Tag Archives: anti immigration

Tory Party conference – echoes of Nuremberg

Posted by on

Category
Articles
Tags

LBC’s James O’Brien did a superb job of placing the anti-immigration narrative of the Tories, unleashed at their first post-Brexit party conference in Birmingham, into its rightful and very worrying context. Simply put, we have entered a politics that bear a striking resemblance to that which Europe lived through in the 1930s, when in similar conditions of economic depression, austerity, and the ensuing assault on workers’ wages, conditions, and living standards, the politics of race and ultra nationalism were able to achieve mainstream legitimacy and traction.

If, by now, there is anybody on the left who still believes Brexit somehow enhances the prospect of a more just, equitable, and progressive society coming to pass, they are not only delusional but also mendacious. Those who sided with Farage and company — and here George Galloway with his obscene appearance at that now notorious UKIP anti-EU rally, where he baldly proclaimed, ‘Left-right, left right, all the way to victory,” springs to mind — in making the case for “taking the country” back should be hanging their heads in shame over the reality of Brexit, as opposed to the theoretical and doctrinal wonderland they inhabited while campaigning for it.

The warnings issued by those who saw further and deeper, that Brexit would unleash a tidal wave of right wing consciousness across the country, such as that which followed the Falklands War, were blithely ignored – even contemptuously dismissed – by people who should know better. The result is that we now have a Tory Prime Minister embracing the politics of anti-immigration and xenophobia in a move designed to curry favour with an indigenous white working class that has been persuaded that dwindling public services, low pay, and job insecurity is a product of immigration rather than inequality and Tory austerity.

With her speech — which followed on from an even more reactionary effort by her Home Secretary, Amber Rudd — Theresa May has drawn a clear dividing line in British society on the question of immigration and the status of migrants. In other words, you either stand in solidarity with migrants or you stand against them. Any nuanced middle ground left available to stand on when it comes to this question has now disappeared

Much of the responsibility for this state of affairs, the ability for such nakedly and brutal xenophobia to take root, lies with the left. As Ben Chu wrote in The Independent:

The academic evidence we have is very clear that immigration does not undermine average UK living standards, but actually enhances them. Some researchers have found that there is a negative impact on the wages of unskilled natives — but only a mild one. Overall the impact is positive.

Yet some on the liberal left, despite acknowledging this evidence, are moving to the view that telling people that they’re wrong when they complain of a negative economic impact of immigration is condescending.

Prior to the EU referendum, British society was already being dragged deeper and deeper into a swamp of identity and anti-politics. Seen in this light, Brexit marks an all-too regressive and reactionary culmination; tantamount to the reassertion of far right nostrums not only on free movement, but also on all immigration, minorities (particularly Muslims), and multiculturalism.

The reason such a vile and toxic mix has been able to gain the traction it undoubtedly has is austerity and the unleashing of the class war it describes and has informed. It has led to the collapse of the political centre ground, not only in Britain but all across Europe and the US, where Donald Trump’s campaign for the presidency has served to elevate the same xenophobic and reactionary politics to mainstream legitimacy as Brexit. The space vacated by this collapse has been largely filled by the right and far right rather than the left. In sum, the right is currently winning the battle of ideas with the result the triumphalist re-branding of the Tories as a patriotic defender of British workers against their foreign counterparts and interlopers, coming over here to steal British jobs and push down the wages of British workers.

Jeremy Corbyn’s response to May’s conference speech, while of course welcome, was an exercise in attacking the Brexit horse after it has bolted. He and his team failed to understand the danger Brexit posed during the EU referendum campaign, else why was his campaign so lacklustre and woefully dispassionate?

The SNP’s Nicola Sturgeon, who is the only party to leader to have emerged from the wreckage of Brexit with any credit, again proved her mettle when in response to May’s conference speech, she opined:

Theresa May’s vision of Brexit Britain is a deeply ugly one — a country where people are judged not by their ability or their contribution to the common good, but by their birthplace or by their passport. It is a vision the Scottish Government wants no part of, and one which we will never subscribe to.

