Shame of Labour's surrender
QUILOOK
Straw bends to racist Tory right Published by Socialist Outlook. PO Box 1109, London N4 2UU. Printed by Tridant Press, Edenbridge WE HAVE got used to Tony Blair's Labour leadership failing to fight the Tories.
But it is impossible not to be startled as well as revolted to see Shadow Home Secretary Jack Straw sail into battle against Labour MEPs on behalf of John Major's reactionary immigration laws.
His intervention to defend the status quo, which has led to the shameful imprisonment of thousands of refugees and asylum seekers, the misery of countless separated families, and a rising tide of deportations, comes as the right wing of the Tory Party is again playing the racist card.
Winston Churchill is back, with new claims of 'tides' of immigrants, minister Charles Wardle has resigned in protest at weakening immigration checks, and the racist and fascist far right is making sinister inroads into the crumbling inner cities and industrial wastelands of Major's Britain.
But Straw denounces Jacques Santer, president of the European Union commission, for being determined to 'destroy British control of its own immigration policy:
"Our position has always been that the issue of border controls and immigration policy must be for the UK government alone to determine, and not for European institutions, " he declared.
Britain, he boasts, in a statement thạt could have been made by any right wing Tory Euro-sceptic, is 'an island with a different history'. He condemned Labour's Euro-MP for supporting free movement across borders for EU residents and legal immigrants.
Soclalists oppose immigration laws, whether they are 'British' or the 'Fortress Europe' policy of the EU. Not so Jack Straw. Is this the real, face of 'New Labour'?