On the topic of immigration

[ed miliband]

I've noticed a rising trend amongst establishment figures to frame anti-immigration policy as something that appeals narrowly to the working class - the run-up to the Labour Party leadership is apparently going to see more anti-immigrant rhetoric in the hope that it will appeal to working class people, for example. When mainstream journalists talk of Labour's failings they always mention immigration in conjuction with the working class, as if the worst thing Labour did to the working class was make them endure migrants. I've also noticed liberal commentators poor scorn over what they see as filthy proles, and what they percieve their views on immigration to be.

The recent 'Bigotgate' incident - when Brown called an working class woman a bigot for a comment about Eastern European immigration - brought up much of this, with commentators from both the left and right rushing in to castigate Gillian Duffy basically for being working class (at least that is the way I percieved things to be), and not moderating what she said in the Prime Minister's company. On another forum people hailed Brown as something of a hero for calling the woman a bigot ("because that's what she is"), but of course turned a blind eye to the fact that Brown's own stance on immigration is hardly the most enlightened in the World. Recent strikes at oil refineries have been portrayed in the media as anti-immigration strikes, but lots of evidence suggests the strikes were actually to do with union membership - and yet the media rushed to shout about how this was a sign the working class were really, really anti-immigration.

Now obviously there is much concern about immigration, and I can honestly understand it (this does not mean I agree with it). I can honestly even understand why an unemployed person might say 'they took our jobs' (although I think this is a mythical line - used a lot by people recounting tales of anti-immigration, rarely used by people in real life). But I cannot understand where this idea that the working class are a reactionary mob is coming from - and yet it's suggested continuously, and particularly by liberals.

Has anybody noticed this? Can anybody shed some light on it?

[Blake's Baby]

Of course. Some working class people are reactionary, racist, xenophobic and/or chauvinist.

The point about it being in the media a lot is because to paraphrase someone or other 'the ruling ideas of any epoch are the ideas of the ruling class'. The working class is made out to be inhererntly racist and xenophobic so the state can:
1 - 'rescue' the indigenous working class from influxes of 'foreigners' 'aliens' 'illegals' 'immigrants' 'bogus asylum seekers' etc;
2 - divide the working class along religious/ethnic/national lines to make it easier to control.

After all, the state finds it a whole heap easier to keep the working class in line and prevent us realising that it's not our neighbours who are the enemy, it's the bosses, if we already think our neighbours are horrible and repugnant people ... and it cuts both ways, immigrant communities are told to hate and fear the people they go and live amongst too - and as proof, we see the racist bigots complaining, so the immigrant communities need the state to help them against the resistance of the natives...

I think Gillian Duffy is a bigot. I was quite pleased Gordon Brown said it, it was about the only thing I heard during the whole election campaign I agreed with. I think he was a craven arse for apolgising, and you're right, Labour's immigration policy is not so different from the BNP's.

I don't believe all working class people are xenophobic; but some certainly are. Why not? We're taught to be. When we're taught to love our country, that implies it has something about it that's better than others. Why are we not taught to love other countries? The answer to that should be pretty obvious. So 'our' country is superior to 'their' country so 'we' are superior to 'them' so it's unfair when 'they' come over here and steal our jobs/women/crisps...

[ed miliband]

I think Gillian Duffy is a bigot. I was quite pleased Gordon Brown said it, it was about the only thing I heard during the whole election campaign I agreed with. I think he was a craven arse for apolgising, and you're right, Labour's immigration policy is not so different from the BNP's.


While I agree with the rest of your post I don't agree with this for a number of reasons. Firstly Brown's use of the word was hypocritical to say the least - one should be judged by their actions, and in that case Brown is certainly deserving of the title 'bigot', if Gillian Duffy is. I don't believe she considered the implications of what she was saying, or that she thought what she was saying could even be considered bigoted. I know a elderly comrade who has said he sees nothing wrong with the term 'darkies'. This man certainly isn't bigoted, and he wouldn't actively go out and call a black person a 'darkie', but what was once an acceptable way for people to talk no longer is, and many elderly people are still stuck within that warp, as it were.

