When it comes to the discussion about immigration, both its advocates and its opponents tend to display a certain contempt for the working class. Last week Cameron lamented the consequences of high immigration, and blamed the phenomenon on the British welfare system. British workers, he argued had become addicted to welfare, in turn forcing British firms to look abroad. It is unfortunate that, in making this case, he was echoing some of the arguments that get made by what we consider to be the liberal left. As I have noted in the past, the Guardian and the Independent have sometimes made the case for immigration but telling us how “useless” or “revolting” low skilled British workers are.

Indeed, as distasteful as Cameron’s remarks were, the case being made for immigration by Cable and the business lobby is not that much more appealing. Cable’s approach is that immigration is necessary to fill gaps in the labour market. This line of argument is frequently echoed by business. Robert Peston recently alerted us to the complaints of leading British industrialists who argued that the pool of talent in Britain alone is not wide or deep enough.

It is indeed rather galling to hear that migrants are desperately needed to fill gaps in the labour market, while 2.5 million of our citizens are without work. Of course there can be a mismatch between the skills that people have, and the skills that businesses require, and of course, as Chris Dillow recently argued, labour is not completely mobile: “An unemployed council workerin Swansea”, he writes, ” cannot easily become a plumber in London or fruit-picker in Lincolnshire.” Yet the discussion ought not to end there. First of all, people’s abilities are not completely immutable. People can be trained and retrained, and the businesses that have benefitted the most from the upturning and remoulding of the British economy over the preceding decades to be prepared to shoulder some of the costs. Secondly, it is not completely crazy to suggest that Britain should seek to direct its economic activity towards the kind of skills that people have.

This modern globalised economy in which we live is characterised by uncertainty and constant change. Patterns of comparative advantage can rapidly shift, and developments elsewhere can – if things are left to the market – very suddenly make whole sectors of the economy inviable. This is what we saw in the 80s. For business, mass migration can be a means of transferring these risks onto the working class. Workers whose skills are now the “wrong” skills can simply be dispensed with. There is no incentive to retrain and reskill, when those with the “right” skills can simply be cherry picked from across the globe. Equally, the kind of activity in which businesses engage can be determined only by what can be sold most profitably, without reference to what the existing labour force is best able to produce. The scrap heap piles up, and piles up some more.

If this looks like a call to limit migration, it is not. But what I am saying is that a defence of migration cannot simply be a defence of the status quo. We need to push for the kind of society and the kind of economy in which migration genuinely works to the benefit of all concerned. Because right now, the picture is not as rosy as some on the liberal left seem to complacently believe. In response to Cameron’s speech, Mehdi Hassan – senior political editor at the New Statesman – made a spirited defence of immigrtation. In doing so, he boasted of a Low Pay Commission report which, he said, found that immigration increased the average waes of non-immigrant workers.

The report itself did indeed discover that immigration was increasing the “average” wage. Yet it also found that while immigration was associated with “significantly positive wage effects around the middle of the distribution”, it also had “clearly negative wage effects at the lower end of the distribution”. In other words it was associated with increasing inequality. There is no necessary reason why immigration should have such an impact. As with any other phenomenon, the impact of migration is dependent upon the social and economic circumstances in which it takes place. With, for example, stronger unions and better labour laws (ours anti-union legislation is amongst the most restrictive in the developed world), wages for the worst off need not simply a matter of supply and demand. But unless we are prepared to put forward such an alternative, then we might as well hold our peace.

To contact Reuben email reuben@thethirdestate.net

The Education Maintenance Allowance gave £30 a week to students from poor families continuing their education past GCSE. I say ‘gave’ because it has been axed by the government.

I never needed to subscribe to this, but I know that a lot of the people I studied alongside at the Sixth Form College I attended would have had a very stressful time without it (and many would not have sat their A Levels at all.)

The EMA was one of those New Labour policies that worked because it put money directly into the pockets of people who needed it. And it really did work. From the FT:

The Institute for Fiscal Studies found that the EMA’s impact was “quite substantial”. It increased the share of young men eligible for the benefit staying in education for two years by 7.4 percentage points and by 5.9 percentage points for women.

In its place the doomed youth of today will have to make do with a £50 million ‘targetted’ program, details to be announced in the near future. (This represents a saving of £500 million pounds, though sadly misery felt by the young and poor isn’t accounted for in most government figures.)

The caprice of this decision is infuriating. A dear friend of mine, from just such a family, began at university only last month; I know for a fact that he would never have been able to afford the travel to and from the college he attended (at which he received distinctions on every piece of work completed.) Almost by accident of birth he, and many others in his situation, got away, having left for university just in time for this Review. Other bright working class students won’t be so lucky.

The expansion of vocational training for the young was presented almost as a way of making up for this insult. Add to this the increases in tuition fees, and this government has effectively priced the working class out of an academic education, while offering only manual labour. Jesus Christ, we might as well bring back the secondary modern. Disgraceful.

