"British Jobs for British Workers” is a xenophobic and racist slogan: the left can debunk it.
In the 2016 EU referendum, opposing the migration of workers from central and eastern Europe into Britain was the key issue for many Leave voters, and one which was highlighted by the xenophobic UKIP party. The Leavers’ arguments were as simple as they were wrong. They said the the migrant workers took away ‘our’ jobs, depress wages and put pressure on housing and other social services. Moreover, they undermine the cultural homogeneity of ‘our’ country.
Essentially this xenophobic/racist argument is the same as the one used to oppose and discriminate against the Catholic Irish in the nineteenth century, Jews escaping pogroms at the beginning of the twentieth, blacks from the West Indies and Asians from Africa and the Indian subcontinent in the post-war period. By contrast, the British moving abroad for economic reasons are never labelled as migrants, but as ‘expats.’
It is completely correct to oppose this racism, to point out that the economy is boosted by young, migrant workers and to defend EU freedom of movement as an essential liberty. But in opposing racist lies, we shouldn’t blind ourselves to truths lurking behind the racist propaganda.
Let’s take a hypothetical case to illustrate the point. What is the sense of school cleaners in an English town commuting monthly from Romania? The workers live in appalling overcrowded conditions and receive no more than the minimum wage, while indigenous people in the town join the lines of the unemployed. At the same time a pressure is put on the local housing stock. Do circumstances such as these prove the xenophobes’ argument?
Not at all. The situation in that English town would be no different if the cleaners came not from Romania, but from Scotland or another part of Britain. The effects on local resources and local unemployment would be the same. The issue for certain jobs is not, as the racists claim, “British jobs for British workers,” but local jobs for local people. There is nothing wrong in principle in offering employment first to people who have lived in the area for a certain amount of time. Nationality has nothing to do with it. If a Romanian has lived in the town for say two years, s/he is at the front of the queue. The Brit from the other end of the country is not.
Once we accept in principle the idea of local jobs for local people in certain limited instances, we solve much of the ‘legitimate’ complaint and reveal the xenophobic and racist character of the slogan, “British jobs for British workers.”
10 October 2017
Should Catalonia declare independence?
Independence for Catalonia is not a principle. It depends on the will of the inhabitants and political realities.
As a socialist I have no fixed principle or view on whether Catalonia should be independent or not. But I do believe two things: first, that Catalonia should have the right to independence if the majority of people living there want it; and second, the behaviour of the Spanish state in violently impeding the October 1st referendum was deplorable.
However, following the chaotic referendum, socialists should not back immediate Catalan independence for two reasons: In the first place,it is far from certain that a majority of Catalonia’s voters support independence. And second, a declaration of independence by the Catalan Parliament would be followed by the forceful suspension of the Catalan administration and the imposition of direct rule from Madrid. Even if independence in these circumstances were achieved, the picture would be far from rosy. No recognition of Catalonia internationally, exclusion from the EU and massive de-investment in Spain’s richest region. There is certainly no public appetite for all this to happen.
If the Catalan government pulls back to fight another day, it is in strong position to win concessions from a Madrid which has no desire to go to war with its rebellious region.
As a socialist I have no fixed principle or view on whether Catalonia should be independent or not. But I do believe two things: first, that Catalonia should have the right to independence if the majority of people living there want it; and second, the behaviour of the Spanish state in violently impeding the October 1st referendum was deplorable.
However, following the chaotic referendum, socialists should not back immediate Catalan independence for two reasons: In the first place,it is far from certain that a majority of Catalonia’s voters support independence. And second, a declaration of independence by the Catalan Parliament would be followed by the forceful suspension of the Catalan administration and the imposition of direct rule from Madrid. Even if independence in these circumstances were achieved, the picture would be far from rosy. No recognition of Catalonia internationally, exclusion from the EU and massive de-investment in Spain’s richest region. There is certainly no public appetite for all this to happen.
If the Catalan government pulls back to fight another day, it is in strong position to win concessions from a Madrid which has no desire to go to war with its rebellious region.
9 October 2017
Zionism: don't leave yourself vulnerable to attack
By banding around the the term Zionism, leftists are being imprecise and unnecessarily leaving themselves open to malicious allegations of antisemitism.
It’s somewhat crazy to deliberately slip on a banana skin just to make the point that somebody else should not have put it there. But that is pretty much what some on the left are doing when they bang on about Zionism, and end up being given the boot by the Labour Party.
