Emancipation & Liberation

Bill Scott uses the traditional song, Erin Go Bragh to explore the historical role of migrant workers in Scotland

In our feudal past, apart from the merchant towns such as Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen, Scotland was almost purely an agricultural community. Three quarters of Scotland’s total land area is still agricultural land, mainly hill and upland grazing suitable only for sheep and cattle rearing.

Up until the 19th century the largest single source of employment for men was in agriculture with women also making up a sizeable proportion of the workforce. Then came the Industrial Revolution and the Clearances. Hundreds of thousands of potential farm workers emigrated to the New World or to find work in the mines (Fife, Lanarkshire, the Lothians) and factories of Edinburgh, Dundee, Glasgow and the West of Scotland.

But the new industrial workforce still needed to be fed. So where were cheap, and therefore profitable, agricultural workers to be found? The answer then as now was in migrant workers.

As male labourers became less plentiful the farm owners of fertile South and Central Scotland turned to female workers from the Highlands. In the martial Gaelic society of the Highlands & Islands women had always been the main harvesters. The main harvesting implement was the light toothed sickle which women wielded more efficiently cutting the grain and straw down to the root. Escaping grinding poverty and the rigid social convention enforced by the Kirk young Highland women flocked to take part in the hairst (harvest).

In 1827 a minister complained that the roads of Argyll were full of Highland women who had bought fripperies and fineries from wages earned at the hairst. Having been away the whole time from the restraining moral influences of males like himself! For these young women the hairst was viewed almost as much a holiday as work. Large groups of women from the same community would sign up and travel together taking a piper with them to play on the road as they walked to the hairst. Once they arrived they would live in communal bothies.

The Lothian hairst attracted labour from as far afield as Argyll and Wester Ross. At that time 46% of the agricultural labour force in the Lothians was female, higher than anywhere else in Scotland. As the Clearances accelerated the self-sufficient shielings and crofts of old were burnt to the ground and folk moved off the land to accommodate first the more profitable sheep and then hunting, fishing and shooting estates. The Napier Commission reported that in the 1880s Many young women went to the Lothians. It is sheer necessity that compels them to go. Whilst going to the herring (gutting and cleaning fish for the then new and very profitable herring industry) was a long term occupation, with many married women involved, the harvest shearers coming to the Lothians were mainly in their mid-to late teens.

Further labour came from the agricultural North East where the harsher climate meant that crops took longer to ripen. North East harvesters moved from farm to farm in the Lothians and then worked the harvest north through Stirlingshire, the Carse of Gowrie, Fife or even westwards into Ayrshire. Eventually they would arrive back in time for the hairsts in Banff, Buchan and Huntly.

The women who came south were paid £1 a week for their back-breaking labour but it seems that the independence gained and the possibility of romance far from the eyes of watchful ministers and fathers was also a strong attraction. A common concern in official and religious tracts of the period was this loss of social and sexual control over these mobile women earning their own wages. Some were even known to smoke!

In the early days shearers lived in farm outbuildings but as time passed purpose built bothies were constructed – still pretty basic with no running water and no toilet. Though living conditions were poor the hairst workers appear to have been well fed, with porridge, milk, bread, beer and very occasionally meat provided in addition to wages – with labour scarcer something had to be done to ensure these migrant workers would return the next year.

Many shearers embarked at Aberdeen to sail to Leith for the Lothians. In Leith the shearers disembarked at a place in the docks that locals derisively called “Teuchters’ Landing”. The former Waterfront Bar in Leith has now acquired this pretty unhappy name.

In the later part of the 19th Century after the Irish (and Scottish) Potato Famine, Irish male labourers, using the scythe-heuk, gradually replaced female shearers. The migrant Irish labourers mainly came from Donegal and originally worked in Dumfries & Galloway before gradually spreading out to other parts of Scotland. The scythe cut more corn, more quickly but male labour was more expensive which perhaps explains why there was still a demand for female labour in the Lothians as late as the early 1900s.

