Proper Gander: Regulations, nations and alienation (2026)

The Proper Gander column from the June 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

BBC News  made sure to emphasise that a Home Office investigation which led to a couple of arrests was prompted by the findings of an episode of its Scams & Scandals documentary series. As its title indicates, The Immigration Fraudsters revealed misconduct among ‘legal advisers’ preparing applications for their clients to remain in the UK. Presenter Billy Kenber tells us ‘we’ve gone undercover to expose this hidden world of illegality’, which means that much of the programme consists of blurry, shaky footage from a concealed camera worn by his colleague. Posing as a foreign national, he visits law firms and advisers who can arrange the necessary paperwork for a claim to the Home Office as an asylum seeker. The covert footage reveals that some advisers gather fabricated evidence to meet the criteria, and Kenber suggests that possibly thousands of people have been granted leave to remain on fraudulent grounds.

Those who make claims for asylum include people who have newly arrived in the UK and others who originally entered under a temporary student or work visa or as the spouse of someone with leave to remain. A successful application confers refugee status, which doesn’t automatically mean permanent entitlement to live in the UK, but permits official employment and being able to claim benefits, apply for ‘social housing’ and use all NHS services. People without official approval to be in the country have ‘no recourse to public funds’, meaning they don’t have access to these aspects of the state. Those in this position without the funds to buy their way out have to rely on cash-in-hand work for an income and are more likely to be trapped into slave labour or homelessness.

For a claim for asylum to be granted by the Home Office, a fear of persecution in the applicant’s country of origin is required. As Ejel Khan of the Muslim LGBT Network explains, homosexuality is illegal in many countries, so fleeing one could be grounds for a gay person applying for asylum in the UK. The undercover reporter meets an immigration adviser who says that for a four-figure fee she can arrange a claim on this basis. He says that he isn’t gay, which doesn’t prevent her from offering to provide a letter declaring that he has had sex with a man, and also membership of the ‘Worcester LGBT Asylum Seekers Group’. The reporter goes to one of its meetings in London which has over 200 attendees, some of whom say next-to-none of them are gay.

The Immigration Fraudsters also covers another route for making asylum claims, on the grounds of being a victim of domestic abuse. This applies in situations where someone has come into the country on a family visa, so their entitlement to remain relies on being in a relationship with their partner who already has official status. If the relationship were to end, the partner under the visa would ordinarily lose their right to remain in the UK, unless they were a victim of domestic abuse. The undercover reporter records an adviser offering to arrange a fake claim (under the 2013 Migrant Victims of Domestic Abuse Concession) of being a victim of psychological cruelty from his wife.

The documentary’s producers contacted the dodgy advisers about their activities and received replies bluntly denying any wrongdoing. This wasn’t enough to satisfy the Home Office, hence their announcement of an investigation following the programme’s broadcast, which led to raids by its Immigration Enforcement team and arrests. One way of looking at this is that the BBC, as one branch of the state, was carrying out the ‘due diligence’ which fell within the remit of another branch of the state, the Home Office.

Kenber meets with above-board legal experts who say that people who apply fraudulently make it harder for those with genuine claims, a sentiment echoed by immigration minister Mike Tapp after the raids. The Immigration Fraudsters doesn’t include discussion about the wider context of the issue, beyond quoting some statistics about the number of asylum applications. Having a situation where people lie about being persecuted in order to stay in the UK comes from a combination of factors, each illustrating how society’s capitalist framework alienates us. Fundamentally, the division of the world into countries, as territories of different states, reduces people to being subjects of those states. This accords us differing status in relation to other countries, according to our wealth, nationality, immigration rights and even our family role. Alongside this bureaucratic alienation, there’s also that caused in those states and cultures which are particularly oppressive, including towards anyone who isn’t heterosexual. Understandably, people will want to leave those countries for another where their prospects may be better. Domestic abuse, and especially being trapped in a violent relationship, is another effect of living in a divisive, alienating society. Fleeing these situations means being processed and accorded the status of asylum seeker and, maybe, refugee. While many staff work hard trying to help people navigate the system, the framework they work within is complicated by its legal and financial constraints. This doesn’t prevent some people wanting to manipulate it, leading to fake claims for asylum. While there’s nothing admirable about pretending to be a victim of abuse, those who do would have to be in a dire enough situation to push them towards this. The suspect advisers are exploiting their clients’ grim position, but they’re also products of their circumstances. Presumably, this career pays better than their other options. A capitalist economy encourages people to try to make money out of anything, including desperation. The arrests which followed the programme’s broadcast may lead to some disruption of the network of ‘legal advisers’, and the Home Office is likely to tighten up its legislation. Such measures can’t change the conditions which have created the issue, nor resolve the plight of people seeking asylum, with or without fabricated paperwork.

Mike Foster

Tiny Tips (2025)

The Tiny Tips column from the October 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

In spite of momentous historical changes, the fundamental patterns of inequality reemerge across the centuries with remarkable consistency, the patterns of extreme wealth concentration, class immobility, surplus value extraction, special privilege, and ideological systems capable of masking the contradictions. This suite of social traits seems almost constant. 

(CounterPunch)

Write, but do not offend. Speak and comment, but do not divide. Observe cruelties, barbarities and murder, yet refrain from having an opinion. This is the constipating, stifling regime being put in place via suggested codes of conduct for organisers of writer events in Australia. The object of this intellectual veiling: discussing the exterminating war in Gaza. Across the country, the straitjacket of forced social harmony is being applied. 

(Dissident Voice)

Vietnam raises over $13 million for Cuba in historic charity drive. 

(Vietnam Net)

Asked whether Gazans would be allowed to leave, Al-Hayek was unequivocal. “The Palestinian people do not want to leave Gaza,” he told The Media Line. “We repeat each time: We will remain in Gaza until Judgment Day. Here we were born, and here we shall die.” 

(The Media Line)

Hotel accommodation benefits large contractors like Clearsprings, Serco and Mears, while Britannia Hotels made over £150 million in profit since it started to accommodate asylum seekers in 2014. Such contracts even brought the founder of Clearsprings to the Sunday Times Rich List. This company provides housing services to the Home Office that were associated with the highest mortality rate among resident asylum seekers between 2020 and 2023. 

(Counterfire)

Ah, those pro-lifers. Walking, talking, shooting oxymorons. You can tell the pro-life extremists. They’re the ones who want their enemies – the women and men who support a woman’s sovereignty over her own body – dead by any means at their command. Hard to get more pro-life than that. Mike Lee, the brilliant Republican US Senator from Utah, went on Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, and posted about the fatal shooting of Democratic politicians in Minnesota, that, “This is what happens when Marxists don’t get their way”. 

(CounterPunch)

U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi announced Wednesday that the United States has seized nearly US$700 million in assets connected to Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Confiscated property includes multiple luxury homes in Florida, a mansion in the Dominican Republic, two private jets, a horse farm, nine vehicles, luxury yachts, jewelry, watches, and cash. 

(Dominican Today)

This is the humanist vision of Alien: Earth, which recognizes our distinctiveness is not in the power of our minds or the machines that we produce. Rather, it is found in humanity’s ability to transform itself, to create and recreate its own internal nature for new conditions, including those yet to come. In doing so, the show goes beyond mere anti-corporate sentiment and instead asks if we can create a new purpose for ourselves, unburdened by the demons of our past and the demons that our future might hold.

(Jacobin)

(These links are provided for information and don’t necessarily represent our point of view.)

Away with all national flags! (2025)

From the October 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Bertrand Russell once said ‘Patriots always talk of dying for their country but never of killing for their country’. What, then, should we make of a recent poll carried out by the Daily Express (30 August) that found ‘Nearly three-quarters of Brits unwilling to fight for UK in the event of war’?

If the Express is to be believed, a majority sensibly enough have lost their appetite to fight for ‘their’ country in a war. One should be wary of jumping to hasty conclusions, however. Sadly, unwillingness to ‘fight for the UK’ does not necessarily translate into a decline of patriotism. It doesn’t seem to have dampened nationalist fervour.