Why use the term at all? Zionism was a project, gaining steam around the beginning of the 20th Century, particularly among Jews in the west of the then Russian empire, to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Zionism was never a majority opinion among Jews. Today, Israel is not a project but a regional superpower, whose dissolution is neither desirable nor realistic. Even if the country is a paradise compared with its neighbours, in contrast to other liberal democracies it has two major shortcomings. Israel is based on the supremacy of one ethnic group and relegates its Palestinian citizens to a second-class status. In addition, Israel occupies territories outside its borders and appropriates land for its own citizens and denies many human and civic rights to Palestinians living under permanent military occupation.
Both these things are worthy of hefty criticism, but it is more precise to criticise the Israeli state and successive Israeli governments than to talk in abstractions about Zionism. On top of that references to Zionism carry two further dangers.
First, you and I know that antisemitism (prejudice against an ethnic group) and anti-Zionism (opposition to a political project) are quite different things. And, of course, those in the Labour Party and press throwing around accusations of antisemitism know that too. But the the distinction is lost on many ordinary people, so people opposing Zionism can easily and falsely be labelled as antisemites.
Second, criticising Zionism is in principle OK, but talking about Zionist conspiracies is not. The latter implies that people who are Jewish are all secretly working together with Israel to advance themselves against the interests of the gentile world. That’s pure antisemitic nonsense. You can distinguish, I suppose, between a conspiracy to promote Zionism and a Zionist conspiracy, but why go there? These muddles can be avoided.
Indeed, why negotiate this minefield at all, when you don’t have to. Remember, the Corbyn leadership is now focussed on winning office. If you step on a mine, they are not going to expend political capital to help you.
It’s somewhat crazy to deliberately slip on a banana skin just to make the point that somebody else should not have put it there. But that is pretty much what some on the left are doing when they bang on about Zionism, and end up being given the boot by the Labour Party.
Why use the term at all? Zionism was a project, gaining steam around the beginning of the 20th Century, particularly among Jews in the west of the then Russian empire, to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Zionism was never a majority opinion among Jews. Today, Israel is not a project but a regional superpower, whose dissolution is neither desirable nor realistic. Even if the country is a paradise compared with its neighbours, in contrast to other liberal democracies it has two major shortcomings. Israel is based on the supremacy of one ethnic group and relegates its Palestinian citizens to a second-class status. In addition, Israel occupies territories outside its borders and appropriates land for its own citizens and denies many human and civic rights to Palestinians living under permanent military occupation.
Both these things are worthy of hefty criticism, but it is more precise to criticise the Israeli state and successive Israeli governments than to talk in abstractions about Zionism. On top of that references to Zionism carry two further dangers.
First, you and I know that antisemitism (prejudice against an ethnic group) and anti-Zionism (opposition to a political project) are quite different things. And, of course, those in the Labour Party and press throwing around accusations of antisemitism know that too. But the the distinction is lost on many ordinary people, so people opposing Zionism can easily and falsely be labelled as antisemites.
Second, criticising Zionism is in principle OK, but talking about Zionist conspiracies is not. The latter implies that people who are Jewish are all secretly working together with Israel to advance themselves against the interests of the gentile world. That’s pure antisemitic nonsense. You can distinguish, I suppose, between a conspiracy to promote Zionism and a Zionist conspiracy, but why go there? These muddles can be avoided.
Indeed, why negotiate this minefield at all, when you don’t have to. Remember, the Corbyn leadership is now focussed on winning office. If you step on a mine, they are not going to expend political capital to help you.
2 October 2017
The Nation State: facts and desires
The nation state is the prime unit of focus in politics, but should it be?
Despite talk of globalisation, in the developed capitalist world today the nation state remains the key unit of political organisation and identity. It possesses a monopoly of violence over its territory, supported by its legal system, bureaucracy and has control of the vast bulk of money held as public funds. Neither sub-units, such as regional authorities, nor supranational ones, such as the European Union, come anywhere near to outweighing the political might of the nation state. That thesis was never proved more amply than during the Catalan Independence referendum fiasco on 1 October 2017.
Several other West European states (e.g. Britain and Belgium) contain nationalist and separatist tendencies. While such autonomous movements should not be politically underestimated, it should be noted that not one state in western Europe has been broken up in this way since 1945. The devolved units, such as Scotland and Catalonia, remain very much secondary to the old political states of which they are still part.
