HP Source: Immigration (there, we said it)

 

‘It is racist, whether or not it feels racist,

the truth is our Prime Minister’s a real racist.

‘You should be grateful, we’re the least racist.’

I say the least racist is still racist.’

 

Much is made of the Tories demolishing the so-called ‘Red Wall’ in traditional Labour safe seats at the last election.

This was driven by their previous Tory governments’ policy of austerity and voters desire to see immigration ‘cut’, as Johnson’s populism promised to ‘level-up’ these areas with the supposed prosperous regions of London and the south-east

‘People living in the capital face some of least affordable housing in the country, and the highest rates of income inequality’

On the face of it these regions are more prosperous; research from IPPR North shows that 47% of new jobs created between September 2009 and September 2019 went to these regions.

By comparison, the north-east and north-west of England, and Yorkshire and the Humber, which counts for 28% of the population had only 17% of the country’s new jobs

Despite this disparity in job creation, Londoners are not benefiting from regional economic divides.

People living in the capital face some of least affordable housing in the country, and the highest rates of income inequality.

A recent report from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation found the city had the highest rate of poverty, with 28% of people trapped in relative poverty after housing costs.

 

‘The wind howls through the empty blocks looking for a home,

I run through the empty stone because I’m all alone’

 

Nonetheless we Londoners do feel duty bound to help our friends in the north, perhaps as much as the government wants to help immigrants!

It is now time to review the governments immigration plans which, predictably, were acclaimed by the Daily Mail and its readers.

Many, still hungover from their Brexit parties no doubt stayed-up all night to celebrate. The policy, driven by a points system, is based on allowing in people the government feels will benefit the country; people will need 70 points to apply to work here.

 

 

What this means is:

 

• UK borders will be closed to non-skilled workers, and all migrants will have to speak English.
• Anyone wanting to come to the UK to work must have a job offer with a salary threshold of £25,600. A salary ‘floor’ of £20,480 will be acceptable in special cases where there are skill shortages, e.g. nursing.
• No self-employed people will be coming here
• Border control will no longer accept ID cards from countries such as France and Italy.
• The skills threshold for foreign nationals wanting to work in the UK will be lowered from degree to A-levels or their equivalent.
• The cap on the numbers of skilled workers is being scrapped, and a small number of highly skilled workers will be allowed to come in without a job.
• The right of artists, entertainers, sports people and musicians to enter for performances, competitions and auditions are unchanged.

 

The following shows the percentage of workers from EU countries, and the sectors they work in:

 

 

Brexiters aside, these measures have been poorly received. One charity, the East European Resource Centre, fears that businesses will hire undocumented workers if the supply of low-skilled workers is choked off by the immigration policy.

‘Let’s not kid ourselves: someone will have to do the dirty, low-paid jobs, from construction to food processing to social care. Where are these workers going to come from?’ said Barbara Drozdowicz, the centre’s chief executive.

‘Let’s not kid ourselves: someone will have to do the dirty, low-paid jobs, from construction to food processing to social care’

Then there is social care, a sector already over-stretched and under-funded. The proposed immigration system will stop the current supply of cheap labour, forcing up wages will have to happen if Johnson is to carry-out his pledge to ‘fix’ the system.

The sector already has 122,000 vacancies, and this decade’s 25% increase in people aged over 65 means another 580,000 staff will be needed to care for them over the next 15-years.

In London, 40% of care staff are from overseas, median average pay as of last March is £8.10 an hour, with parts of their hours unpaid: a quarter of staff are on zero-hours contracts.

Working in supermarkets pays more, without the emotional stress.

The sector is being put in a catch-22 situation: caring will not qualify as sufficiently skilled to earn a visa, and the low pay means the work is seen as ‘unskilled’.

However, pay is so low because the government, through local authorities, refuses to pay a fair or even a market rate for the job.

‘pay is so low because the government, through local authorities, refuses to pay a fair or even a market rate’

Anita Charlesworth, the research and economics director of the Health Foundation, says it would cost £10bn to return social care just to the 2010 level of care.

