Sunday 5 January 2014

Labour and immigration

Oh sheesh, Labour doing it again: following the Tories and the Mail claiming that low pay is caused by immigrants. Couldn't a Labour leadership have explained that it's employers who pay low pay not immigrants and that the Labour tradition of dealing with this is trade unions and a Labour government's way of dealing with it is to outlaw low pay, ('minimum wage'/'living wage' etc) legally backed up by an inspectorate? Gawd, that's not the revolution, it's just basic labour-style reform politics. Going on about immigrants causing low pay says that one group of workers is a threat to another group of workers and that one kind of poor person is a threat to another kind of poor person.

Again, couldn't Labour have said that the greatest threat to poor people are people like bankers who bring the system to collapse, governments who do what these same bankers tell them to do, governments who cut social services, freeze or cut pay, sack hundreds of thousands of employees, megamillionaires who don't bother to pay tax? Put all that together and that's by far, far more a greater threat or danger to poor people than the other kind of poor person, Labour is calling the immigrant.

Like the low pay cycle is the race to the bottom, this is a political race to hell. Labour, you will never win the blame the poor game. Tories and fascists are better at it, because they mix it up with flag-waving stereotypes and racist imagery to make it more potent. Labour tries to do it 'honestly' and it just looks like johnny-tag-along - which it is.