Ammunition for campaigns
Imagine there's no countries Steve Cohen £2.50 (order it by sending a cheque to: GMIAU, 23 New Mount Street, Manchester M4 4DE). Unequal Migrants: The European Community's unequal treatment of migrants and refugees E4 (order it from JCWI, 115 Old Street, London EC1V 9JR. NALGO Immigration and Nationality Conference Manchester 15 April 1989. Reviewed by Finn Jensen Steve Cohen is familiar to readers of Socialist Outlook for his articles on immigration issues. In June he published this 88 page booklet Imagine there's no countries subtitled '1992 and interational immigration controls against migrants, immigrants and refugees*.
The introduction deals with the patter of British immigration laws and one chapter with the European Community's plans for common immigration controls. The other five chapters are devoted to the history of immigration controls and the resis. tance to these laws in the United States - and comparisons with both Britain and Europe. It is a useful exercise to give a detailed account of the immigration issues in the States, a subject about which there is limited knowledge in Britain. But Steve Cohen aims to be more than just informative:he seeks to show that all the imperialist countries are developing similar immigration controls, and that in many respects the United States is showing the lead.
Campaigns against immigration controls have fought to make clear that the purpose of British immigration laws is to limit the influx of black people from third world countries. What SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 26, July-August 1990
REVIEWS also needs to be understood is that EC countries through the Trevi group and the Schengen group are planning a similar arrangement by 1992 for the whole of the EC. One of the reasons why this is so little known is that the groups are not under the democratic control of any EC institutions. They work in secret!
One of the differences between British and American immigration rules, apart from the explicit anti-communist element in the United States, is that there employers are heavily fined for employing workers without the right to stay. Employers thereby become the extended arm of the state's immigration control. Some European countries have introduced similar employers* sanctions and it is Steve Cohen's guess that Britain will follow this example.
Imagine there's no countries is not a legalistic booklet - although it is written by a lawyer. Some of the immigration laws in Britain, Europe and the US are briefly explained, but the booklet is also full of examples on the consequences of these laws for various individuals and how some of them have organised a fightback.
For more detailed information on the EC's immigration rules in the light of 1992 and the Single European Act the booklet
to read is Unequal Migrants: The European Community's unequal treatment of migrants and refugees, a report by the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants (Policy Papers in Ethnic Relations No 13).
This compares the rights of EC citizens and non-EC citizens to enter an EC country (for work, marriage, to study etc) and looks at what rights they have after entry.
Not surprisingly non-EC citizens have hardly any rights within the EC. About 15 million non-EC citizens already living in an EC country do not have the right to look for work in another EC country and are not even mentioned in the Social Charter. They are only protected by the national laws of the EC country they are living in.
Surprisingly Britain is actually one of the few EC countries that do give some legal protection eg in terms of race discrimination and voting rights. For the majority of the 15 million non-BC citizens living in the EC 1992 'will mean a new regime of greater controls, more restrictions, and the close surveillance of black and ethnic minority communities on the streets and in the workplace.
The JCWI booklet ends with two chapters: "A positive migration and refugee policy for the Community and Campaigning
for these reforms", which attempt to give a political direction to the changes needed in the EC before the end of 1992
These demands should be discussed by the labour movement, which does not have a record of giving migration and refugee issues a high priority. The record of the Labour Party on these issues is abysmal, but the left must fight now for changes.
NALGO is probably the trade union in Britain which has campaigned most consistently on immigration issues. It has successfully defended several of its members against deportation, had a conference last year on immigration and nationality and is planning another this October for all trade unionists.
The report of this first conference NALGO Immigration and Nationality Conference (Manchester, 15 April 1989) has just been published. The contribution from Alistair Darling MP (Labour Party spokesperson on immigration) gives no hint of what policies on immigration a future Labour govemment will introduce.
Whatever govemment is in power in Britain in 1992 it is extremely unlikely to abolish all immigration laws which are making life impossible for black people in and outside Britain. Campaigns in the black community and in the labour movement are needed to defend black people against the effects of these laws but also to fight for their abolition.
Important steps are already being taken. The JCWl and various local campaigns are planning to launch a national Divided Families Campaign. Apart from NALGO's trade union conference a conference on 1992 is planned in Manchester for 27-28 October.
A national march and rally under the slogan Fight racism -smash immigration laws' is also planned to take place in Manchester in October. The three mentioned publications are all ammunition for these and other campaigning activities.
Page 39
SOCIALIST OUTLOOK Changing our message to the oppressed
I found your article (Britain's Black voters: the challenge to Labour, Socialist Outlook, June 1990) particularly interesting as it is over Black issues that the left has found itself trapped between its traditional support for Blacks and its secularism (e.g. the French left and the 'chador' controversy). There were two issues raised which I would like to comment upon, the Black electorate and the debate over Muslim schools.
