Pathfinders – Abolish the trough
Summer droughts, record temperatures and infernal wildfires are fast becoming the new UK normal, as are tabloid splashes during the peak sailing season when overloaded migrant dinghies manage to make it to UK shores. Cue a shrill crescendo of right-wing rhetoric about how immigrants (they mean Muslims) are ruining the country, destroying British culture, raping children and stealing jobs. The ultimate right-wing paranoia is ‘the Great Replacement Theory’, the modern incarnation of 20th century panics about the Jews or Chinese, in which sharia law comes to dominate the West, and democracy and free speech are annihilated.
Socialists have a different frame of reference, which is the urgent need to abolish global capitalism. To us, right-wing fears are misdirected emotional responses to the pressures and stresses of living in capitalism. When the world establishes post-capitalist common ownership, with no markets or rich elites, no states or governments, these worries will evaporate. When everything in the future is free, everywhere in the world, it’s the same as everyone being rich, and then who cares who is a foreigner and who isn’t? Maybe we’ll all choose to migrate, maybe not. It won’t matter.
But when you’re impoverished today with no hope of a decent life, it’s easy to fetishise what little you do have, like your ‘culture’. British culture, as everyone knows, is the mongrel product of scores of migrations and invasions over millennia. We are built from a mongrel mix of genes and we speak a mongrel Indo-European dialect. We enjoy Indian, Japanese, Italian, Malaysian and Caribbean cooking. We like Swiss cheese, Ethiopian coffee, German beer, American fast food with French fries, Swedish saunas and nowadays, Chinese smart gadgets. Most of our classical music heroes are Russian or Polish or German. We hang out in Spanish resorts or the Austrian Alps or Thai beach bars. If anything’s ruining British culture, it’s capitalist McDonaldisation, not our boundless appetite for diversity.
Can Britain do without immigrants? With a declining home-grown population and skill set, there is an ever-increasing list of essential jobs that are in short supply. Do we not need electricians or engineers? How about plumbers, builders, bookkeepers, IT trainers or lab technicians? There’s a shortage of all these. The understaffed NHS has 27 percent of nurses and 35 percent of doctors from overseas. Does the right want a functioning NHS or not? Foreign-born dentists now outnumber native ones. Would the right prefer bad teeth?
Alright, but what about all the Asian grooming gangs and the supposed increase in migrant-related crimes and sex attacks? Certainly there have been some well-publicised cases. Migrant crimes make headlines, equivalent ‘white’ crimes don’t. Migrants are mostly young men, and young men proportionately commit more crimes. The problem is age rather than nationality. If migration causes crime, the two should rise in lockstep. Instead, when migration was rising, overall crime rates were going down. Now both rates are falling. The right can’t support their argument with reliable government data, because there isn’t any. Crimes are not recorded against immigration status, data collection is not consistent across police forces, and age demographics are not factored in. The overall picture is confused, anecdotal and ‘a bit of a bodge’, allowing some to claim that the migrant crime problem is worse than it is. Conversely, ‘if you are a victim of a violent or sexual crime in the UK, the available evidence suggests that the ethnic makeup of the country means that the perpetrator is most likely to be a white man’.
Legal migrants are statistically less likely to commit crimes, because ‘they don’t want to get kicked out of the country’, while second-generation migrants tend to assimilate, and crime rates come into line with that of the general population. According to the Office for National Statistics, ‘MoJ data shows that proportionately fewer foreign nationals end up in prison for sexual offences than British nationals’, despite the fact that ‘Time and time again audits have found that the police in the UK falsely charge foreign nationals at a higher rate’.
What about the Great Replacement Theory? Currently Muslims constitute around 8 percent of UK and European populations. It’s true that rates are rising slightly against a backdrop of declining European birthrates. At current trends and on a reasonable estimate, Muslims would be a UK majority by 2180, in 150 years’ time.
A lot can happen in 15 years, never mind 150. Does anyone remember the hot-button social issues of 1876? Mass Polish immigration, recently a right-wing concern, reversed spectacularly when the Polish economy started outperforming the UK’s. Any number of other reversals could occur. In any case, how do speculations about future demographics help today’s poor, whom the right supposedly cares about?
People who voted for Brexit to stop immigration must be gutted that immigration then went up. They voted for ‘sovereignty’ and to ‘take our country’ back. But if England really is our country, how come we’re only allowed to walk on 8 percent of it? Why isn’t the right angry about that? The rich own all the land because they stole it from our ancestors during the Enclosures and the Highland Clearances, and then passed laws to legalise their own robbery. People complain that foreigners are stealing their jobs. Why aren’t they angry that the rich stole the entire world, forcing the rest of us into centuries of landless wage-slavery? Why does the right despise socialists, the very people who call out this crime against humanity and demand that we take our entire world back?
Could it be that prominent right-wing leaders aren’t interested in challenging the guilty rich, who cause all our working-class misery? Could it be that they hope to join the guilty rich, by whipping up popular unthinking frenzy against hapless scapegoats in order to get their own snouts in the trough? Well, socialists have a simple answer for that. Abolish the trough. Capitalism, not immigration, is humanity’s real enemy.
PJS