In August 2025, a high-profile and, seemingly, widely supported grassroots campaign was launched, dubbed ‘Operation Raise the Colours’, ostensibly to ‘promote patriotism’ by flying flags from lamp-posts or painting the Saint George Cross onto mini-roundabouts.

However, one would have to be politically naïve not to see that the ulterior purpose behind all the flag-waving protests accompanying this bizarre fad has been to promote a far-right agenda. The frankly racist targeting of asylum seekers holed up in migrant centres exemplifies this.

This development is notable for the sheer amount of misinformation it has generated – whether we are talking about the costs of the asylum system, the lavish lifestyle asylum seekers are alleged to enjoy (they get a measly £7 a day), or the actual numbers involved (the UK has below the European Union average for asylum applications).

According to the ‘Hope not Hate’ group, the campaign´s organiser is Andrew Currien (AKA Andy Saxon), an ally of the far-right activist, Tommy Robinson. He was formerly in the English Defence League and now runs security for the far-right party, Britain First.

One theory that has been doing the rounds is that the ‘Operation Raise the Colours’ campaign is a reaction to the widespread display of Palestinian flags at protests against what is happening in Gaza. Whatever the case, as far as socialists are concerned, we would far prefer to see no national flags displayed anywhere. In the words of the novelist, Arundhati Roy: ‘Flags are bits of coloured cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people’s minds and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead.’

Shrink-wrapping people´s minds means, among other things, instilling in them the absurd notion that they possess something called a ’country’ in the first instance. It is not just the usual suspects that are actively engaged in this indoctrination process – the state, the church, the media and so on. In its own way too, the Left, when it talks of ‘nationalising the commanding heights of industry’ or glorifies ‘national liberation struggles’ against ‘imperialism’, reinforces a nationalist mindset and by extension, capitalism. To refer to the Communist Manifesto: ‘The workingmen have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got’.

To those who imagine that ‘Britain’ is ‘their’ country, one might well ask – in what meaningful sense is this true? According to one source, ‘just 0.3% of the population – 160,000 families – own two-thirds of the country, and less than 1% of the population owns 70% of the land’.

Also in Britain, according to a report from the Office for National Statistics (2018), foreign-owned businesses accounted for 13.4 percent of total UK company assets, while foreign buyers account for over 40 percent of London’s prime property market. Most ‘British’ workers don’t even own their own homes, let alone this abstraction called ‘Britain’. A Google Earth photo reveals no borders whatsoever that might delineate those particular spatial units we choose to call ‘countries’. All we see are mountains, forests, farmland, urban settlements, rolling on as far as the eye can see and in every conceivable direction.

Borders only exist in our minds – in our imagination. They are nothing more than social conventions. There is nothing ‘natural’ about them whatsoever, any more than the nation-states they spatially delineate. Our capacity to imagine is part of what makes us human beings. As John Lennon´s song famously put it, ‘Imagine there’s no countries. It isn’t hard to do.’

Today, the great majority of us are little more than prisoners with shopping rights in this open prison that is called capitalism. In this society, the industrial and natural resources of our planet are monopolised by a super-rich, tiny parasite class. It is in their economic interests –not ours – that wars are fought.

At present, there are literally dozens of armed conflicts going on in the world – from localised insurgencies to full-scale wars. To what end? Where is the sense in workers killing other workers just like them – complete strangers with whom they have absolutely no reason to quarrel – just to ensure one piece of tatty cloth, as opposed to another, gets to be raised on the town hall´s flagpole?

Whatever tatty cloth is raised is not going to affect the basic situation of working class people. The same goes in wars. For example, whether in Ukraine it’s a Ukrainian or, alternatively, a Russian rag on the end of a pole. There are no winners in a war (apart from maybe the undertakers and the weapons manufacturers). Workers on both sides will have lost, having succumbed to the death cult of nationalism, their battered bodies draped in the symbol of what is so detestable about the society they currently live in.

Robin Cox

No asylum from the wages system (2003)

From the June 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

Following the May local elections in England and Wales, much has been made, by leftists and liberals, of the fact that the BNP – opportunistically shmoozing around in multiculturalist clothes – ended up with three more local councillors, bringing their total to eight. The pundits railed in helpless, speechless apoplexy against the fascist threat – their speechlessness, however, reveals how they have no good arguments with which to counter the nationalists; and that it is precisely the failure of their ideas that turn the workers towards hopeless fantasies.

The very idea they all try to spread, alike – that a given country is owned by some inclusive “we”, based on common descent or culture which “we” all have an interest in defending; that “we” owe loyalty toward, and toward our “fellow-countrymen” over folks from other lands – is the very premise that the nationalists latch onto and tout as their glorious cause. All the leftists and Liberals can do is whine that they have taken “legitimate patriotism” too far, that they are extremists.

Asylum seekers

The hold that such ideas have on the workers can be seen from the media treatment of the issue of “asylum seekers” – migrants looking for protection in safer lands. Whereas socialists have attended many demonstrations – to leaflet and counterpoise the socialist position to that of the usual raggle-taggle band of reformist organisers – comprising many thousands, of which barely a whisper is mentioned by the national media, all it takes is a handful of local residents protesting against an asylum seeker detention centre for it to make the national news. The editors and news-managers project their own expectation that many of their consumers are concerned by the “flood” of asylum seekers, by pushing the issue up the news agenda.

The professional politicians do their craven best to pander to this supposed collective identity. Government ministers seek to project the line that they are “firm but fair” in dealing with the asylum “crisis”. Desperate to deflect Tory charges that Britain is a “soft touch” for immigrants, they tout every reform taken to speed up the process of ejecting “undesirables” from the country. They talk about legitimate asylum seekers, as opposed to economic migrants – as if poverty itself were not one of the cruellest breeds of oppression.

All this, despite the fact that the government’s own published reports and advice clearly show that the ideas that dominate the “asylum debate” are largely spurious. For example, the report Migration: an Economic and Social Analysis from the Research, Development and Statistic Directorate of the Home Office, demolishes a great many of the myths around immigration, observing that migrants tend to have higher incomes than natives (on the whole, although they occupy a great range of income brackets), and that there is “little evidence that native workers are harmed by migration”.

One of the central fallacies, peddled by the gutter press in particular, is that the asylum seekers are trying to get access to a “soft touch” welfare system. Yet, the report states, migrants tend to use welfare provision in roughly the same proportions as indigenous workers – although that includes higher usage of unemployment and housing benefits, whilst they receive less incapacity and pension benefits. Indeed, the figures for unemployment among migrants apparently show that around 6 percent of them are unemployed as compared with a general unemployment rate in the economy of just under 5 percent – and this is given the filtering employment barriers of language, legal status, lack of references or recognised qualifications or sheer outright racism, that may stand in their way of finding employment.

Indeed, another report Understanding the Decision Making of Asylum Seekers actively refutes welfare as a basic motive for travelling around the world to come to another country. The majority of respondents had little or no knowledge of the UK welfare system, at most they had a vague idea that they would be “looked after”. Indeed, after finding that welfare receipt was not a primary motivating factor to move, the report notes that “most [of the immigrants interviewed] wanted to find a job and did not want to live on state benefits.”

The report lists other factors likely to be of importance – the perception that Britain is a fair and open society is high on the list, as was the desire to be with family and friends already in the UK. Such primary reasons stem largely from the historic foreign policy of the UK government, in presenting itself as a bastion of the free world whilst simultaneously exerting direct political control and links over far-flung lands. Capitalism is a global phenomena, and the interests of capital in Britain materially reach into all corners of the globe.

This is also amply demonstrated by the lists of countries where asylum seekers are coming from – Iraq, Zimbabwe, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey making up the top six countries. The chaos of global politics and repression drives the need to migrate, a global chaos born of the struggle between rival capitalist bands to access and monopolise the wealth of the world.