If you add in Johnson’s electoral pledge of stopping people having to sell their homes to fund their care, and capping the maximum anyone need pay at £25,000, another £4bn is required.

And now we turn to the enforcer of these proposed rules, the misleadingly named Priti Patel, the Home Secretary.

She, quite mindlessly suggested that the 8 million people between the ages of 16 and 64 who are ‘economically inactive’, could be given the skills to do jobs in sectors where there were shortages caused by the new points-based system.

Beyond the miracle of turning the inactive into active there are two-points I wish to consider regarding the home secretary, the first being the Home Office itself.

There have been several allegations in the press of her ‘bullying’, ‘belittling officials’, creating an atmosphere of fear, and being out of her depth.

According to officials from one of her former departments, Priti Patel was given to coming out of her office and inquiring: ‘Why is everyone so fucking useless?’

The Home Office, as it attempts to deliver the Tories policies has become a ‘hostile environment’ towards immigrants and asylum seekers.

Rather than opting for subtle and sensitive, Johnson has promoted an inexperienced right-wing loyalist who is carrying anti-Europeanism with all the enthusiasm of one of Hitler’s Gauleiters.

‘an inexperienced right-wing loyalist who is carrying anti-Europeanism with all the enthusiasm of one of Hitler’s Gauleiters’

Patel’s words and actions shows that, however little she understands or cares about the impact of the immigration proposals, it is another ‘job done’ moment for the government, just like Brexit itself.

The second point is one that has been made by many commentators; under the proposed rules Patel’s parents wouldn’t have qualified to come to this country.

Neither would have Sajid Javid’s parents; his father was a bus driver, championed by the Tories as an example of social mobility.

As a Muslim, they used him as a defence against charges of racism and Islamophobia.

Obviously paying no need to the help his father gave him, Sajid Javid ,when asked, in 2018, if he was sad about supporting laws that would have barred his own father replied that he was ‘very optimistic about our future because … we will remain the global-outlook nation that welcomes people from across the world.’

Looking at his response, maybe he misheard the question?

‘under the proposed rules Patel’s parents wouldn’t have qualified to come to this country’

In effect, their parents came here, did their jobs well, and bore children who have became so well-integrated and influential that they are no using their power to change the very laws that allowed their own existence in the first place.

This denial of their parents’ generation is an insult to the contribution of Britain’s multiracial post-war working class, who came from all corners of the empire to do social care, work in hospitals, staff factories and drive the buses.

 

‘They all work, they’re the working mass

They all work for the ruling class

The State relies on the working man..’

 

This isn’t a policy based on economics, it is political, skills apartheid sorting people into ‘good migrants’ and ‘bad migrants’.

The success of this is paramount to the future of this populist government.

And it isn’t just the UK that is getting tough on immigrants and minorities

‘it is political, skills apartheid sorting people into ‘good migrants’ and ‘bad migrants’’

Since Sunday, 21 people have died in race / religious influenced rioting in India.

Most of the dead were Muslims, the places of worship that were vandalised were two mosques and a Sufi shrine.

The thugs frisking reporters, confiscating their phones and beating them up were all Hindu supremacists, the shops and homes that burned were nearly always belonged to Muslims.

Whilst there is evidence of Muslims rioting, and of a man identified as Muslim firing a gun, the organisers of this devastation were local politicians affiliated to the Bharatiya Janata party (‘BJ’), India’s ruling party.

We will come back to the BJ a little later

It was their speeches that triggered the violence, while the Delhi police, which reports to the home minister (and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s right-hand man), Amit Shah, either looked-on, arrived after the event, or actually participated in the violence against people demonstrating against Modi’s discriminatory citizenship law.

Perhaps then there is little surprise that, on his recent visit, the US president, Donald Trump, was greeted so warmly. Trump said, ‘America loves India. America respects India. And America will always be a faithful and loyal friend to the Indian people.’

And, Trump’s obsession with halting foreign immigration is shared by his Indian counterpart, prime minister Narendra Modi.

