Unions must fight racist Government policy

The Tory government’s plan to fly asylum seekers to Rwanda is, of course, the most appalling racist dog whistle imaginable in the run-up to the May local elections.

It almost certainly isn't intended that this will ever actually happen, it is a device to hoover up racist votes whilst forcing the Labour opposition to choose between outright condemnation (which will please part of our political base but may not appeal to the mythical "white working class") and a feeble position of simply claiming that this racist policy, which has been condemned by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, won't provide value for money.

As with all so-called “immigration and asylum” policies this initiative is also fundamentally dishonest.

The UK economy - and in particular the economy of London - relies upon the availability of a flexible pool of cheap labour provided by foreign workers who lack the documents to prove their rights to work in this country. 

In my years as a rank-and-file union organiser in London, I was, for example, aware of more than one occasion on which attempts to organise the workforce of privatised parking contracts in London boroughs were obstructed because a sizeable proportion of the workforce were working unlawfully with the knowledge of at least some of their management. This made organising that workforce extraordinarily difficult.

Undocumented workers cannot be eliminated from the London labour market, and never will be. No measures can prevent this pool, this "reserve army of labour" from being replenished. The utterly dishonest and hypocritical professed concern at the plight of those who are victims of "people smugglers" is a red herring.

The purpose of racist immigration and asylum policies is both to divide and rule the working-class and to provide a material basis for the super exploitation of the undocumented workforce.

All that having been said, the fact that an incumbent government is formally proposing a policy which in the 1970s would have been at home in the manifesto of the National Front is a remarkable and worrying, not to say frightening, development. 

The labour movement needs to adopt an uncompromising position of opposition to this racist policy, along the lines of the position of PCS. Other trade unions need to follow this lead and then to lead the Labour Party into a stronger position of opposition.