“Middle and working class parents stumbled across this ‘tough love’ approach where you put clear boundaries, but within those boundaries you are totally child-centred. You nurture them, love them and journey with them to adulthood.

“But that, for all kinds of reasons, has got fractured. It is a wish for young people to know how to get back to that.” (From the BBC website: http://bbc.in/bRwHEq.)

What to make of this?

Well the first thing to be said is that what we now see rather nostalgically as ‘tough-love’ was very often just ‘tough’. And if a lack of such a parenting style contributes to poor development by school-age, why do the children of middle class liberals do so much better than the children of poor parents?

Let’s take one example. It has been shown that the very vocabulary of young children is affected by class. Children of middle class parents actually know more words than children of working class parents. This dramatically affects the ability to read later. And the differences are disproportional: some of the poorer parts of our country have 40% of children reading below their age. The result should be simple: working class parents must make a strong effort to flood their children with spoken language in every way they can. Yes, and they must do this while working two jobs, or worrying about losing on, trying to find one, worrying about how this month’s bills will be paid, all the while living in modern squalor and totally unsure of their current means of life. These people really must try harder.

‘Hand-outs’, Field has assured us, can’t solve everything: “Money alone will not give people the space, the abilities and knowledge to be the good parents that most want to be.”

No, but the money helps.  His statement that he would rather see child benefits slashed than support for parents scaled back is seriously antiquated: rather than society bringing the working class up to a civilised level (well within our ability) they must attend parenting classes and work their own way out of the situation in which they have been placed.

This would be forgivable if Field wasn’t giving his status as an egalitarian to a government actively concerned with increasing inequality. Cameron will now be able to point to Field whenever he is asked a tough question on the gap between rich and poor. “Don’t look at us, we’ve got Frank Field on the case. And his report concluded that we should bring back caning and Latin…”

Parental failure needs to be discussed in this matter, but to lose sight of the real problem – inequality itself – and aid a pro-inequality government in this manner is far less than should be expected of a social democrat.

Working class universalism is not enough. Labour does not deserve our unwavering loyalty

Power to the people!

It’s Friday evening. I should be out partying or down the pub. Instead I’m sitting in front of my computer, wondering what wondrous topic to opine upon for my column. I’ve scoured the news. David Cameron’s doing God and Boris, hopes for a climate change deal this year are looking scandelously dismal, British soldiers are getting shot in Afghanistan and American soldiers are getting shot at home. But what’s really caught my attention tonight has been the debate on Though Cowards Flinch which emerged from an article Guy Aitchison wrote for The Third Estate on Power2010. The discussion on democratic reform, whilst interesting in and of itself, is not really what’s piqued my interest in this thread, rather the disagreements on left wing organisation within and without the Labour Party.

I very rarely get involved in internal left-wing organisational disputes anymore. Partly because, despite their utility to a point (and it is a definite point), they bore the hell out of me. And this is speaking as someone who considers themselves switched on. For the wider public, sectarianism is to socialism as talking about your ex is to sex. It’s a turnoff. More crucially, however, these sorts of debates in the end only serve to distract us from our common goals, our common enemies, and the wider issues facing us in a very unjust world. While we’re bickering about the best way to rally the British workers to our cause, Iraqi civillians are getting blown up, Afghanistan’s tearing itself apart, kids are slaving away in sweat shops, Palestinians are having their homes knocked down, the ice caps and glaciers are melting and David Cameron’s doing God. And Boris.

Just this once, however, I’m going to throw in my two Euro cents. The impetus for this is a comment by Carl Packman in response to my damnation of the Labour Party and everything it stands for these days.

I see what you’re saying Salman, but take something that Mark Fischer said, when he gave a lecture on Marxism recently at Eton: ‘I assured the audience that the whole point of Marxists’ identification with the working class was its universalism.’ The very reason British Marxists should remain tied to the Labour party, and not join fringe yoke like SWP, or any of the other Trot splits, is because the party is historically linked to the Labour movement, and is henceforth the site of working class universalism. New Labour neo-liberalism is its inappropriate thorn, those careerists should not be vindicated by socialists jumping ship.

I tend to avoid discussing Marxism in 19th (or indeed 20th) century terms anymore. The last time I used the words bourgeoisie and proletariat were in an essay on The German Ideology. I believe many of Marx’s ideas remain fundamentally relevant to the modern world, but the modern world is dynamic and disjunctive and theory must remain equally adaptable in its adoption. Creationists, after all, are laughed at in modern Europe. Christians who have successfully incorporated Darwinism into their world view remain part of relevant discourse. The reason I personally feel this point warrants discussion however, is because it’s a debate I’ve had with Reuben many times. It’s a very old idea and one that has never failed to leave me feeling cold.