Demand for labour

While it is true, as one of the writers in the report observed, that the decision to economically migrate is not taken solely on labour market factors, and the nature of the political regime and country may well have a strong determining role, nevertheless the demand for labour to be attracted to concentrated areas is a structural feature of capitalism. Since its inception, capitalism has drawn workers into highly concentrated areas of development in order to satisfy its labour needs. All those people seeking migration, whether legal or illegal, are simply obeying the imperative that they must try to find a place to work; and no amount of government restrictions will change that fact.

In fact the report Migration Population in the UK: Fiscal Effects states that migration is a net contributor to the British capitalist economy. Many migrants bring new skills, new industries (including the industry around migration). Each new worker is able to expand the capacity of industry to produce. Of course, what the report neglects to mention is that this happens only within the remit of the profitability of capital, which can and will discard workers – irrespective of their origins – whenever its inevitable crises interrupt growth.

It should, therefore, be in the interest of governments to facilitate (at least) the smooth running of the labour market. Indeed, they should promote the widest movement of labour possible. Yet, despite this interest, and the clear advice at their disposal, they fail to do this.

A primary reason for this failure is the perception among workers (who have votes) that there is some threat to themselves from competitors from overseas. It’s a matter of record that those who are in possession of little are easily frightened by the threat of some other coming to take it away – hence all the medieval tales of færies and witches trying to steal children from impoverished peasants. The appearance of jobs going to these “foreigners” whilst their “own” go without reinforces the illusion that migration causes unemployment. However, a government so minded could choose to argue against these illusions, and pour resources into propaganda to that end.

That they choose not to indicates another reason – that governments rely upon apparent homogeneity of culture and population to secure support for their actions and policies. How else, otherwise, to spread the message that “we are all in this together” if the “we” cannot communicate in the same language, with the same set of meanings and values? The growth of capitalism has occurred alongside the growth of the culturally homogenous state – usually through forced population migrations – wherein the owners and rulers of a land could pretend to some sort of common identity with the ruled.

Hence the problem, in the eyes of many capitalists, that despite the fact that since the second world slaughter more people – year on year – left the UK than entered it, of a change of “culture” without the consent of the population. That is, that the cultural changes are breaking up the historical cultural bloc upon which traditional power and authority is based. The economic needs of capital come into conflict, again, with its social basis and the political needs of the master class.

So far as socialists are concerned, this attempt to try and make a common appearance of an interest with our exploiters is like a burglar playing on their support for the same football team as their victim. It does not change the relationship one iota. We see the harm that is done by national boundaries, that prevent workers from moving to be with whom they want to be with; prevent them from sharing their skills and their knowledge as they see fit; prevent them from seeing their common cause.

So far as socialists are concerned, it is not a case of chanting “Asylum Seekers are welcome here”, which implies we as workers have some right to say who is and isn’t welcome in the first place; nor even of saying that the asylum laws should be relaxed. We understand that the thing which makes workers leave behind their communities, and go to a place where their language is not spoken, is the wages system itself, which swats humans around the globe like a kitten playing with its toys. This underlies the need for us to recognise our identical position with regards to the wages system, and work together, as workers across the world, across boundaries, to create a commonly owned planet where all can live in security.

Pik Smeet

Life & Times: Asylum hell (2024)

The Life and Times column from the July 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

I was recently invited to a wedding. The couple getting married were a young man from Africa and a local girl from my own area – Francis and Sarah I’ll call them. It was a modest affair – Registry Office with 20-30 people and then a buffet reception in a local community centre with a slightly larger attendance. The couple already had two children and were obviously devoted to each other. They’d met when Francis, who’d fled his country, was waiting for his umpteenth asylum application to be heard and processed. His parents had been killed in internecine fighting between religious groups in his country and, fearing for his life, he’d managed to find someone to help him escape, get to France and from there cross to the UK. All this when he was only 15 years of age. Now, on the day of his wedding, he was 31 and had only recently been granted leave to remain in this country – and that on a temporary basis. Before this he’d lived for a dozen years in limbo.

Threat of deportation

How did I come to know him? One day, out of the blue, a friend who regularly supports asylum seekers asked me if I’d attend court with one of them the following week since she’d arranged to go on holiday. I agreed and from there I sort of got drawn in. Francis had been ‘picked up’ by Home Office officials when he’d gone for one of his monthly sign-ons at the local police station. From there he’d been taken to a ‘safe place’ with a view to deportation. In the event the judge at the court hearing found that the necessary formalities for deportation hadn’t been satisfied and he was released pending further scrutiny. But he would still have to report to the local immigration office once a month. I said I would go with him.

So once a month I would accompany him to the processing place. Every time he went he was petrified he wouldn’t get out but would be bundled into one of the Home Office vans waiting menacingly outside. So I made a point of dressing up (ie suit, collar and tie) reasoning that, whatever their intentions, they might have more compunction about snatching him if an older well-dressed man (who might even be his solicitor) was with him. In the event they never tried it again, but he did continue to be put through hell, with all the long drawn out, complex applications and appeals he made being rejected. This was largely on the grounds that they didn’t believe his story. And it’s true that he didn’t have evidence to prove it, and of course I couldn’t be absolutely sure myself. But it didn’t matter to me. As a socialist who wants a world without frontiers or discrimination of any sort, whatever anyone’s story, I was an open borders person.

Mind games

Every time Francis applied or appealed against a decision, he was made to travel half the length of the country – usually to the immigration office in Liverpool – to deliver his application by hand, even though that process itself took around 10 minutes. How did he survive during this time? Well, the friend of mine who had been kind enough to give him a room in her house to live in and some financial support, also got one of the local universities to accept him to follow a degree course in Business Studies free of charge. And this despite the fact that, in the beginning at least, he knew very little English. But he turned out to be a bit of a prodigy, mastering English very quickly and becoming a fluent speaker and writer. So much so that, on completing his course, he was awarded a first-class degree. And this was a key part of his next Home Office application. He hoped that they would recognise him as someone who could usefully contribute to the society he was desperate to live in. Instead he got knocked back again. Their response to his academic achievement was that he’d be able to contribute usefully to his home country when he went back there.

The rejection was nothing new. ‘Mind games’ was the way he described it. Yet even if he couldn’t work, had no entitlement to any means of living and still faced deportation, he somehow managed to stay positive. This was rewarded when he met Sarah. She took him to live with her, they had a child and, when he applied again, he went down ‘the family route’. To the surprise of us all, this time they relented and gave him short-term permission to stay. These decisions are often thought to be hit and miss, depending even on the mood of the Home Office caseworker at the time, so maybe this time that person got up on the right side of bed? But, anyway, this was a start and meant that at least Francis had the legal right to work. And he quickly found a job – in a delivery depot on the night shift. And then he moved to working in a care home, something he liked better and found a good deal of satisfaction in. He still works there, his leave to remain having been extended – hopefully indefinitely. So given the treatment asylum seekers get and the social and political demonisation they’re subject to, I think we can say he’s one of the lucky ones. When I attended court with him at the beginning, I witnessed one poor individual being dragged away to be put on a plane – the anonymous fate of so many, and of some of Francis’s own friends.

Abolish borders?

So the wedding was a happy event for him – and for me – especially considering that so many desperate people leave their homes through poverty or oppression only to find that the better life they were hoping for elsewhere doesn’t materialise and they may even be pushed back forcibly to the place they were escaping from. So Francis, though it may be thought that, as a care worker, he’s not fulfilling his potential, has been luckier than many in a system that divides groups of people up by borders and denies them the right to movement across the planet for all that a sane socialist society would offer. But this can only come with the abolition not just of borders and states but of money, wages and the whole of the profit system.

Howard Moss

Can there be ‘non-reformist’ reforms? (2022)

Book Review from the December 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

Against Borders. The Case For Abolition by Gracie Mae Bradley and Luke De Noronha (Verso, 2022)

The recent furore caused by a Tory politician referring to migrants entering the UK as ‘an invasion’ has brought to the fore the whole question of borders and ‘bordering’. Most people of course take for granted the idea that borders are natural and permanent, that we are all ‘citizens’ of a certain state, which gives us the right to live and work there and also to keep out citizens of other states who may be considered unwanted or undesirable for one reason or another. Few question the idea that a state needs to have borders, often well-policed ones, to enable such exclusion to take place. Disregard of such borders by people from outside seeking to enter provokes vexation or hostility among many and is easily used as part of a political party’s agenda to court support and popularity.