The British people in 2016 are sleepwalking, just as people in Germany and elsewhere in the 1930s sleepwalked, into a sewer of right wing demagoguery and racism. Nobody should make the mistake in thinking it can’t happen here.

It can.

Brexit is racism and racism is Brexit

Posted by on

Category
Articles
Tags

imagesBy now it could not be clearer. Rather than usher in a more progressive Britain, freed from the shackles of that nasty, undemocratic EU in Brussels, Brexit has merely served to give licence to racism and unleashed precisely the carnival of reaction that many feared and warned that it would.

This story carried in The Independent makes sober reading. It reveals a spike in racially and religiously motivated hate crimes in the wake of the EU referendum, involving

  • Gangs prowling the streets demanding passers-by prove they can speak English
  • Swastikas in Armagh, Sheffield, Plymouth, Leicester, London and Glasgow.
  • Assaults, arson attacks and dog excrement being thrown at doors or shoved through letter boxes.
  • Toddlers being racially abused alongside their mothers, with children involved as either victims or perpetrators in 14 per cent of incidents.
  • A man in Glasgow ripping off a girl’s headscarf and telling her “Trash like you better start obeying the white man.”
  • Comparisons with 1930s Nazi Germany and a crowd striding through a London street chanting: “First we’ll get the Poles out, then the gays!”

With the collapse of the centre ground as a consequence of the economic crisis and austerity, it is the far right rather than the left that is winning the battle of ideas, emphatically illustrated by Brexit – a political campaign driven by the ugly politics of anti immigration and underpinned by xenophobia, racism, and the reaffirmation of a white supremacist British identity in reaction to multiculturalism.

Those on the left who campaigned for and supported Brexit did so having imbibed and surrendered to the far right on the issue of immigration and the free movement of labour, which is a symptom of the free movement of capital and the gross inequality between states that is a by-product of neoliberalism.

The worse illiterate is the political illiterate, Brecht reminds us, and this political illiteracy has never been more in evidence than when it comes to the pro-Brexit left. Providing progressive and left cover for white supremacy counts as many things, but socialism is most assuredly not one of them.

British society does not and never has had a problem with immigration. Instead it has had a longstanding problem with the maldistribution of wealth and resources, and a cultural problem with racism, reflective of the apotheosis of its colonial past and the cultural values incubated thereby.

Rather than a victory for the left, Brexit has revealed the willingness of its left-supporting adherents to throw migrants and minorities under the bus in order to appease the most base, tribal, and regressive instincts of a working class which in large swathes of the country has been persuaded that migrants and minorities rather than Thatcherism and the inequality it has entrenched is responsible for their plight.

They should hang their heads in shame.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I am not voting for the EU, I am voting against Brexit

Posted by on

Category
Articles
Tags

 

imagesThere are times when the truth is not enough and only the unvarnished truth will do. We have arrived at such a time just days away from the EU referendum on June 23rd.

The unvarnished truth when it comes to the campaign for Britain’s exit from the European Union, Brexit, is that it has unleashed the ugly forces of right wing extremism, racism, xenophobia and British nationalism in a society that had allowed itself to grow complacent when it came to the aforementioned, doing so in the mistaken belief that common human decency was as British as Big Ben; in other words in the belief it could not happen here.

Recent horrific events reveal that it can and has happened here.

Over the past few months of the Brexit campaign we have borne witness to a scapegoating and demonisation of migrants by mainstream politicians and right wing newspaper columnists reminiscent of the way Jews were scapegoated and demonised in Germany in the 1930s, and on the same grounds – i.e. they pose a threat to our way of life; they hold alien cultural beliefs and practices; their values are at odds with our values.

This scapegoating has been so intense, so vehement, it has raised the political temperature to the point where an elected MP who dared raise her voice in solidarity with migrants and for Britain’s continuing membership of the EU was murdered in the street in broad daylight in an act of right wing extremism and terrorism, reminiscent of the way democratically elected politicians were murdered in Germany in the 1930s, depicted as ‘traitors’ from the vantage point of the swamp in which fascism swims.