But the Clearances and grinding poverty also drove male agricultural workers south from the Highlands. This Scottish song from the mid-19th Century tells the story of a Highland Scot who is mistaken for an Irishman. At that time both groups were almost equally despised in Lowland Scotland being categorised as uncivilised savages, Papish (the Highlanders were actually more likely to be Episcopalian or even ‘Wee Frees’ but why let the facts stand in the way of prejudice), bog-walkers who couldn’t even speak English. Both groups were also in competition with locals for jobs and, because the Irish and Highlanders were often literally fleeing famine, were often prepared to work for very low wages, causing resentment as they undercut the locals.

The song, Erin Go Bragh, was revived and given a more modern arrangement – but retaining the biting irony of the original – by Dick Gaughan, a Leither, who is proud of his, second generation, Irish roots. The lyrics given here are close to those given on Dick’s website (there is always argument about how to set broad Scots down in writing).

The song demonstrates that West Highlanders had far closer links with their Irish cousins than they did with Lowland Scots. Stan Reeves of Edinburgh’s Adult Learning Project has experienced going into a village pub in County Cork to hear a song melody from the Western Isles with new more locally relevant lyrics attached, the song having been brought there perhaps over a hundred years before by Hebridean herring fishermen. Similarly tunes can be heard in the West Highlands that almost certainly originated centuries before in Ireland.

What the song also demonstrates is that intolerance and racial prejudice can start a lot closer to home than despising Poles or Lithuanians and accusing them of taking our jobs. How daft does, Lowland jobs for Lowland workers sound? Best to be like the bold Erin Go Bragh of this song and identify with others who are oppressed. Who knows some day it might be you yourself under attack.

But of course hundreds of thousands of Highlanders did not do as bold Erin Go Bragh did and retreat to the Highlands. Instead during the Clearances fully half of those forced off the land settled in Central Scotland. They found jobs in the factories, mines and mills. They joined trade unions. They became part of local Lowland communities. In the best sense of the word they were assimilated but so too were Lowland Scots.

Before the Clearances there was a clear divide in Scottish society between the Lowlands and Highlands, each viewing the inhabitants of the other with suspicion and as other to their own way of life. After the Clearances the songs and stories of the Highlanders were transferred into the families and communities they became part of. Yes that sometimes meant a sentimental attachment to a life and culture that had in reality been far from idyllic. But many now Lowland Scots genuinely did have a granny (because the older Highlanders were most reluctant to leave and least able to succeed as economic migrants) and a place they thought of and, for a time, had a clear memory of, as ‘home’ in the Highlands.

But in addition the Highlanders’ oral history of oppression, rebellion and struggle – the Massacre of Glencoe, the ’45, the Sutherland Clearances, the Battle of the Braes & the Land League – became incorporated as a seamless whole into the Lowland Scots narrative of the Covenanters, the United Scotsmen and the 1820 Rebellion. Gaelic and Lallans oral history became “our” history. It is that capacity to incorporate incomers which should give us hope that the current racism and prejudice towards migrant workers can, and will, be overcome as new Scots add the weft of their oral tradition to the rich cloth of Scots working class history.

Note: Nowadays Erin Go Bragh is better known as the Anglicisation of a Gaelic phrase used to express allegiance to Ireland. It is most often translated as Ireland Forever. Speakers of Irish often claim that it is a corruption of the Irish, Eire go brach. However the Scottish Gaelic phrase Eirinn gu brath, literally means, Ireland until the Day of Judgement and is pronounced almost identically to Erin Go Bragh. So it’s possible that a phrase which has come to strongly represent Ireland could have come originally not from the Irish (Gaeilge) but instead from the Scottish (Gaidhlig). Dick Gaughan’s website is at: http://dickgaughan.co.uk

Editorial from The Commune, no. 6

The jobs massacre currently taking place under the cover of recession is an attack which particularly endangers casually or precariously employed workers; furthermore, migrants are also being scapegoated for ‘stealing’ hard-to-come-by jobs.

Immigrants, many of whom are forced to leave their countries of birth by repressive regimes directly or indirectly put in place with a helping hand from British foreign policy, are expected to work long hours at low pay on casual contracts: and most of all, not to complain.