Life for migrants

Those from outside who do manage to get in by irregular means are subjected to a rigorous process of ‘assessment’ before a decision is taken on whether they are ‘genuine’ refugees or asylum seekers who might be in peril if they returned to their home country, or whether they are just ‘trying it on’, ie, attempting to gain entrance simply for economic or other reasons deemed non-legitimate. Anyone who has been involved with trying to assist asylum seekers knows just how precarious an existence they lead in the period of their assessment, sometimes lasting a number of years. They live a life on the edge not knowing from one day to the next whether or when they will suddenly be taken to a detention centre to face deportation to a place where their life may be in danger.

On the positive side, this prompts a significant number of people to come forward and assist these individuals in a practical way and to show them fellow feeling and humanity. And there are others who in a sense go further and seek to make the case more generally against the use and very existence of borders as a way of excluding people and putting barriers in the way of their seeking other and hopefully better lives. An example of this mainly with reference to the US was the 2021 book by Todd Miller, Build Bridges Not Walls: A Journey to a World Without Borders (recently reviewed in this journal) and now, focused on the UK, we have Against Borders. The Case For Abolition by Gracie Mae Bradley and Luke De Noronha (Verso, 2022).

Borders and the nation state

Both these books present a powerful set of arguments against the nation state, the system it supports and the suffering it causes, even if neither takes the arguments further by advocating in a specific way not just the abolition of borders and states but, as the Socialist Party does, of money, wages and the whole of the profit system. This is a pity because they are all pieces of the same intricate jigsaw that make up the capitalist system.

There are, however, points in their book in which Bradley and De Noronha seem fully conscious of this. They advocate, for example, ‘transformation of the conditions to which borders are a response’, ‘a world without borders’ without ‘the false promises of race and nations’, and abolition of ‘the nation-state system’. They also say that they are for ‘rejecting the dreary and paralysing politics of reformism’. But, at the same time their practical recommendations remain on the level of working for certain kinds of reforms within the current system, which they label ‘non-reformist reforms’, and for ‘government policies that are less bad’. They take this ‘non-reformist reform’ formulation from the French writer and theorist André Gorz, who, in the 1960s, argued for ‘revolutionary reformism’, ie, seeing some types of reforms as being both of immediate benefit to workers and at the same time somehow laying the ground for revolutionary change (he was an early advocate of the so-called ‘guaranteed basic income’). Like Gorz, they see fights for these reforms as ‘trials of strength’, small wins which would allow movements to build power and momentum. They state that ‘the task of distinguishing these ‘non-reformist reforms’ from reformist ones is vital, while also, however, admitting that there can be a fine line between the two.

‘Non-reformist’ reforms

What are the ‘non-reformist reforms’ around border control that these writers say we should now aim for as a prelude to a world in which borders are abolished? Examples they give are: equal access for refugees and asylum seekers ‘to essential goods and services’ and ‘labour rights and protections’ regardless of immigration status; an end to deportation for ‘foreign’ offenders found guilty of crimes; an end to Home Office policing of refugees and asylum seekers; fewer resources expended on immigration control. All this as a prelude to aiming for something more, a world in which everyone has the freedom to move and to stay – something which we can only applaud.

However the obvious comment that these ‘non-reformist’ proposals prompt is not that, perhaps with much effort, lobbying and the rest, they are impossible to achieve but that, even if they were achieved and this made a significant difference to the plight of refugees and asylum seekers, they would do nothing to address the wider imperative of abolishing the borders between nation states which the authors rightly see as controlling and defining people and fuelling nationalistic and racial divisions. Nor would they do anything to remedy the widely differing levels of access to the necessities of life that make capitalism a profoundly unequal society. What they certainly would do is take up a massive amount of time and energy on the part of those campaigning and almost certainly distract attention from the fundamental task of replacing a society dedicated to profit to one based on the satisfaction of needs. Also, though there is of course no denying that certain reforms can be beneficial to migrants and to workers generally, it is also the case that, just as one government may decide to bring them in, another may decide to revoke them and so take us back to square one.

System change not reforms

So reforms, even if labelled ‘non-reformist’ (or, as some may call them, ‘progressive’), cannot resolve the basic contradictions of a system organised for the benefit of a wealth-owning minority not for the majority who have to sell their energies to an employer for a wage or salary. Indeed reforms may even serve to perpetuate that system by lending it temporary respectability and acceptance in the sense that it may seem that improvements are being made and that should be enough. Of course it is not enough and it may easily make those involved in such activity lose sight of – and so actually impede – the essential socialist objective of a moneyless, leaderless world society of voluntary cooperative work, free access to all goods and services and truly democratic organisation. Why prolong the agony?

Howard Moss

We all need asylum (2001)

From the October 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Eurotunnel’s September announcement that they had appointed a former army general, Sir Roger Wheeler, to help keep out asylum seekers trying to reach Britain through the Channel Tunnel via the company’s French compound at Coquelles seemed most apt just days after Daily Mail headlines screaming about “The Chunnel under siege”, “The storming of the Chunnel” and “Invasion”.

No doubt such militaristic lingo will in future include further metaphors describing how Wheeler is deciding “tactics” for the best “attacks” and “defences” as he “spearheads” a “fight” against the “enemy” until eventual “victory”. This however is not mere warlike figure of speech without material substance, since with miles of razor-wire fencing, security patrols, guard dogs, searchlights and look out towers equipped with infra red and CCTV cameras, the Coquelles terminal resembles a World War 2 prisoner-of-war camp. Not one, though, with prisoners forcibly kept on the inside, but restrained from gaining entry.

But jailbirds is precisely what asylum seekers are—inmates of capitalism’s global choky, convicted of being “bogus” and “illegal” because of non-ownership of money-making assets, and so sentenced to life imprisonment of predominantly suffering, exclusion and exploitation. Not that us natives in “our” country have much more freedom, seeing how Britain’s means of production and distribution most definitely are not ours, leaving us banged up in the selfsame suppressive manipulative clink.

By not owning and controlling raw materials, power stations, factories, transport systems etc, the majority must work and live their lives according to the needs, and dictates to government puppets, of the minority who do. The “middle class” (forced to sell themselves, working class in reality) may imagine they’re better off than others on lower pay, though examining the real cost to their families and health from work pressures, employment insecurity, pollution, environmental destruction and the fundamental instability and competitive dangers of markets and money, reveals their “gains” to be illusory.

The Home Secretary, David Blunkett, has sought to adopt a conciliatory approach, expressing a desire to see migrants able to obtain work permits to contribute to UK society. Yet if he paid heed to the state of the global economy, with a worldwide recession looking unavoidable, it’s clear that permits to work are idiotically pointless if businesses have sacked millions of employees because a whole heap of capitalist work has suddenly become unprofitable. So while many of those seeking to enter the UK might be well-qualified machine operators, engineers, builders, doctors etc (as they are), if the capitalist economy is going through yet another of its inevitable cyclical crises, there’ll be no employers or money to pay for these much-needed workers.

Such economic crises make migrants unwanted. They put politicians under maximum pressure to keep them out to minimise state expenditure, spending which reduces the nation’s profitability the bigger it gets, and is especially disliked when making profits is then as difficult as it gets. Increased racism and nationalism also become more likely as high unemployment and poverty produce considerable social suffering, provoking the pained to find and lash out at those they think responsible, and politicians in need of scapegoats, chauvinistic bigots and money-mad tabloids all eager to point some out.