Trump has previously complained about immigration from ‘shithole countries’, suggesting policies prioritising migrants from ‘countries such as Norway’.

‘Trump has previously complained about immigration from ‘shithole countries’’

Trump’s first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, called for a return to something like the 1924 Immigration Act, which banned immigration from Asia and severely restricted the entry of other people considered racially undesirable.

In the early 20th century, the US deployed citizenship strategically excluding non-whites and non-Christians, which impressed Hitler.

In Part II of Mein Kampf, he decries the idea of a state in which ‘race and nationality’ play no role in citizenship, proposing a ‘national state’…but there is at least one state in which feeble attempts to achieve a better arrangement are apparent: the United States of America, where they absolutely forbid [the] naturalisation of certain defined races, and thus are making a modest start in the direction of something not unlike the conception of the national state.’

Hitler introduced his own version, the Nuremberg Laws, in September 1935, which prohibited non-Aryans from marrying those of ‘German blood’ and created a category of second-class citizenship for Jews.

This concept of a national state also found popularity outside Europe.

VD Savarkar, the Indian political theorist of Hindu nationalist ideology, was influenced by European ethno-nationalism, using the Nuremberg Laws as a model for eventual Hindutva policy towards India’s Muslim residents.

Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (‘RSS’) is a Hindu nationalist movement dating back to the mid-1920s, many of whose members venerated Savarkar.

‘India’s ruling party, has begun to implement changes in citizenship laws that echo the Nuremberg Laws’

Senior leaders, such as MS Golwalkar, were influenced by Mussolini and Hitler. The BJ party, the political wing of RSS and now India’s ruling party, has begun to implement changes in citizenship laws that echo the Nuremberg Laws.

India’s new Citizenship Amendment Act allows for a fast-track to citizenship for non-Muslim migrants, thus discriminating against Muslims.

The proposed national register requires residents to prove their citizenship with documentation – which many in India lack.

Together, these laws place Muslims without documentation in a quandary. Large detention centres are being built to house India’s Muslim residents who are declared ineligible for citizenship.

History shows the horrific consequences of laws such as this, why, then, are so many countries going down this path?

Regular readers will now that I have long voiced concerns that we are returning the politics of the 1930s, where Fascism was a dominating voice. People might only be nationalists today, but it isn’t where you start it’s where you finish; it’s a slippery slope to racism and Fascism.

 

‘We reach out over race and hold each other’s hands.

Then die in the flames singing ‘we shall overcome’

 

OK lyric spotters some powerful tracks this week that perfectly complement a hard-hitting and in many ways worrying article.

By way of an homage to the Priti ugly one proposed by the government, we have a slightly squiffy points based system this week, with entries accepted via the usual channels and additionally by hand to Lunar House.

I can proudly claim to have troubled the scorer this week, but have to say that only was only by snaring the lowest hanging fruit; first up, and instantly recognisable from the media attention it garnered – Dave with ‘Black’. Powerful, clever, brilliantly staged – all for just 1 point?

Next, and he’s not exactly dishing them out – ‘oh, it’s too easy, a great song – 1-point’. Just take it and lap up those Clash City Rockers and ‘London’s Burning’

Then ‘now it’s getting difficult, a very angry US punk band’; when Philip admits it, I know I’m never going to get to Minutemen and ‘Fascist’ – wet your whistle for all of 58 seconds and gorge on your five, count them, five points.

Lastly, and it felt like Tyson Gilbert was showboating –  ‘I will doff my cap to you if you get this’; he even said it was the ‘return of an old favourite’, so I had some idea of where to look.

Didn’t help, but one of the joys is that it has introduced me to an excellent track that I was unfamiliar with – David Bowie and ‘Black Tie, White Noise’; memories of Rodney King and the LA riots and a great and totally appropriate track – 5 points if you got there, but for me at least his cap remained firmly planted. Enjoy!

 

 

 

Philip Gilbert is a city-based corporate financier, and former investment banker.

Philip is a great believer in meritocracy, and in the belief that if you want something enough you can make it happen. These beliefs were formed in his formative years, of the late 1970s and 80s

 

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