And this pretty much sums up everything else I feel about that incident:

http://paulstott.typepad.com/i_intend_to_escape_and_co/2010/04/gillian-duffy-last-chance-for-the-left-to-learn-.html

I also think that, to a certain extent, what she said was taken out of context. From what I can remember she was concerned about spending cuts to healthcare, education and welfare, and then dropped that line about immigrants - the insinuation being whether or not the infrastructure could support them. While this obviously isn't any compensation for what she said, I don't believe it's fair to say the comment was made as part of a huge rant about immigration as some of the coverage seemed to suggest, but rather in the middle of some genuine and understandable concerns that many on the left can echo.

Maybe she was a bigot and perhaps I have been desensitised. I often hear people talk in a similar manner to Duffy - actually, often far worse than her - and it's often from people who genuinely don't see why or how what they are saying could be considered racist or bigoted. I know it's an old cliche for people to say 'I can't be racist, my friends are black' - but that is often something I've observed - many people I've overheard making dodgy comments don't actually have a problem getting on with black or Asian or eastern European people. While it is easy to write these people off as racists, the reality is much stranger, and much harder to tackle.

[Blake's Baby]

No, I'm afraid that the reality is that they are racists with little 'exceptionalist clauses' that say 'fucking darkies coming over here and nicking our council houses... except Desmond, you wouldn't even know he was black'. That makes them racist, hypocritical, and stupid too.

'Racism' is specifically about groups. You can always make exceptions for sub-groups and individuals - the Nazis were still racists (still believed that white people, especially those supposedly descended from people living in the Bronze Age in southern Denmark, were superior to all others) even though they were allied to the Japanese in WWII; having East Asian allies didn't make them 'more complicated' it just made them more hypocritical. In South Africa under Apartheid, Japanese business men were accorded 'honorary White' status in regards to hotels, swimming pools etc. It doesn't mean the Apartheid regime wasn't racist, doesn't mean it was more complicated. Just liars and hypocrites.

And back on Gillian Duffy, her tying of immigration issues ('all these East Europeans... where are they flocking from?') to issues of funding of services, is a direct example of the idea that the 'indigenous' working class needs to be defended from an alien outsider working class. That's xenophobia, and it's the sort of thing the Daily Mail pushes all the time: 'Albanian Gypsy Dole-Scroungers coming over here and taking up our Hospital Beds and putting their criminal children in our Pristine Primary Schools full of Blonde Children' (I paraphrase).

I'm not saying that Brown isn't a bigot; he's certainly a patriot, and that's a pretty serious crime in my book. Anyone who rants about 'Britain's interests' and prosecutes wars while presiding over a system that deports people to face torture or death or even poverty is a shit as far as I'm concerned. But I'd hate him even more if he'd been caught on tape saying 'that woman was right you know, we should organise for more Romanians to be deported'.

I'm unsure about which parts of the blog you posted that you actually agree with. I hope not the part where the blogger insinuates that only the working people that lived in Britain before the recession have any claim on the resources and services here.

[ed miliband]

You've misrepresented what I said - or I didn't explain myself very well - it's not that people are saying things like 'fucking darkies coming over here and nicking our council houses... except Desmond, you wouldn't even know he was black', it's that people are making comments about immigration (rather than immigrants)* that yeah, are hypocritical and stupid, but aren't reflected in social relationships. I'm not saying I agree with these people, but that simply writing all of them off as racist bigots doesn't work because - a) these people don't consider what they are saying racist, and often don't act in a manner one might expect a racist to, and b) it ends all debate, but answers no questions. That's what I agree with Paul Stott on - the left police themselves and others for racism in a manner that very few people in the wider working-class do.

It is a hard position for the left, and one that leaves me scratching my head for answers.

*That is, most of the abuse is not aimed at immigrants as people, but the act of immigration itself.

[Blake's Baby]

OK, I see some distinctions that you're making but I don't see them as relevant. I don't care if 'people' don't see what they're doing as racist, xenophobic or whatever. If they believe that the people who were born in a place should be privileged over people who weren't, that's xenophobia (not necessarily racism because it's not necessarily based on ideas of 'race') and it should be challenged.

As to the differences between 'immigration' and 'immigrants' I think that's a red herring. 'Immigration bad' means 'I don't like immigrants', simple as. I don't care if 'the wider working class' doesn't accept this at the moment; no-one ever said the process of the working class coming to consciousness of its historic role was going to be easy but if the phrase 'the workers have no country' means anything it is that working people from anywhere on the globe have the same interests and class solidarity is our weapon against nationalism and any kind of particularism.