Nonetheless, the independent power and room for manoeuvre of the nation state has weakened in the last thirty years on account of globalisation - or to say that more precisely, the free movement of financial capital, the growing role of transnational corporations and transnational political agreements (e.g. the Schengen open borders agreement) Yet, that does not change the fundamental power of the nation state, the real power of which was most clearly demonstrated in the near financial meltdown in 2008. Collapsing banks could only be rescued by subsidies from nation states, while supranational bodies such as the EU proved themselves weak and ineffective.
An entirely different question is: should the nation state be the exclusive focus for the political left? The answer is no for at least two reasons: first nationalism by its nature not only creates a community of "insiders," imagined or otherwise, for those who are deemed part of the nation, but by the same token it also identifies and excludes those who are not deemed to part of the nation. The striving for socialism, tactical consideration aside, can never be based on preference for one set of people defined by citizenship or ethnicity at the expense of others, because socialism is properly anchored in principles of universalism and internationalism.
The second reason is practical. Reformism is about progressive change brought about by the state, nearly always with popular pressure from below. It is indeed true that in the so-called Golden Years, late 1940s to the mid 1970s, the nation state in every West European democracy did bring about meaningful reform in favour of working people. Thus we can clearly see that, though the state is an instrument of capitalist power, it also has the ability to regulate capitalism and can do so on occasion against the immediate interests of capitalists. And today, in so far as globalisation has diminished the power of the national state, the space for progressive reform lost to the nation state can only be taken up by supranational bodies – and in Europe that mean the EU. Such reform is, of course, utterly unrealistic if conceived as the EU alone acting against member states, but is perfectly feasible if it were the EU acting in coalition with several of its big member states - even though, sadly, that opportunity has been lost to the British Left on account of Brexit.
Despite talk of globalisation, in the developed capitalist world today the nation state remains the key unit of political organisation and identity. It possesses a monopoly of violence over its territory, supported by its legal system, bureaucracy and has control of the vast bulk of money held as public funds. Neither sub-units, such as regional authorities, nor supranational ones, such as the European Union, come anywhere near to outweighing the political might of the nation state. That thesis was never proved more amply than during the Catalan Independence referendum fiasco on 1 October 2017.
Several other West European states (e.g. Britain and Belgium) contain nationalist and separatist tendencies. While such autonomous movements should not be politically underestimated, it should be noted that not one state in western Europe has been broken up in this way since 1945. The devolved units, such as Scotland and Catalonia, remain very much secondary to the old political states of which they are still part.
Nonetheless, the independent power and room for manoeuvre of the nation state has weakened in the last thirty years on account of globalisation - or to say that more precisely, the free movement of financial capital, the growing role of transnational corporations and transnational political agreements (e.g. the Schengen open borders agreement) Yet, that does not change the fundamental power of the nation state, the real power of which was most clearly demonstrated in the near financial meltdown in 2008. Collapsing banks could only be rescued by subsidies from nation states, while supranational bodies such as the EU proved themselves weak and ineffective.
An entirely different question is: should the nation state be the exclusive focus for the political left? The answer is no for at least two reasons: first nationalism by its nature not only creates a community of "insiders," imagined or otherwise, for those who are deemed part of the nation, but by the same token it also identifies and excludes those who are not deemed to part of the nation. The striving for socialism, tactical consideration aside, can never be based on preference for one set of people defined by citizenship or ethnicity at the expense of others, because socialism is properly anchored in principles of universalism and internationalism.
The second reason is practical. Reformism is about progressive change brought about by the state, nearly always with popular pressure from below. It is indeed true that in the so-called Golden Years, late 1940s to the mid 1970s, the nation state in every West European democracy did bring about meaningful reform in favour of working people. Thus we can clearly see that, though the state is an instrument of capitalist power, it also has the ability to regulate capitalism and can do so on occasion against the immediate interests of capitalists. And today, in so far as globalisation has diminished the power of the national state, the space for progressive reform lost to the nation state can only be taken up by supranational bodies – and in Europe that mean the EU. Such reform is, of course, utterly unrealistic if conceived as the EU alone acting against member states, but is perfectly feasible if it were the EU acting in coalition with several of its big member states - even though, sadly, that opportunity has been lost to the British Left on account of Brexit.
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