Besides, is Blunkett unconcerned that offering work permits tends to result in cherry picking of the most employable and skilled workers from areas of conflict and deprivation? Because only they will have been most able to save up income, or successfully borrow the money necessary to pay for their travel arrangements, resulting in war-torn and poverty-stricken regions being left without people vital for their improvement and essential services.

The answer to people fleeing conflict, deprivation and brutal regimes is to remove the root causes of such nastiness—minority ownership and control of productive resources which generates rivalry for the upper hand, and restricts provision of, and access to, goods and services according to available profits and ability to pay. It is this exclusive possession and control of resources that also divides the world into separate competing countries and blocs, and the need for associated borders to prevent others from attempting to acquire these valuable assets by armed force, subversion or, in the case of migrants during economic downturns, “excess” demand (i.e., too many unemployed and unemployable people burdening state finances). And since these means of production responsible are possessed and run by ruling classes in all countries worldwide, worldwide socialism is the only solution.

Not only does global minority ownership and control of productive assets cause people to flee and seek better lives elsewhere, it also influences where such migrants try to reach. Politicians and media commentators have concentrated on irrelevant criticism of the Red Cross refugee centre in Calais, from which migrants set out to jump on UK-bound trains (amputated limbs and death occurring in the process), and on nauseating nit-picking about asylum seekers not staying in the “first safe country” they reach, accusing them of seeing Britain as a “soft touch”. Apart from the fact that no country is “safe” from capitalism, just as this economic system became global because that was beneficial to capital, so too has there been economic pressure for one global language to facilitate efficiency in the markets. And since America has been, and remains the dominant economic power—along with other significant economies also having English as their principal language—governments and astute parents in other countries with different native tongues have felt impelled to teach children to speak English in order to be able to compete.

Hence, migrants with even a smattering of English, and a desire to work for a bearable living standard or to pay off debts to people-traffickers, choose countries like Britain. Or Australia, where with a national election imminent, the sickening response of John Howard’s government was to pander to apparently widespread racist sentiment and send in armed troops to force a Norwegian freighter, the Tampa, to take its undesirable shipwrecked cargo of over 400 mainly Afghans away from cobber-filled Oz—a country ironically founded by boatloads of undesirables.

On 7 September, a High Court judge annoyed politicians and tabloids by ruling that detaining refugees at Oakington “Reception” Centre in Cambridgeshire for a week or so, while their asylum claims were being decided, amounted to illegal imprisonment under the Human Rights Act. Not that Mr Justice Collins merits praise, since he also stated it was still legal to detain anyone thought likely to abscond to avoid deportation. So, as usual, who and what’s legal or illegal remains dependent upon what’s acceptable or unacceptable to capitalism.

“Illegal” remains a class-based description that politicians, through their two-faced cant and deceit, will continue to attach to asylum seekers entering the UK for “economic reasons” rather than “genuinely fleeing persecution”. Yet just you try to take what you need from a shop without paying, because you’re skint. How long before the police drag you away, and a magistrate probably locks you away, each insisting that you, too, were “illegal”? And which British employees toiling for inadequate incomes in the longest working week in the EU aren’t forced to sell themselves for “economic reasons”, and have never considered such wage slavery to be “persecution” from which they’d also like to escape?

Those travelling long distances through fear or desperation are people no different to ourselves, since under capitalism, we are all asylum seekers. Only those owning substantial capital that generates enough money to pay for whatever needs they may have, without ever having to work, need not seek asylum from capitalism. Multimillionaires and billionaires, thanks to exploitation of the working class majority, able to fly first-class anywhere in the world at a whim are the real migrant “spongers” who need to be kicked out.

Max Hess

Migration – what is the problem? (2023)

From the September 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

There has been migration for as long as there have been people. Firstly moving from Africa and spreading over the entire world. Not that it is a peculiarly human trait. Come autumn or spring, some birds migrate considerable distances. There are herd animals with a tendency to move en masse.

However, anyone thinking migration is a novel phenomenon and a recent political problem could be forgiven considering how it’s being portrayed by sensationalist media and desperate politicians. A veritable armada of small boats swarming across the English Channel, or so it would seem.

‘Johnny Foreigner’ is single-mindedly intent on accessing public services having never paid a penny towards them, expecting to be housed and receive benefits. That is when not undertaking devious criminal schemes, or bringing extensive extended families to join them in enjoying such largesse.

With a general election pending both Tory and Labour Parties have identified this emotive issue as a major potential vote winner, or loser. Each vies with the other to demonstrate how they alone can tackle this problem. There is the nub of the issue. Migrants are not people with problems, they are deemed to be the problem. And problems must have solutions, though it is doubtful if either party would claim to have the final solution. Although there is a discomforting resonance whenever politicians specifically identify a particular group of people as being alien.

Capitalism has used this sense of the lesser other from its outset. Taking early advantage of that notion led to brutal forced migration from Africa in the slave trade, with enterprising traders shipping involuntary human cargo to the money-making plantations of the ‘New World’. A deliberate movement of people to generate profits, the capital that financially fuelled the industrial revolution.

It might be objected that slaves are not the same as migrants in that they were transported against their will. But how many people become migrants undertaking the perilous, and too often fatal, sea journeys from choice? War, abject poverty and famine are drivers of people who are uprooted with little or no control over their journey.

Those early days of capitalist industry in Britain saw the enclosure of rural land creating a mass migration from the countryside to the new industrial urban centres, where labour was required. There was no consultative process, just the financial imperative. Undoubtedly, in the initial stages there were men who had to leave their families in the village while they went to the towns.

Eventually those men would send for their families to join them. Such movement would have been no simple task in the absence of organised transportation. Later, many descendants of those families would relocate to the Americas and the antipodes, driven again by desperation. Some went against their will as transported criminals.

Even economic migration within national boundaries led, on occasion to conflict. For example, in 1832 a strike by miners at Friars Goose in Gateshead was met with the eviction of the miners and their families from their colliery tied cottages. This was to accommodate lead miners, who’d been impoverished by their declining industry, who were migrating to the expanding coalfields. Because it suited the mine owners, this migration was welcomed by them, while the locals were forced aside by use of the local militia from Newcastle.

It requires a little genealogical research for those who identify their families as belonging to a particular former industrial area in the north of England, for example, to find antecedents, going back only a few generations, who came from the then rural south. The growing interest in genealogy has led to many taking DNA tests to establish their familial origins. It is common enough to meet people claiming blood-ties to Scandinavia, Northern Germany, Ireland and Wales, often with unexpected influences from much further afield.

It seems we are all descendants of foreigners, not that those Viking and Saxon forebears would have thought of themselves in such terms. Movement of people was commonplace and there were no nations to identify with.

All too frequently there are news reports of another small boat foundering in the Channel during an attempt to cross over from France that ends in disaster. For a brief moment the drowned become men, women and children, rather than simply migrants. There may be a momentary reduction in belligerence towards those promoted to victims, while the antagonism is refocused on villainous people-smugglers making money out of human misery.

Asylum traders, like slave traders before them, are of course simply motivated by money. As are the manufacturers of the wholly unsuitable inflatables used as makeshift ferries. As, also, are the politicians of various stripes who soon return to ranting on about the unacceptable cost of migrants coming to ‘our’ country.

The accommodation of migrants, it is insisted, must be as basic and unwelcoming as possible to act as a deterrent to others. This begs the question as to how dreadful must accommodation become to be a more effective deterrent than the prospect of being launched in an overcrowded rubber dinghy into the world’s busiest and turbulent shipping lane with the very real possibility of drowning?

Politicians continue to trade their quack solutions to the ever-present migrant situation. Repurpose army camps? Use hotels, a nice little earner for hoteliers? Or perhaps take an idea from history and anchor a few prison hulks, sorry barges, around the coast.

If migrants are so ungrateful as to object, they can always take the reported advice of Lee Anderson, deputy Tory chair: ‘If they don’t like the barges, they can fuck off back to France.’

What if the small boats were luxury yachts carrying super-rich traders in the wealth created for them by workers? These economic migrants, in the sense of being wealthy enough to sail from country to country as they will, would certainly be welcomed.