[Kenco Smooth]

It wasn't that she reffered to imigration but that she directly targeted a specific group (Eastern-Europeans) even going as far as to ask where they are all coming from.

I'm not going to support someones entire belief system just because they are working class. It's worth remembering that many working class people currently hold beliefs that could be called bourgeois, thinking that these beliefs are in their own self interest. When these views are voiced we should put them down no less harshly than we would if a member of the bourgeoisie put them forth.

If, for example, a member of parliament had expressed her views publicly this whole place would have jumped on them with much harsher terms than bigot. Just because someones potential quality of life is limited under capitalism doesn't give them free reign to express views like this and not expect criticism.

Quick note that I'm not defending Brown here. As has been said he is as deserving of the title 'bigot' as she is if not more.

[Zanthorus]

it's the sort of thing the Daily Mail pushes all the time

I could be misinterpreting you here but the Daily Mail is always going on about how everyone is out to get the middle-classes. They only use pro-working class rhetoric when it suits their agenda like that one thing they had a while back about how the "white working class" was being let down by labour and their evil multiculturalism.


I'm not going to support someones entire belief system just because they are working class.

Agreed.

[Blake's Baby]

I could be misinterpreting you here but the Daily Mail is always going on about how everyone is out to get the middle-classes. They only use pro-working class rhetoric when it suits their agenda like that one thing they had a while back about how the "white working class" was being let down by labour and their evil multiculturalism.
...

I don't know if you're misinterpreting or not, but I agree with you. :thumbup1:

It's not about 'pro-working class rhetoric', it's about nationalist rhetoric. 'The working class' includes immigrant workers too.

[ed miliband]

OK, I see some distinctions that you're making but I don't see them as relevant. I don't care if 'people' don't see what they're doing as racist, xenophobic or whatever. If they believe that the people who were born in a place should be privileged over people who weren't, that's xenophobia (not necessarily racism because it's not necessarily based on ideas of 'race') and it should be challenged.

As to the differences between 'immigration' and 'immigrants' I think that's a red herring. 'Immigration bad' means 'I don't like immigrants', simple as. I don't care if 'the wider working class' doesn't accept this at the moment; no-one ever said the process of the working class coming to consciousness of its historic role was going to be easy but if the phrase 'the workers have no country' means anything it is that working people from anywhere on the globe have the same interests and class solidarity is our weapon against nationalism and any kind of particularism.

I think that's far too simplistic and you're intelligent enough to realise that. I do not like religion - must I dislike religious people? I do not like the monarchy - must I hate the queen? Of course not. *

But... I agree completely with your last point.

* just seen the flaw here... :/

[Blake's Baby]

I don't hate people who are racist, or I try not to. I had the fact that they are racist. And I also understand why they are racist, because we are subtly and not so subtly told that this is the way things are, were, always will and indeed should be.

But they're not, and I'll return the compliment and say that I think you're intelligent enough to realise this. It really is that simple. Racism (xenophobia, chauvinism) is a tool exploited by the bourgeoisie to divide the working class and strengthen 'the nation'. We have to fight it, not make excuses. Just because a worker expresses a particular view, we don't have to agree with it. Just because masses of workers express a view, we don't have to agree either.

EDIT: re-reading your post I think you're making a different point to the one I answered.

On whether hatred of the 'sin' of immigration is the same as hatred of the sinning immigrants; well, immigration isn't a sin. I might say I hate hats, and use this as a cover to hate people who wear hats. But that's essentially irrational (unlike hatred of religion which is pretty rational really), it's bigotry and prejudice. Why should people hate 'immigration' more than, say, 'holidays'?

The only reason to oppose immigration is because you don't want 'other' people coming to where you are. People can claim it's about resources, but I think that's a red herring too, you don't often hear the people who oppose immigration saying 'what we should do is save £1 trillion by not bombing the Third World, then we'll have enough money to pay for all the schools and hospitals we need when they emigrate here'. So in the end, if someone opposes immigration, it's because they don't want outsiders where they are. But then again, when was the last time you heard someone saying 'I wish all these people from Yorkshire would go back where they came from, this is Worcestershire, Worcestershire for the Worcestershireans!'? It's all to often people who look different, speak a different language and worship at a different pointy-roofed structure who are targeted as the 'outsiders' (as they're easier to spot).

You know all of this. And I suspect you know I'm right.