Why a Corbyn-led Labour Government would be better for nearly everyone, even the radical left. Part 1b: Race and Immigration, questions for the radical left

This is Part 1b of a series of articles around the UK General Election. You can find the introduction to the series here.

The Left has basically won on the question of Austerity. It has managed to convince people that the stripping back of state provision and selling off of state assets was not done to reduce the deficit but rather out of political considerations: to enrich the rich, transferring wealth upwards. Under the Conservatives, the deficit has increased and they are not in the least bit concerned because that was never their aim in the first place. Despite some fluctuations, Britain’s external borrowing (debt owed to creditors outside the UK) remains above 6,000,000 million pounds, up by another 500,000 million pounds since the Tories came to power.[13]

However, on the question of immigration, the Left has still to find an answer that can convince the population. “No borders”, is more than a political slogan, it is the only ethical position on the subject. To assert the right to residency of some people but not others has no moral basis other than a fascist-style racial supremacy that posits an arbitrary ‘ethnicity’ (either ‘Anglo-Saxon’ or ‘white’) as the basis of belonging or a feudal-style ‘right of conquest’. ‘We were here first’, runs the latter argument.

Claudia Jones, the Commonwealth and the Immigration Act of 1962

Reading Claudia Jones’s broadside against 1962’s Commonwealth Immigration Act as reproduced in the latest Race & Class, a few things struck me. This first immigration act, passed by a Tory government in the year following Jones’s opinion piece in the West Indian Gazette, significantly changed British views on immigration. The targets she rages against should make us reflect on some of the assumptions we have so naturalised that we no longer recognise them as assumptions at all.

Reflections on A Sivanandan’s ‘All that Melts into the Air is Solid’

I have recently started up Hotchpotch again, as part of the Extra Pages project. It’s ‘an intellectual night for non-academics’ – a participatory evening of discussion, debate, bring-and-share readings, presentation from an activist/community group and also a lecture by a layperson on a text that they have found interesting. Last Monday I did the first one, on A. Sivanandan’s 1990 essay. I had picked up ‘Communities of Resistance: Writings on Black Struggles’ in an English language bookshop in Budapest. I have found it fascinating. Siv, born into a Tamil family in Northern Sri Lanka (Ceylon as it then was), left for Britain after the inter-ethnic riots between Sinhalese and Tamil and “walked straight into the ‘riots’ in Notting Hill”. In England “I knew then I was black. I could no longer stand on the sidelines; race was a problem that affected me directly. … I had to find a way of making some sort of contribution to the improvement of scoiety, to bring about a society where human beings could be human.” (The Heart is Where the Battle is; Verso, 1990) Starting as a tea boy in a public library, he qualified as a librarian, going on to work in the library of the Institute of Race Relations, which he and other members took over, with Siv becoming director. From an Establishment body, “controlled and in part financed by big business [which] spoke to government concerns”, Siv and the others made it “a think-in-order-to-do tank, for black and Third World Peoples.”