Your correspondent is quite right to point out the regressive platform of the Islamic Party of Great Britain, as well as to predict that the Black vote would slip away from Labour unless it develops policies that meet [their] needs'. I have for long felt that it breeds arrogance and is in itself a dangerous trend for any bourgeois political party to claim a natural electorate.
This attitude so evidently displayed by the Labour Party has made it in rhetoric alone a friend of Britain's Black population. The token gestures of having a few Black members of parliament and a polite mention in policy documents have not alleviated the political frustration of Black youth, Afro-Caribbean and Asian alike. Meanwhile the older generation in both communities have been loyal supporters of a Party which in spite of racist immigration and no coherent plan of action for the economically and educationally deprived inner-city youth, somehow exuded positive vibes and arguably at local level attempted to address our special needs.
One of the few positive aspects of the Satanic Verses controversy for me, was the politicisation of a large segment of Blacks, the Muslim youth, In the past the sheep-like had dutifully voted Labour with little regard to its past performance or promises for the future, However, a book, was the catalyst to lifting of the mental veil of religious dogma The worldwide Islamic revival and the failure of party political forces to meet their aspirations have led many to view their religion as the panacea for all ills.
It is in this context that the recent gains made by Islamic groups in Algeria's election Page 40
LETTERS must be viewed. The imposition of top-down bureaucratic socialism with secular agenda in a nation and among a community where religion is intertwined with daily life, is unworkable. Our response as revolutionary Marxists cannot be to wring our hands in despair and wail 'class consciousness' al them. We must adapt our ideology - not to backward historical concepts relating to the status of women and so on, but to recognise that by virtue of its christian european background, Marxism-Leninism and Trotskyism have an alien vocabulary to those from vastly different backgrounds.
Since 1979, the growing prosperity of many South Asians have led them to view the Conservative Party as their allies in spite of its ill-concealed racist policies and politicians. It seems that Mrs Thatcher can do no wrong by them, their move to affluent Tory suburbs has spared many of them of the brutaility of the Poll Tax. Their preference for private school education imbues their children with notions of individual gain and a rabid fear of socialism, whose image of high taxation and immense social upheaval creates their recurrent nightmares. Labour will lose its moral high ground as the Asians vote along class lines for the Tories or religious parties while Afro-Caribbean youth do not vote at all in defiance of a political system which views them as little more than social malcontents. Thus the left has no option but to rethink its time honoured ideals if we are to build a broad united front of the oppressed.
The most pressing issue today in the Muslim community is state-funded Muslim schools. The argument raised is that while the state funds Anglican, Catholic and Jewish schools it discriminates against their religion. It is increasingly anomalous that England has an established Church linked so closely with the state. The repeal of the blasphemy laws and the total separation of religion from education and the state must be our aim, (along with a national curriculum that is global in dimension, humane in perspective and genuinely non-racist as opposed to 'multicultural'). However in the short term we cannot ignore the force of religion with its positive and negative aspects,
In Latin America, where the left and plural democracy has been demoralised or decimated by imperialist backed regimes, the Church is a movement inspiring social justice and opposition to the ruling hierarchy; in Burma and Sri Lanka the Buddhist clergy have been ranged against the machinery of
the state (albeit in Sri Lanka, the racial chauvinism of many monks is a powerful reactionary tool).
The left can be principled in its stand by advocating an end to all religious schools while supporting (the idea of) Muslim schools which have the advantage of being within the state system - and therefore are bound by a curriculum which aims to be non-sexist, nonhomophobic and non-racist, but which is diverse enough to reflect the heritage of all Britain's communities and prepare them for the new Europe. It is apparent already that if support and financial help are not forthcoming from the state sector, Muslims will establish independent schools and thereby entrench those institutions, making them as difficult to counteract and uproot as existing independent schools.
It is not historic compromise" that I advocate but adaptability and broad-mindedness while remaining true to our philosophical and political roots. If the left does some soul-scarching, we can realise the gains to be made in the 1990s when Thatcherism discredited could lead to exciting developments for the revolutionary left.
B. Skantha Kumar
London Fighting the poll tax in every area
So Geoff Martin thinks that Merton is "just not that sort of area".
That is, not the sort of area where an anti-poll tax movement, even if relatively small, can be built.
I can only assume from this that if Coun cillor Martin thinks this cannot be done in Merton, those of us just a little further south in Sutton, who have been built such a movement (even if relatively small) are completely wasting their time.
*..Organisations with campaigning experience" have never been particularly thick on the ground in Sutton either. What some of us in the Labour Party have showed, though, is that it is worth going to the trouble to create them - even in "those sorts of areas".