It is important to understand that the economic and social conditions that existed in depression-ravaged Germany back then have been replicated in Britain and across Europe today on the back of an economic recession compounded by the implementation of austerity, which has been tantamount to a mass experiment in human despair. This recession and resulting Tory austerity have combined to leave millions impoverished, marginalised, angry and fearful, thus perfect fodder for the kind of right wing populism and demagoguery that has underpinned a campaign that has been an insult to common human decency never mind the nation’s collective intelligence.

Without the horrific murder of Labour’s Jo Cox, UKIP leader Nigel Farage’s obscene anti-immigration poster should automatically have marked the point of no return for a Brexit campaign that has from the outset been predicated on exploiting the impact of austerity by politicians who have been among its biggest champions, inferring that the huge pressure brought to bear on the nation’s public services, on the social and private housing sector, and on the NHS is due to immigration rather than the extreme cuts to public spending and investment that have taken place.

As much as the EU needs to be reformed in the interests of its citizens rather than big business and the financial sector, it has been a last line of defense against a Tory establishment that would relish nothing more than to pull Britain out of the European Convention on Human Rights, a statutory requirement of EU membership, and get rid of the progressive legislation that we presently enjoy via the EU on workers’ rights and protections, maternity leave, paid holidays, consumer protection, and the environment. And this is without taking into the account the harm it would do to the economy in terms of investment, exports, jobs, and the value of sterling.

But these issues are trifling compared to the main one, which is the worrying emergence and normalisation of far right nostrums and the ‘othering’ of migrants, minorities, and asylum seekers. It is a toxic brew that has gained traction on the back the growing anger of the millions who have been battered materially, psychologically, and spiritually by a Tory government in whose control the economy has been wielded as a sword to punish the poor and the vulnerable instead of a held up as a shield to protect them from circumstances and factors beyond their control.

A vote to Remain on June 23rd is now a vote for hope rather than despair, for progress rather than regress. It is a vote against the politics of division and hate, against scapegoating and in defiance of a base tribalism that offers the country nothing apart from apartness.

We can no longer delude ourselves that racism is a marginal phenomenon in Britain. It is not. Indeed, it would be hard to recall a time when it has been more prevalent than now. This is not to accuse everyone who supports Brexit of racism, of course not. It is, however, a campaign in which racism has been afforded the opportunity to grow and incubate in a way it has not in living memory.

Warning of the danger of lapsing into complacency when it came to the possibility of fascism re-emerging after its defeat in the Second World War, German playwright Bertolt Brecht wrote: “The womb from which this monster emerged remains fertile.”

How those words resonate now, today, in Britain, seven decades later.

My vote on June 23rd will not be cast as a vote for the EU; it will be cast as a vote against Brexit and the ugliness it represents and has unleashed.

My enemy does not reside in Brussels. It resides right here at home.

 

 

The vile murder of Jo Cox MP

Posted by on

Category
Articles
Tags

imagesAccording to witnesses the ‘beast’ that slaughtered Jo Cox screamed ‘Britain first!” before carrying out his foul deed. Anyone who believes that this act of brutality is unconnected to Brexit and its ugly politics is either guilty of mendacity or wallowing in ignorance.

As Polly Toynbee writes in the Guardian: ‘The mood is ugly and an MP is dead’.

Oh how the words of Bertolt Brecht, warning of complacency when it came to the possibility of fascism ever re-emerging , resonate today. Brecht wrote” ‘The womb from which this monster emerged remains fertile.”

The pro-Brexit left need to know that they are dancing with the devil. I urge them to turn back before we enter an abyss from which there is no coming back.

Brexit is the legimisation of racism, right wing extremism, and the politics of hate against ‘the other’ in response to austerity. It is everything that previous generations of socialists, communists, and progressives have resisted with their liberty and lives if need be.

As I have just written elsewhere, we have borne witness to the ideological collapse of the pro-Brexit left.

Enough is enough.

Shame on those who have attempted to attribute a progressive character to this racist campaign and cause.