Life and Times – Running scared

I’m one of those people who has sympathy for those human beings who have left one country with a view to settling in another – migrants. It doesn’t matter to me whether they’re fleeing from war or persecution or just looking for a better life for themselves. My view is that that human society everywhere would be much enhanced by people being able to move around the world freely. It would give increased satisfaction with life to those doing the moving and also confer advantages on the cultures receiving them, opening these up to different ideas and different ways of doing things.

Keeping out the foreigner
I could only be dismayed therefore – even if not surprised – at the action of the newly elected Labour government in ramping up the previous administration’s policy of hostility to migrants, in particular by introducing new rules for linguistic competence. This will mean that foreigners, whether asylum seekers, ‘legal’ migrants, students or anything else will not be able to live or work in the UK unless they are able (in the words of the government) ‘to express themselves fluently and spontaneously’ in English, and speak it ‘flexibly and effectively for social, academic and professional purposes’. How it might be possible to assess such skills is one matter and is anyone’s guess (and many native English speakers would find them problematic), but the idea that that kind of knowledge of English is essential for participating in work or social life is plainly absurd.

So why is the Labour government taking this action as well as laying down other strictures to make it more difficult for people from other countries, whether refugees or otherwise, to live in the UK? The plain and simple answer is that they are running scared. They have only been in office a short time, yet they have tumbled in the polls, performed spectacularly badly in local council elections and already feel beleaguered by the challenge they are facing from that new group of political opportunists, Reform UK, who are banging the racist, anti-foreigner drum as loud as possible with, so it seems, significant success. They seem to be managing to convince large numbers of workers that the real problems they face – for example insecure employment, making ends meet, fear of crime – are primarily attributable to the relatively small proportion of the population that happens not to have been born in this country. Nothing of course could be further from the truth, but the xenophobic scapegoating of small groups with small differences seems to work well on people who feel under particular economic and emotional pressure.

Uncontrollable system
Add to this the inevitable problems faced by any government trying to control the uncontrollable system that is capitalism – the task the Labour Party has been landed with – and you have the perfect storm. Having placed restrictions on winter fuel payments and made other welfare cuts in the name of ‘making ends meet’, it is now having to row back on some of that so as not to fall uncontrollably behind in the polls, and is hoping that its anti-migrant stance – craven sop to Reform UK that it is – will somehow help it make up the ground. But there too it is facing opposition – not just from anti-racists but from other perhaps unexpected sources too. We are talking here, for example, about the CBI and other employer bodies who are worried that their members might not be able to recruit workers for ‘lower level’ employment of various kinds (eg catering, care work, delivery jobs), about the NHS, and about universities who fear the dire financial straits they are already in will be made worse by further difficulties in enrolling foreign students. ‘They can’t do right for doing wrong’ seems the appropriate adage. But this applies to all governments who undertake the task of running a show that, by its inbuilt chaotic nature, pulls them in multiple different directions. Any principles they may profess before entering office, any ‘good intentions’ they may have go right out the window once they win power and are faced with the need to keep that show – the anarchic system of capitalism – afloat.

Profit or free access?
As for the plight of migrants, finally I have to declare a personal stake in this. My own forebears were foreigners. My grandparents arrived in this country over 100 years ago, probably speaking no English. But they became part of British society, as my parents were too, with English as their first (and only) language. And the picture has been the same with very many migrant minorities and, regardless of government regulations, will continue to be. But what will also continue, both in this country and across the world, is that migrants and ‘native’ inhabitants alike will be subject to the contradictions and uncertainties of a system whose prime purpose isn’t the wellbeing of the majority of its inhabitants – those who have to work for a wage or salary to survive. Its purpose rather is the production and distribution of goods and services for the profit of the tiny minority who own the means of production and distribution, which process governments have the job of overseeing. The system in question, based as it is on buying and selling, wages and salaries and the market, is by its nature full of unpredictability and is bound to leave flailing any government charged with trying to run it. It needs to be replaced by a different system – a moneyless, wageless, frontierless society of free access based on the principle of from each according to ability to each according to need. That’s what we call socialism, but neither the Labour Party, nor any other party claiming to be aiming for social justice within the framework of the current system, can ever be an instrument for achieving it.

HOWARD MOSS