However, those referred to pejoratively as economic migrants are classed as being even less worthy of acceptance than those fleeing war and political repression. Yet, the common cause of their distress is capitalism. War is the most belligerent expression of that fundamental characteristic of capitalism, competition. Politics, whether totalitarian or democratic, ultimately serves capitalists’ interests, the need to ensure profitability.

Meanwhile those workers who cannot serve the ceaseless pursuit of profit of their home country’s capitalist class, become economically surplus. Migration in search of the wherewithal to live then becomes the driving necessity.

The ‘migration problem’ has a solution; abolish capitalism. Then everyone can make a valued contribution to society, local, regional and internationally. And in return their self-defined needs will be met.In socialism people can travel freely and safely, as and when they choose. Or stay put around where they are born if they wish. The choice is straightforward, continue ad infinitum to have migrants fleeing war, famine, repression and poverty, all of which will persist as long as capitalism is allowed to persist. Alternatively, sink capitalism and promote socialism as the world’s common destination.

Dave Alton

BNP: product of reformism’s failure (2004)

From the July 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

Just what is it about the BNP that the vast majority of British workers find so nauseating?  In the run up to the 2004 local and European elections, all manner of people, organised in their respective groupings, mobilised against them, from the Labour and Conservative Party activists and the myriad left-wing groups, to student bodies, church groups and unions like the CWU who informed members that their “conscience clause” gave postal workers the choice not to deliver BNP material if they found it objectionable. The anti-nazi organisation Searchlight even produced 28 versions of a newspaper targeting the BNP election campaign and distributed 1.5 million of them in areas where the BNP were most active.

Many were clearly panicked at the thought of widespread BNP victories and this afforded the BNP media coverage which was out of all proportion to the size of their organisation. An eve of poll message from Nick Griffin, the party’s fuehrer, on the BNP website of 9 June, stated  that they “were on course for a political earthquake”, that the BNP  would be “breaking through with three or four Euro MPs”.  Yorkshire, the BNP claimed, was to be their “jewel in the crown.”  Two days earlier the same website had this to say: “Today in London a Monk came up to us.  He said he had voted for the Conservatives all his life but this year he was voting for the BNP.  He informed us that most of the Monks in his monastery were also voting BNP.”  One wonders whether the fascists of the BNP had been taking tips in humour from their favourite comedian Bernard Manning.

And so it came to pass that the BNP managed to gain four new councillors in Bradford in four wards. This ‘jewel’ was out of a record 101 candidates they fielded across Yorkshire.

Elsewhere, the BNP made a breakthrough in the south of England, taking three seats in Epping Forest in the local elections. And in Burnley, the BNP gained one seat but managed to lose the other seven in which its candidates were standing. In the North East, where the party stood a full slate of 25 candidates in Sunderland, they failed to make any promised gains.

Leader Nick Griffin, who in April had invited over Le Pen, the Nazi leader of the French National Front,  to plan how they could work as a team (or rather comedy duo) when Griffin became MEP for the north west of England, failed to take the seat he hankered after.  No BNP candidate succeeded in getting elected to the European parliament and in the London mayoral elections the BNP ended up in sixth place and failed to secure the votes required to get representation on the London Assembly.

Regardless of how much these smiley-faced fascists claim to have changed their image, booting out the boneheaded troublemakers of yesteryear, they still represent the politics of hate – and their writings and statements still contradict the respectable shirt-and-tie image they try so hard to project. This was much evident from their election manifestoes, especially that used for their London Assembly campaign and entitled London Needs the BNP.

The manifesto began with a subject the BNP are famous for – the strange obsession with the colour of human skin. It opened: “Within another generation, without political change, London will not even be recognisable as a European city”. Considering the diversity of cultures existing peacefully side by side in most European cities London, in a generation, would very much be like any normal European city. It asserted that the  “remaining British people in London are faced with progressive marginalisation” because there are too many non-whites, neglecting to mention the way capitalism itself marginalises, atomises and alienates not just individuals but entire communities.

There then followed the usual rant against asylum seekers, “both legal and illegal” and Ken Livingstone and the Labour Party were said to be responsible for “this new influx that is about to engulf us.” Here again, no mention of the fact that within the EU alone, the UK was recently ranked 10th in number of asylum applications compared to the country’s population or that the government has recently brought in measures that make it far more difficult for people from a variety of countries to claim asylum in the UK – together with a reduction of appeal rights for a host of countries. Neither does the BNP acknowledge that the Home Office itself has recognised that asylum seekers, refugees and immigrants have made a huge contribution to the economic and cultural life of the UK, bringing with them a wealth of skills and knowledge.

Law and order, another BNP favourite was then tackled. Having informed us that recorded crime has risen by 1000 percent (how they love nice round figures) since the 1950s they go on to cite the president of the Association of Chief Police Officers as claiming that mass immigration had “brought new levels of organised crime, drug dealing, gun crime, prostitution, fraud and kidnapping,” before advocating the reintroduction of the birch and the death penalty and a policy of zero tolerance. Again, no mention that one BNP London Assembly candidate was a reputable soccer thug, that the BNP National Development Officer, Tony Lecomber, has twice been imprisoned or that BNP leader Nick Griffin was given a suspended sentence for incitement to racial hatred. A visit to the Searchlight website will reveal that the BNP has a membership full of unsavoury characters. Moreover, in the year following the first BNP council victory in Milwall in 1993, racial assaults increased by 300 percent. It seems crime will only be tolerated when it is the BNP and their supporters who are carrying it out.

Next was the issue of “security” with the BNP promising to “make London safe from the threat of terrorism”, by deporting “Moslem fundamentalists”. Their TV election broadcast, which was edited, though downloadable later from the BNP website, was similarly Islamophobic, blatantly hinting at a hyped threat of Islamic terrorism. Significantly, the last terrorist bombs to go off in London which killed and injured members of the white working class were set off back in 1999 by one-time BNP activist David Copeland, who, when apprehended , said his aim had been to start a race war which would lead to a BNP government being elected. And the BNP National Organiser has a conviction for setting off a home-made nail bomb and possessing hand-grenades and electronic detonators. Moreover, Griffin’s political mentor is the Italian Nazi terrorist Roberto Fiore; the very same Griffin who once went to Libya to gain support from Colonel Gadaffi  and who was all too ready to share a platform at a Cambridge seminar in July 2002  with Sheikh Abu Hamza al-Masri, the despicable Muslim fundamentalist, currently awaiting extradition to the USA for alleged terrorist crimes.

And so the manifesto continues, each statement showing the BNP to be the intolerant, narrow-minded, racist bigots they have always successfully presented themselves as, before closing on a subject covered in the May issue of the Socialist Standard (‘The Beauty Trap’), namely the forthcoming erection of the statue of Alison Lapper: “Just as Ken Livingstone dislikes anything English he equally disapproves of anything British, which is why we are now to have a sad limbless body on the vacant fourth plinth rather than a British statesman or woman. A BNP Mayor would have this dreadful thing removed.”   In this regard the BNP are in keeping with their beliefs on the white master race. Indeed, their National Organiser considers people with learning difficulties to be “sub-human” and those with disabilities to be “genetically inferior”. As true heroes of the white working class they claim to be the BNP have said they will introduce a GM programme to get rid of those they consider “inferior”.

The 800,000 workers who fell for this sort of rubbish across Britain and gave the BNP their votes in the European and Local elections on 10 June are the misinformed products of the demoralising system we know as capitalism, deluded into thinking that one main issue – a total halt on asylum – would suddenly improve their miserable lives. In truth, a shortage of council housing and poorly maintained housing estates, low wages and pittance benefits are no more the fault of asylum seekers than is the hole in the ozone layer. At the end of the day the BNP promised voters little more than extra space at the trough of poverty and tens of thousands wanted it.

