Government launches “Immigrants, go home” campaign
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Socialist Party members have sometimes suggested that the party should buy a van and adorn it with socialist slogans and drive it around the streets to publicise the case for socialism.
The government has taken up the idea, but with a sinister purpose. They are going to equip two vans proclaiming "Go home or face arrest" around London in areas with a high population of non-EC immigrants (Hounslow, Barking & Dagenham, Ealing, Barnet, Brent and Redbridge). Since it is impossible to distinguish between a "legal" and an "illegal" immigrant the effect can be imagined. It will stoke up already existing anti-immigrant feeling in these areas. In fact, this may well be the government's intention so that they can stop losing votes to UKIP and the BNP.
With officially-sponsored xenophobia politics in this country is beginning to get even nastier.
Strange bedfellows…ourselves…LibDem and Ukip… http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk-news/2013/jul/25/coalition-row-adverts-illegal-immigrants
But we were first. Not sure that Farage is that critical as he's reported in today Times as raising another bogey that
Quote:"28 million poor people" from Bulgaria and Romania will have automatic rights to work in Britain from 1 January,The figure seems to have gone up from the 6 million who are said to be actually coming that's circulating in pubs at the moment.I think he'd prefer the vans to tour the highways and byways of Bulgaria and Rumania saying "Don't Come".
Australia is well down the road of racist immigration policies. See Pilgers article http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jul/29/australia-gulag-votes-aboriginal-concentration-camps And our own earlier blog entry http://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/2013/07/australias-warm-welcome.html
Immigration officers told to go home:http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=pQ0_TFBVotsThe comments suggest, unfortunately, that the Tories could have judged well that their "(illegal) immigrants, go home" vans stunt will be a vote-winner.
Now Labour is jumping on the anti-immgrant bandvan, reviving Gordon Brown's slogan of "British Jobs for British Workers" and targetting "legal" immigrants:http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/labour-targets-next-tesco-new-2150777Politics in Britain is definitely becoming nastier. It's about appealing for the votes of bigots and xenophobes without appearing to be one yourself.
In the competition for which party is the more anti-immigrant, Labour Shadow (Anti-)Immigration spokesperson, Chris Bryant, has now launched the slogan "No British Jobs for Polish Workers".In this he is echoing what Harry Pollitt and the old Communist Party said in 1947. Here's what Pollitt wrote on page 72 of a CP pamphlet entitled Looking Ahead:
Quote:I ask you, does it make sense that we allow 100,000 of our best young people to put their names down for emigration abroad, when at the same time we employ Poles who ought to be back in their own country …Our own blog comments on Keir Hardie's anti-migrant attitude.http://www.socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/2013/08/same-old-labour-party-story.html The trade union leader Ben Tillet also has a record of attacking workers from abroad. The blog refers to the positive side of the unions eventually dropping their anti-immigrant position and actively going to recruit foreign workers My own blog re-published a statement by Jewish trade unionists made to the TUC conference back in the 1890s, the document being circulated wider by Eleanor Marx.http://mailstrom.blogspot.com/2007/04/voice-from-aliens.html We cannot of course expect Labourites to advocate class struggle to end xenophobia. i believe the SPGB had to formally disassociate itself with anti-Chinese sentiments expressed by some members of the Socialist Party of Canada back in the early part of the 20th C.
Interesting article here on the (generally positive) attitude of the pre-WW1 Socialist Party of Canada to Asian immigrants to British Columbia:http://bataillesocialiste.files.wordpress.com/2007/07/campbell_1999.pdf
The Tories too of course. In fact there seems to be a sort of unofficial sharing of this dirty work between the Tories and Labour, with the Tories targetting "non-White" migrants as the scapegoats while Labour (having the "non-White" vote in their pocket) target "White" ones. I've noticed too that the BBC has joined more in the campaign after they were told off recently for not playing their part enough:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/general-discussion/bbc-told-not-being-populist-enough
Does Tory ideology (or at least Post-Thatcher Friedman conservatives) believe society is/ought to be divided by class? Doesn't it claim other divisions such as race, nationality, productive capabilities, culture, law-abiding etc. are more important? Wasn't this why John Major declared we live in a classless society – this was not a lament?Labour, paying lip-service to class division, has no such excuse on its own terms.
More proof modern 'conservatism' is class-denialismhttp://www.salon.com/2013/08/16/santorum_term_middle_class_is_marxism_talk/#commentsI guess 'our rulers are our betters or know better' doesn't wash anymore, especially in the US
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