Immigration is a class matter

For decades British governments have encouraged massively increased immigration, and have ignored what workers think about that.

Not only is this an economic attack, but it is fostering divisions between workers at a time when they need unity.

Immigration affects the whole of society: any sort of planning for infrastructure and public services – houses, schools, hospitals and so on. And it has the effect of holding down pay, undermining working conditions and facilitating the continued lack of adequate skills and training.

Some ideas that not too long ago were mainstream in discourse between workers have now become marginalised and demonised. That perversion of debate is as deliberate as the migrant policy itself and is designed to cloak and protect that policy.

We have a strange relationship with professed nationalism in Britain and are wary of it – think the BNP (and SNP too, also fascist in origin). The easy answer is to cry “far right, boo, avoid” when confronted with an argument that Britain should be independent and should also have control of its borders and who lives here. We need to look deeper.

Opponents of immigration control say that “we are all migrants, refugees welcome here”. On one level, historically that’s true. But that obscures the reality. There is no pure-bred British worker (or any sort of Briton) – truly we are a mongrel nation.

Independence

But to conflate the wish for national independence with racism or a hatred of migrants in general sets up an idea that there is a group of workers whose thoughts and views must be suppressed. This creates the opportunity for just the sort of attitude and actions it professes to oppose.

And the drive to separate parts of Britain and divide it up in the name of local democracy or historical nationhood (for Scotland, quite contentious, for Wales even more so) is out of the same ideological toolkit as the denial of control of our borders and national independence.

These views use the great range and diversity of British workers as a way to weaken the whole class, undermining unity. But we must do more than point the finger at those who have a different view. And to do so we have to look at class – what makes us workers.

The idea of class is fundamental to political thinking – and to economic and cultural reality. It’s objective, not subjective. It’s about our collective circumstances and experience, not about individuals.

'What makes the British working class is far more than the mixture of their backgrounds...'

What makes the British working class is far more than the mixture of the backgrounds of those who have come to make it up. It is a synthesis: workers, no matter what their background, all find themselves in the same circumstances. As wage workers they have the same interests and concerns, facing the same exploitation.

Retreat into ghettos, the promotion of multiculturalism, the denial of British culture and the need to assimilate, will all make the class weaker, less able to deal with the ruling class. Acceptance that we are all one working class, and that we all have our part to play, will make us stronger.

It’s one thing to say “there’s a limit to what I can do in this fight (for wages etc)” and another to raise that to a political attitude – which goes along with “all workers are thick and stupid (except my pals)”, “Britain is finished”, “we are too weak to exist alone, we need to be in the EU (or in the US sphere)”.

Common interest

So why would a communist, or any class conscious worker, who sees the common interest of exploited workers across the world, think that nations are a good thing? It’s at that level – a shared territory, language, economy, and culture – that we are strongest in dealing with the ruling class.

So let’s return to where we started, what’s behind the immense change in the population of Britain? We need debate – not to decry the changes but to understand them and assert our own common interests as workers.

As British capitalism continues to decline it can’t reinvent itself, or invest in the skills of its working class. It searches for desperate measures to survive, turning to the last gasp measure of employing both cheap labour and importing skills from abroad, in order to squeeze profit from its archaic practices.

Precious

Rather than viewing the labour of workers as a precious resource to be used with great care, many are engaged in work neither socially useful nor productive. Numbers of workers in the service industries have soared because employers see opportunities to exploit recent migrants at low wages and under poor conditions.

Rather than an employer undercutting its workers by using scabs, fire and rehire etc, now it’s the state doing so with immigration against the whole working class.

That has been the dilemma since World War Two at least – they can’t afford workers, though they can’t do without them. We should turn that round for workers – we can’t afford capitalists; but we can live without them.

• This article is an edited extract from a speech made at a CPBML meeting in Manchester in November 2024.