Editorial – Starmer goes nativist

ReformUK fought last year’s general election on a single issue. The same leaflet, distributed everywhere they were standing, declared that this was ‘the immigration election’ and that ‘only Reform UK will freeze immigration’. They won five seats, all from the Conservatives. Labour election strategists were pleased as the swing from Conservative to Reform helped them win in other seats Then, last month, Reform won a parliamentary by-election in a seat previously held by a large majority by Labour. Then, Labour realised that Farage’s party was as much a threat to them as to the Conservatives.

What to do? The decision was made to steal Reform’s clothes and on 12 May Starmer delivered his already notorious ‘island of strangers’ speech in which he claimed that if immigration wasn’t further curtailed native-born Britishers would become, as Enoch Powell had put it decades earlier, ‘strangers in their own country’. Neither Powell nor Starmer defined what they meant by ‘stranger’, leaving native-born people whose parents or grandparents came from the British colonial empire open to being victims of anti-immigration prejudice and attacks.

Starmer’s words was hard-core xenophobia, the language of nativist parties everywhere, as political theorists define parties that declare their aim to be ‘promoting or protecting the interests of native-born people over those of immigrants’. Many might see this as reasonable — why should people already there not get priority over newcomers? — but it is based on the premise that native-born workers and immigrant workers have different interests.

The nativist demagogues claim that the two groups compete not only for jobs but also for housing, hospital treatment and school places. This does appear to be the case but the limited supply of these is not caused by too many immigrants. It’s limited by the nature of the capitalist system under which workers are never going to be supplied, whether from their pay or from services provided by the state, with much more than enough to keep themselves in efficient working order. Keeping immigrants out won’t change this. It wouldn’t mean more or better for the ‘native-born’.

It is not clear why immigration should have become a big issue; probably a result of the media’s over-concentration on the desperate people crossing the channel in small boats. Immigration proper is a normal economic feature of capitalism and waxes and wanes as the economy expands or contracts. Capitalism needs workers because their work is the source of capitalist profits. When capitalism is expanding in some place due to the prospects of profit being good, more workers are needed there. Workers move to where the jobs are, sometimes recruited directly by employers. From a capitalist point of view, employing these migrating workers and providing housing and basic services for them to keep themselves fit to work is well worth it as the amount of profits they produce outweighs the cost.

Socialists say that workers, wherever they were born or whatever their language or state-imposed nationality or what religion they were brought up in, have a common interest in joining together, in the first instance, to face their employer. More widely, they have an interest in uniting to end the capitalist system and replace it with a world without borders based on the common ownership and democratic control of the Earth’s natural and industrial resources.

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