New Labour has made much of its claimed opposition to "social exclusion", and prides itself on having set up the Macpherson Inquiry into the police investigation of the murder of Stephen Lawrence, which has put the issue of "institutional racism" into the headlines.
But Labour’s own policies have continued to exacerbate the very problems they have identified. Despite cosmetic changes and a shift in rhetoric, the grim toll of black and ethnic minority people killed in police custody has steadily risen, with little or no effort to bring racist officers to account. Black people continue to face harassment from the police.
Social tensions, stoked up by Labour’s failure to deliver sufficient affordable housing, jobs or decent living standards in the depressed inner city areas, are again providing a fertile breeding ground for racists and the far right. A new brutal round of racist violence is developing against Black and Asian communities and refugees from Eastern Europe, especially Roma people. Unsurprisingly, little of this is reported in the national and regional media.
But increasingly the victims of media hysteria and racist violence are asylum seekers, who, despite every effort by Labour and Tory politicians to erect barriers to keep them out, still travel to Britain hoping to find peace and prosperity.
In the present-day global economy, money is free to travel. Traversing national frontiers is no problem. Capital is literally flying all over the world - and not only in money form. The same is also true of fixed capital - machinery. Multinational enterprises think nothing of moving whole factories from one part of the globe to another, in search of higher profits, wringing more surplus value out of underpaid work force.
The movement of currencies has little to do with increasing the world’s productive resources. While, before 1971, over 90 per cent of exchange transactions in the world bore some relation to financing trade and future investments, and less than half was speculative, today these figures are reversed: over 90 per cent of all transactions are speculative. There are no closed borders against these currency speculations. Capital can go where and when it wants.
There is, however, no such freedom of movement for people trying to escape from abysmal poverty, racial and political oppression. For tens of thousands of people trapped in these conditions it is becoming increasingly difficult to find a country willing to accept them.
While, once upon a time, people openly moved from one country to another in search of improved living standards for themselves and their families, and if successful were hailed as entrepreneurs. Today, the wretched of the earth, coming from the under-developed to the more prosperous countries of the West, are greeted with scorn as "economic migrants", to set them apart from "genuine refugees."
The irony of the situation is that the poverty prevailing in the so-called developing world is exacerbated by the economic actions of the wealthier countries of the West to which the refugees seek to flee. Conditions imposed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund through structural adjustment programmes are a major cause of emigration.
Controls imposed on would-be immigrants are harsh and often brutal, as governments aim to stop the inflow. The anti-immigrant rhetoric of the government and the media are stimulating racism, although the advocates of anti-refugee legislation argue that its aim is to minimise racist tensions.
The Treaty of Rome which set the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1957, was supposed to eliminate trade barriers and establish free movement of capital within Europe, and stimulate the free movement of people. Migrants within Europe were to have full social and family rights.
But in the 1970s the rights of ’third country nationals’ already settled in European states were severely curtailed. Fortress Europe was being created. In the 1980s Thatcher’s government refused to agree to the Schengen Convention, under which border controls between countries in Europe agreeing to the Convention would be abolished by 1 January 1990. Britain insisted on maintaining its own severely restrictive border controls.
It is within the discretion of governments to determine who is a "genuine" refugee and who is not. British Governments, whether Tory or Labour, have an eye on the electorate who could be swept into a xenophobic view by a manipulative media.
There is no real distinction between the positions of Jack Straw and his predecessor, Michael Howard, both of whom are, incidentally, descended from immigrants, in Howard’s case only two generations ago.
In 1994, around 80 per cent of asylum seekers, amounting to some 16,000 were refused the right to stay. The rate of refusal has now increased. Since coming to power in May 1997, up to the end of October 2000, New Labour has deported over 132,613 people.
The numbers being turned away are still rising. In October 2000 alone, 3,650 people were refused entry or forcibly "removed" from the country, bringing the January to October total to a massive 38,430 (figures do not include dependants).
Detentions of asylum seekers have also increased since Blair took office, both at "immigration detention centres" (such as Campsfield) where a total of 452 people were incarcerated at the end of October, and in prisons, which accounted for a further 1113. Forcible detentions also include the 185 locked up at Oakington Reception Centre, but the Home Office do not consider them to be detainees and therefore exclude them from detention figures. These grotesque centres must be shut down.
But the persecution does not stop for those asylum seekers who are not detained. Thanks to Straw’s recent legislation, a single adult seeking asylum is barred from working, and has to exist on just £36.54 a week in vouchers to be spent at selected shops - only £10 may be converted into cash. These policies have created a new layer of socially excluded people, victims of New Labour’s racism. Vouchers should be scrapped and asylum seekers should have the right to work. Those who cannot must have the same entitlement to decent benefit levels as everyone else.
The existing border controls have led to great suffering and abuse of human rights; they are racist and help to legitimise racism. They must be scrapped. The free movement of people must be recognised as a universal human right - and the fight for open borders take up throughout Europe and other advanced economies.
The Asylum Act, and the barrage of racist laws passed under the Tories must be repealed.
There must be positive action to break down all forms of institutionalised racism. Black communities which have lost confidence in the ability or willingness of the police to protect them against racist attack, or to prosecute those responsible, must have the right to defend themselves. Self-defence is no offence.
But the lessons of past social divisions must be learned. There must be sufficient investment in affordable housing, in education and in socially useful employment in deprived areas to ensure that the provision of jobs, homes and qualifications for people from black and ethnic minorities is not at the expense of denying the same facilities to all who need them.