No political party reserves the right to go unchallenged. And no left-wing organisation deserves the right to be reified, to become a concrete fact in and of itself, to demand the unwavering loyalty of the workers regardless of its political positions. If that party is not the right vehicle for change, we should not be in it. I simply cannot accept that because the Labour party was once the locus for progressive working class political activity that it should always be and will always be, irrespective of its current leadership and its present policies. That is the political equivalent of Creationism. It relies on nothing more than blind faith. Not least the faith that New Labour – a neo-liberal, neo-conservative, repressive war machine that, by gutting the Labour movement and accepting the basic tenets of Thatcherism has done far more damage to the country and the world than the Iron Lady ever could -  is simply a transient thorn. It isn’t. It’s been here for the best part of two decades and will remain for the forseeable future. Labour may be heading for a spell in opposition, but the fight against Cameron as he does God and Boris won’t be led by the old class warriors. It will be led, most likely, by David Miliband. Or another obsequious, spineless, supine, Blairite clone with a pretty face and ugly politics.

And it is precisely this kind of faith-based thinking which will continue the New Labour project long after Brown’s government has faded to a dim, uncomfortable and embarrassing memory.  New Labour is not a transient thorn. Its intelligent, educated and very bourgeois (look what you’ve made me do!) architects made a calculated, and very correct, decision that they can afford a sharp swing to the middle ground because whatever they do, their core support of left-wing voters will back them come what may. As long as they believe they can get away with that, New Labour will remain entrenched and the British working class will find nothing more than a few empty platitudes.

The workers of Venezuela once owed their loyalty to the loosely social democratic Acción Democrática party. Indeed their largest trade union remains linked it it. But AD was not the right vehicle for a country that desperately needed change. That’s why Chavez rose to fill a gap in political representation, without any reliance on historical links or organisational ties, because he is the right vehicle and the right voice at the right time. That time is now. Parties cannot just be viewed in terms of their history. A week’s a long time in politics and a decade’s even longer. We have to look at their policies here and now and make informed decisions about the change they are likely to bring. Otherwise we’re betraying our own principles, all in the name of some ideological committment to a homogenous, united, organised, class-conscious working class of the last century that thanks to Thatcher, Major, Blair and Brown, no longer exists.

Labour are warning that the far right are becoming more dangerous – perhaps it’s time for them to stop being complacent.

John Denham announced a new government initiative on the weekend to address the concerns of the white working classes who he said had been “exploited” by the far right. The government, it seems, has finally taken its head, ostrich-like, out of the sand of middle class suburbia and realised that in their absence the right wing have filled the void that their disinterest in traditional Labour heartlands has created.

As secretary of state for communities and local government, Mr Denham has actually helped to deepen the class divide that has led to traditional Labour areas becoming a breeding ground for racists. In a speech he gave to the Fabian Society only a few months ago – a speech, aimed at wooing the middle ground of voters – Mr Denham said that the old ideal of egalitarianism that had “dominated much left-liberal thinking since the 1960s” was over. In other words people were now willing to accept disparities in wealth and we should stop kicking against the system. This is sort of the political theory equivalent of “shit happens”. He also said:

“If you think you are in the middle, policies and language aimed at ‘the poor’ leave you out. And if you are in the middle, you are more likely to be concerned about whether ‘the top’ is doing better than you, than you are about ‘the bottom’.”

Well, guess what John? Those people at ‘the bottom’ are now in danger of becoming a major thorn in the side of the Home Counties voters New Labour has been so busy attracting for the last 12 years.

The far right are making gains, they aren’t large gains yet – they are, however, getting a lot of publicity. In the vacuum of any decent opposition to them on the ground, that publicity is starting to win people over to their crude and ignorant ideologies. Every time the media shows someone from the BNP or the English Defence League on TV they are in isolation. If anyone from any of the major political parties deigns to even comment on them, it is usually from the despatch box at Westminster. The logic being: “you are ‘down there’ and we are ‘up here’”. Unfortunately, ‘down there’ is in the grass roots of the constituencies – i.e. where the voters are. A good, if maverick, example of how this optical illusion works can be seen in Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’ (bear with me). When Romeo talks about how attractive his latest crush Rosaline is, his friend Benvolio says to him:

“Tut, you saw her fair, none else being by,

Herself poised with herself in either eye”.

In other words, in the absence of any comparison, she looked like a good thing. So it is with the BNP. Those who say that Nick Griffin should not be given the platform of a respected programme such as Question Time to air his racist opinions are missing the point. It is exactly the platform that they need to be seen on. They need to be engaged with in a respectable environment so they can be compared to mainstream politicians – and completely annihilated.

Ignoring the problem has not and never will make it go away – just as ignoring working class voters, your own traditional constituency, will only make them turn against you. Complacency, combined with a recession that has hit the poorest and most marginalised in our society the hardest, is the ideal breeding ground for fascism. Necessity is the mother of all reinvention. Labour may lose the next election, but for the good of the country as a whole they need to remember who they are and win back the working class.