Of course, the BNP were fortunate to ride a wave of patriotism—a tool they can use to great effect when it suits—in the run up to the election, with voters going to the polls as the 60th anniversary of D-Day was being commemorated and rammed down our throats every night on TV, and the English football team were gearing up to compete in Euro 2004 and when manufacturers were reporting sales of 4 million St George flags. And neither is their raw brand of nationalism that unique in today’s climate where the UKIP can make huge gains in the European elections on a “say no to Europe” platform, proclaiming the merits of British sovereignty, and where the Labour Party is all to ready to send British troops off to far away lands to protect the interests of Britain’s ruling elite.

Furthermore, we can only wonder at the mainstream parties fears of a surge in support for the BNP. Considering the views of the Labour and Conservative parties on asylum (Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech springs to mind) and the former’s part in upsetting the Islamic world so much recently, their objections to the BNP do seem a  little hypocritical. They may genuinely abhor the racists of the BNP but have been unsuccessful in confronting them where they have made political gains because to do so would mean acknowledging the shortcomings of a system which they champion and which gives rise to the politics of racism.

If anything the BNP are the product of the total failure of all the reformist parties to make capitalism a fit society to live in. And this is not the fault of the mainstream parties, for they are controlled by the system and not vice versa despite their claims and promises. When capitalism fails to deliver, when despondency and shattered hopes arise from the stench of the failed promises and expectations that litter the political landscape, is it any wonder that workers fall for the scapegoating lies of fascists and the quick fix they offer?

John Bissett

A Very British Hit Job (2022)

From the August 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

This June saw a very British hit job. Charles, the heir to the throne, reportedly made comments that indicated that he considered the British government’s policy of off-shoring irregular migrants to Rwanda as ‘appalling’. The Times reported this, indicating that the remarks were made in private. Nonetheless, this led to banner headlines in many papers. Unnamed government ministers were quoted as saying ‘He is in danger of over-reaching himself. He cannot make pronouncements on government policy when he is king. Even in private there is always a chance those remarks will get out and put him in a difficult position’.

Undoubtedly, the government had initiated this policy to get a strong reaction so they could have a storm about taking a strong stance over their handling of irregular migration across the Channel. They probably didn’t expect the flak to come from the prince, much less the Archbishop of Canterbury: they wanted to be able to point to soft liberals who ‘hate their country’ rather than the absolute pillars of the very Establishment itself.

This must have hit home, because, just a week or so later, we saw more banner headlines about Mr Windsor. The Sunday Times led with a splash about him receiving large charitable donations from Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani, the former Prime Minister of Qatar. The issue being that the €3 million was received in €1 million cash instalments, personally handed to the aristocrat in Fortnum & Mason carrier bags.

These reports noted that ‘Each payment was deposited into the accounts of the Prince of Wales’s Charitable Fund (PWCF), a low-profile grant-making entity which bankrolls the prince’s pet projects and his country estate in Scotland. There is no suggestion the payments were illegal.’

So, if the donation was not illegal, was not given personally to Mr Windsor, why did it merit a front page splash? The journalists provided weak gruel with questions of ‘judgement’: it simply looked shady to accept large donations of cash (though, apparently, trustees later said due diligence on accepting the donation was done). Presumably, if the donation had been done by bank transfer, there’d have been no issue.

They also drew in other allegations of courtiers offering cash for honours, which, while shady, were themselves not relevant to the princeling accepting charitable donations.

In his final novel, Numero Zero the Italian scholar of communication and meaning Umberto Eco presented an examination of the fictional establishment of a new newspaper: the issue-zero proofs of concept that are a prelude to releasing a newspaper proper. The idea being that an Italian millionaire wanted to ‘enter the inner sanctum of finance, banking and perhaps also the quality press. His way of getting there is the promise of a new newspaper ready to tell the truth about everything,’ a newspaper that could be stopped, for such rewards.

Eco has the fictional editor of this pseudo-newspaper say: ‘It’s not the news that makes the newspaper, but the newspaper that makes the news. And if you know how to put four different news items together, then you can offer the reader a fifth.’ The simple act of contextualising a story on the page makes the story. Of course, Charles Windsor consorts with rich people, and gifts and favours are swapped all the time, and his simple unearned privilege is an affront to humanity. But, putting a small example on a front page gives it an appearance of impropriety, even when in fact none exists.

It is also an excellent example of ‘swiftboating’, an act named after the campaign of Swiftboat veterans for truth, a move by Republican Party strategists in the United States to neutralise a natural strength of then Presidential candidate John Kerry. He was a decorated Vietnam war veteran, something that is normally an advantage in elections, however, merely raising a question mark about this turned his greatest strength into a liability.

The Royal Firm uses its charitable work as a shield to protect it from criticism of its undemocratic power and unearned opulence and luxury. By turning charitable collection into a point of concern, and even possible malfeasance by the princeling (especially by reference to his Scottish estate which the charity supports), the media ‘swiftboated’ him.

The message sent was loud and clear: the press could manufacture a story any time they want. And, given how long ago these transactions are supposed to have happened, it also sent the message that they are sitting on an arsenal of stories that they could pull out at any time to trash Windsor in the public imagination – much like the infamous list of ‘handsy’ Tory MPs that was leaked from the Whips’ office in 2017 and contained details of 40 MPs’ sexual and other misconducts, including Chris Pincher – the revelation of whose behaviour was just the trigger for the downfall of Boris Johnson.

We have just witnessed the punishment beating of a Royal, with the clear implication that the mass media can destroy the monarchy if it wished, and that if it hinders the agenda that parts of the press want to have the government follow, it will not hesitate to do so.

If that happens, we would not shed a single tear: indeed, given how some members of the Royal firm whine about the unfairness of press intrusion, we’d heartily encourage them to save themselves the bother, and leave the business, and take the whole stinking operation with them.

Pik Smeet

Greasy Pole: Howard’s End? (1999)

The Greasy Pole column from the April 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

A collective shiver must have run down a few thousand spines at the news that Michael Howard, all ambition apparently spent, intends to retire from the Conservative Front Bench (or perhaps had been pushed off it by William Hague). For a lot of people his time as Home Secretary is remembered now like a nasty operation or a serious accident on the motorway—for Howard was among the grisliest of that gruesome lot who, until May 1997, were the government of British capitalism.

Behind a condescending manner and voice and an immovable smile, reminiscent of an oil slick, there lurked, in Howard’s misunderstood breast, a steely ambition. When the Tories, reeling from their drubbing in 1997, were electing a leader to replace John Major, Howard proposed to Hague that they stood as a twosome—with Howard for leader and Hague for deputy. Of course Hague, not being of a suicidal turn of mind, turned the offer down. At the time Howard’s chances were rated highly; he seemed to love being Home Secretary with all the opportunities it gave to boost his popularity by playing up to the prejudices of the party conference. “Prison works,” he told them and they clapped until their wrists ached. “I have 27 points in a plan to fight crime,” he announced and they proved they were not entirely comatose with roars of approval. “If you can’t do the time don’t do the crime,” he shrieked and they rose as one person in an ecstatic standing ovation.

Criminal statistics

One problem with all this is that it did not seem to impress the criminal to any significant extent. The crime statistics—for what they are worth—went up and down (when they went down Howard was hysterically quick to claim this as proof of how effective he was) with little or no regard for what went on in the Home Office. That, to the despair of the reformers, is the way with crime. Meanwhile Howard was busily upsetting almost everyone who, unlike his mindless fans at Tory conferences, are actually in contact with the problem and so have some knowledge of the background to crime. Howard, it seemed, was just about the most unpopular Home Secretary there could be.

Until, that is, the arrival of Jack Straw, who seems bent on outdoing Howard in his zeal to go down in history as the Home Secretary who locked up so many people that there simply weren’t enough left outside the prison gates to commit crimes. Consider, for example, the manner in which asylum seekers are treated when they arrive in this country. When Howard was Home Secretary the Tory government introduced regulations which stipulated that unless an asylum seeker declared their status immediately on arrival they would not be eligible for any state benefits until their application for asylum had been approved by the Home Office. This was the kind of crackdown which Tory activists at their conferences love so much, colluding as it does with one of their grosser prejudices—that most of the people who arrive in Britain saying they have escaped from a brutal dictatorship are not genuinely in need of asylum but come here in search of an easy living on the dole.

