted and propagated as the ideology of our brave new world, is nothing more than the unregulated movement of capital through global markets by multinational corporations that have no country, pay no tax, are bound by no government, concede no rights to their workers, demolish our homes for profit, write our laws to legalise their theft, and determine our governments. And the free movement of labour acclaimed by middle-class liberals as the economic realisation of this ideology is nothing more than the means by which the resistance of workers to their impoverishment has been taken away from them by the influx of a surplus labour force.

In response to all this, which has seen the working class of this country reduced to political and economic impotence and servitude, we now have the lamentations of the European middle classes complaining bitterly about ‘not feeling welcome anymore’ in the UK and proclaiming themselves the defenders of that entirely illusory Britain they have done so much to create, which sees no contradiction in describing itself as built on tolerance, multiculturalism and economic opportunity, while presiding over the greatest assault on the living and employment conditions of the working class in this country in a generation.

It is unfortunate that the working class have had to make this political choice in tandem with the racist right-wing of the Leave campaign – which isn’t to say that the Stay campaign wasn’t just as racist and right-wing; but it’s not as if they’ve been offered anything resembling an electable political party that has cast more than a condescending glance in their direction for several decades now – if ever. But for the politically-correct middle-classes to continue to dismiss that vote as based on racism and xenophobia, and to ignore its actual economic determinations, is to play into the hands of the politicians, bankers, international financiers and media moguls who want to drive this country further to the right, both economically and culturally. More than that, it is a continuation of the political betrayal and economic exploitation of the working class, and the unquestioning embrace of monopoly capitalism, that has been the defining quality of Britain’s London-centric, multi-cultural middle-classes this past decade and more. – Simon Elmer