Roland Wood
Sutton
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Outlook, PO Box 1109,
London N4 20U SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 26, July-August 1990
Sloan's Square Psst! Want to see something special? I MET HIM in a side corridor, by arrangement. We each looked over our shoulders to see if the coast was clear. Only a few yards away the Greater London Labour Party was holding its conference: but my mind was on much greater things.
He reached into his briefcase and produced it. I gasped out loud, then looked round again to make sure no-one had noticed. It was glossy, in several colours. There might even have been thousands of them - but I knew this could not be the case: someone would have blabbed.
"See: they have produced one," he said, taking it back from me and carefully replacing it in his briefcase. I was now one of the small circle in the know.
He walked back into the conference. I felt a weight of responsibility to keep his secret.
I had just met the man with the leaflet for the TUC's July 7 demonstration on the NHS. Water bosses tap into pay main PRIVATISED water company chairmen have not waited long before dipping in to the pool of profits they expect to make. In the first flush of success, the chair of Thames Water has just awarded himself a thumping 200 percent pay increase, from £40,000 a year to £120,0K0.
Now water workers are piling on the pressure: they are annoyed that their bosses appear not to have heard of the "trickle down" theory, and have offered SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 26, July-Auqust 1990
COMMENTARY them just 7.7 percent -tied to an extra hour on each working week!
They appear unconvinced that the responsibility of high office means that top managers should splash out on such big salaries for themselves. Nor are most people. While the chair "takes the strain', we strain the water! Newsman's secret obsession "READING THE SUN is like masturbation," says Sun columnist Richard Littlejohn, writing in the UK Press Gazette. Almost everyone does it, but hardly
WHOTHE HECK IS THAT. GORBACHEV? YELISIN anyone will talk about it.
His argument is that most people who confess to having read the Sun claim not to have bought it themselves but to have "found it on a train" - as many men do with pornographic magazines. This can't be right, says Littlejohn, because it sells four million copies a day: somebody must actually buy it!
The analogy with masturbation is fairly apt: the fact he finds hard to come to terms with is that nobody is proud to admit to their links with the squalid gutter tabloid. It is the kind of self-indulgence many middle class people prefer to indulge in furtively and privately.
If reading the paper is seen this way, can it be any surprise people look askance at the ghastly types who make their living writing the racist, sexist, homophobic drivel that fills its pages?
Littlejohn's article defensively tries to justify his habit of writing a rabidly reactionary column as 'normal behaviour, and seems at a loss to understand why people's jaws drop open when, in the middle of otherwise (relatively) civilised company. he confesses how he spends his day.
Long before the Wapping dispute proved it beyond doubt, many people were sure that the editorial staff on the Sun were a bunch of w**kers! How dare they? READING A COPY of the Sun I found on a station buffet table the other day, I came across another article in the series slag
Aging off the antics of the ousted Labour council in Ealing. Marvelling at the variety of terms the writer had found as synonyms for "barmy" to describe what was no more than a right wing council in sheep's clothing, I was more amazed still to see how lamentably the article had failed to come up with anything really wasteful and stupid.
Indeed several of the items of expenditure seemed not only extremely modest, but perhaps insufficient to meet a real need.
How many Sun readers would really wax indignant for example at the fact the council spent just £41,000 on providing courses in typing and self defence for women living on its housing estates?
We know the stereotype Sun reader is a lumpen thug who believes all women belong in bed or behind the sink: but how
many would really take offence at the idea of women learning a useful skill, and being able to defend themselves against violent attack - paid for "on the rates"? Left on the table? *IT SLIPPED THROUGH on the nod: the right wing press will go wild when they see what it says!" exclaimed a jubilant Socialist Organiser supporter, after their Workers Rights Charter slipped through the NALGO conference.
I hope he didn't hold his breath waiting for the furore. The Charter's generalised formulations against sin and for democratic rights (including unionisation of police and armed forces) have not been the cause of much concer among the ruling class or the labour movement bureaucracy.
It was not so much that it went through on the nod: it just had everyone nodding off! A plonker on the loose IT WAS A STRANGE sensation, being greeted by NUPE's general secretary Rodney Bickerstaffe at a social during the COHSE conference as if l was a long-lost acquaintance.
It was so unlike the last time I had spoken to him, when he berated me for an article critical of NUPE's line on the NHS pay dispute in 1982. Was this a new shift towards the hard left?
Then I realised everyone else was getting the same treatment, and that for once Rodders had been allowed to wander freely without minder' Tom Sawyer standing over his shoulder. He was desperate to seem friendly.
For Bickerstaffe the summer conference season must simply fly by: only then does he have the chance to come out and meet the world. The rest of the time he is put back in the broom cupboard at NUPE's head office, while Sawyer gets on and runs the union.
By Harry Sloan Page 41
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