One problem with the new regulations was in the time it took—and still takes—for the Home Office to deal with the applications. One recent report said that there are over 76,000 cases gathering dust somewhere there. This can go on for months on end, with no acknowledged reason for the delay. While this is happening the asylum seekers are marooned here with nothing to live on. As a concession local authorities are empowered to provide the very minimum of maintenance, which could mean vouchers exchangeable for basic food and clothing or an arrangement which allowed the applicant to eat at local hospitals or hostels. Another problem was the expectation that an asylum seeker would be in a fit state to pick their way through the bureaucracy of making a claim for benefit immediately they arrived in Britain. When we consider what they had been through in their country of origin, this had to be unlikely but the basis of the new arrangements was that they had not experienced anything unusual and were here to try to sponge on the state.

Cases we could cite are not of people who have come here for an easy life on the dole. Given the choice, they would prefer to be in their country of origin; they have fled to Britain in fear of their lives. This was, it seemed, well understood by the Labour Party when they opposed the Tory government’s restrictions on the refugees. One Labour MP remembers those restrictions as “…an act of spite and vengeance against refugees”.

Crackdown 

Labour’s recently published Asylum and Immigration Bill provides wider powers, such as in finger-printing, for the immigration officials, who are already not famous for a commitedly anti-racist stance in dealing with people coming into this country. Registrars will be able to demand evidence of personal details from couples applying to get married and to stop marriages on suspicion. The “cashless” system of subsistence through vouchers will continue, except that even this level of support will be used to discipline the asylum seekers who do not toe the line. Under a new arrangement, they will be directed to live in certain parts of the country and if they leave that area for more than the occasional night their subsistence will cease. So far we have not heard about how it is proposed to find out whether the asylum seekers have stayed where they have been placed nor what powers will be given, for example to the police, to enforce the arrangement. And just to make sure that the message gets across, the government will stop all state support for any asylum seeker who tries to challenge their treatment by the immigration authorities in the courts.

These proposals will be justified by the government on the spurious grounds that this country is being submerged by a flood of illegal immigrants who are undermining all civilised life here with excessive claims for state benefit. We are hearing hints about the menace of “economic immigrants” as if people who come here in the hope of getting a better life are some kind of criminal and as if this has not been an established incentive for millions of people all over the world to set up home abroad. Britain teems with “economic immigrants” from the past, as does the USA, France, Germany . . . and all these countries have had people leave for “economic” reasons. In any case when we look at the figures for people applying for refugee status in 1997 we see that the UK, with 41,000, comes below Germany (135,700) and the USA (103,700) and just a little above the Netherlands (34,400).

In fact the proposals have nothing to do with any alleged problem of resources and bogus claims but a lot to do with the Labour Party’s need to pander to every popular prejudice if they are to have a hope of staying in power for any length of time. This is what informs their every policy and action. This is the explanation for the string of broken promises and the hoards of disappointed supporters who are questioning whether this was what they voted Labour for. The behaviour of Labour in government is not a matter of accident or incompetence. Labour asked for power to govern British capitalism and that was what those voters opted for. The system has to be run like this—the assurances given in opposition have to be exposed as cruel fantasies. In his time Jack Straw was a prominent left-winger; in his mouth it was all a simple matter of changing one set of leaders, one manifesto of deception, for another. Now he shows the reality of it all: Howard may be at an end but his policies live on.

Ivan

In the News (2001)

From the April 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Economic crisis

Tumbles across the world’s financial markets have sent shockwaves through the media and the owning class. The “dotcom” revolution is under threat as new technology corporations report stalled sales, faltering profits and now share prices in freefall. One of the greatest success stories of the 1990s was computer company Cisco which was the best-performing stock of the decade with its share price soaring 100,000 per cent at one point to make it the world’s most valuable company; Now it has announced that it is axing thousands of workers, just like its competitor Compaq and many other high-tech companies.

This has confirmed that even the largest firms are now being hit by the US slowdown, undermining confidence in the entire cconomy. The impact on the world stock-market bubble has already been considerable. Here in the UK the FTSE 100 is down 20 per per cent already on last year and it is likely there may be some way to go. In the US the Nasdaq index of technology stocks has plunged as depressing business results pour in. In Japan. the situation is worse still: the economy refuses to kick in to life despite the best efforts of successive governments and its financial system has lust been described by a government minister there as “on the verge of collapse”.

So much then for the perpetual boom capitalism had allegedly entered and the associated “paradigm shift” in the world economy that was supposed to have taken place. Day by day capitalism is again showing itself red in tooth and claw — and lust as prone as ever to the economic crises and slumps that have beset it throughout its history. Socialists have never been fooled into thinking the system can act in any other way, of course—which is rather more than can be said for Gordon Brown, Eddie George or Alan Greenspan who now seem to be on a learning curve as steep as the Nasdaqs plunge.

Xenophobia

“Patriotism is the last refuge ot a scoundrel”, wrote Dr. Johnson. “In a half-hour speech in which he used the words Britain or Britishness 25 times, Mr. Hague insisted that he, his party and Conservative voters were not racist, bigoted or little Englanders.” (The Times, 5 March)

We can expect a beleaguered politician like the Tory leader who is facing political extinction, to appeal to the worst elements of Xenophobia in a deperate attempt at survival. His depiction of the possibility of an other Labour government as a “journey to a foreign land” and his promise to toughen up restrictions on refugees is to be expected.

But what of the Labour Party? A chance to champion the plight of the refugees? No chance, because the same newspaper reports, “Labour refused last night to criticize Mr. Hague’s remarks on asylum and Europe—areas which party officials believe they are vulnerable— and attacked the Tory economic record.” The awful fate of some refugees being sent home to be imprisoned, tortured or killed can only be wondered at, but it is worth noting what one unknown visitor to the Hololocaust Exhibition at the Imperial War Museum has recently recorded in the visitor’s book.

  “It is 2.15pm. I came into this exhibition at 10.15 this morning I feel very overwhelmed. I am Jewish— on my mother’s side and some of her family perished in the Holocaust. Some survived because they escaped. It would have been interesting to reflect on the debates which must have gone on in thousands of families as the 30s unfolded. To escape? To what? To lose all and face a life of uncertainty and exile. Or to stay because “it’ll all blow over” or “we’ll manage” or some other reason. I have never seen this written about and I think it is especially relevant today when asylum-seekers are so reviled and suspected.”

Environmental disasters ahead

At election times it often suits politicians to make sympathetic noises about environmental issues, but after the elections are over the same politicians can usually find “practical considerations” that make them have “re-appraisals” of previous “policy statements”. This cynical manipulation is rife throughout the capitalist world, but it is doubtful if any of the political con-men could beat President Bush for the rapidity of his volte-face on the environment.

In a letter to Republican Senators, Bush reversed his election campaign promise to limit CO2 emissions from coal-fired plants, saying a new study shows it would be too expensive. He also reiterated his opposition to the Kyoto protocol, a 1997 agreement which aims to reduce greenhouse gases in the industalised countries by 5.2 per cent by 2012 (New Scientist, 15 March).

This is of course, the crux of the matter—cost. We live in a capitalist world based on commodity production with the aim of obtaining a profit. In competing with other capitalists, both nationally and globally, it is necessary to drive down costs in order to grab a bigger share of the market.In such a cut-throat society environment considerations count for little, except perhaps a little electioneering rhetoric. With the USA putting the interests of their capitalist class before the needs of the planet the future looks grim indeed.

The reversal was a blow to Kyoto supporters, since limits on power plants are probably necessary for the US to reach the goals. Christopher Flavin, President of the Worldwatch Institute says: ‘It is essential since those plants are one of the main reasons for the recent sharp increase in US CO2 emissions. In the last two years, the US has passed China to be the world’s number one coal burner'” (New Scientist, 15 March)