However, brave organising efforts have been mounted by many migrant workers to stand up to employers and demand basic rights: for example cleaners at university campuses or banks in the City of London demanding a living wage rather than just the legal minimum and fighting against redundancies. They are an example to the entire labour movement of how to fight back: they show the possibility of building working-class resistance to the recession. Yet as the ‘Justice for Cleaners’ episode shows unions like Unite are indifferent, or even hostile, to migrant workers. This despite the fact that for many migrants, raising your head above the parapet risks determined efforts by employers and the state to question your ‘right’ to live in the UK and therefore to weed-out troublemakers and organisers.

Recent liberal calls for an ‘amnesty’ offering ‘a pathway to citizenship’ for ‘hard-working’ illegal immigrants do not challenge this, since business interests and the state still decide who is ‘suitable’ for entry. The use of border controls to determine who may or may not live in the UK is an affront to any notion of democratic rights of the individual, and is also intimately linked with the racist idea that where you come from should determine whether you are allowed to choose to live here. Such border controls are also highly gendered, with women bearing the brunt of deportations and violence perpetrated by immigration officials.

Those who argue that migrants should not be allowed into the UK ‘for their own protection’, to stop them being exploited by unscrupulous employers, ignore the fact that hundreds of thousands of people work in the UK illegally regardless: in fact their status simply means that they are denied basic employment rights; subjected to practices such as the nonpayment of wages; and are in constant fear that their already precarious work status will be swept from under them. Borders, detention centres and deportations are a savage weapon in the hands of the bosses to control people. Capitalism needs to move the workforce around at its whim in order to mobilise it efficiently, much as the EU Posted Workers’ Directive has allowed bosses to ‘undercut’, breaking union and minimum wage agreements: the best way to fight this exploitation is not to retreat into protectionism, but rather to demand full freedom of movement and equal work conditions for all, regardless of any form of national discrimination.

As communists we are for a world without any borders or states. Opposition to all immigration controls is fundamental to the free society we envisage and the fight to build it starts now. We do not believe it to be some ‘optional extra’ to be neglected as it was by recent left electoral projects from Respect to No2EU. All workers have a common enemy in these racist, sexist, union-busting immigration controls.

Reprinted from the No One Is Illegal website

Whatever the merits of Tony Blair’s recent retrospective apology for Britain’s leading role in the slave trade it would be less hypocritical if his government was not developing a modern system of slavery and the reintroduction of sweated labour through the reshaping of immigration controls.

The mechanisms of immigration control are changing. They are locating themselves in the workplace and on the factory floor. The agents and enforcers of controls are becoming employers. They are the managers of New Labours managed migration.

Managing managed migration

In fact this role began with the 1996 Asylum and Immigration Act which imposed criminal sanctions on bosses who employed those without the correct documentation. The real targets of these sanctions were never intended to be the employers but rather the undocumented, the sans papiers, the illegals, whose immigration status they were expected to police. The intent was to transform bosses into partners in control through the fear of criminalisation.

The statistics speak for themselves. For example in 2004 there were 1098 successful operations (i.e. raids) by the immigration service, which resulted in the arrest of 3,332 workers – but the successful prosecution of only eight employers! In the previous year only one boss was successfully prosecuted but 1,779 workers arrested, removed from the workplace and presumably deported.

The 2006 Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act introduced civil penalties against employers as a deterrent against hiring those without status or without the correct status. Bosses will now have to check an employee’s papers at regular intervals to avoid employing an irregular worker. Most immigration documents are time-limited. Yesterday’s lawful entrant can become tomorrow’s sans papiers.

And it gets worse. Under the law regulating gangmasters – the Gangmasters Licensing Act introduced in 2004 after the drowning of Chinese cockle pickers – gangmasters will only preserve their registration if they show they are policing and refusing to employ undocumented workers.

There has been considerable publicity given to the new points system controlling the entry of migrant workers as detailed in the government’s white paper, A Points-Based System: Making Migration Work For Britain. Virtually nil publicity has been given to the requirement that employers will have to register before they are able to recruit overseas labour, and may jeopardise that registration if they are connected with employees who breach immigration law. Furthermore employers will have to report their employee(s) to the Home Office for absenteeism.

According to the White Paper:

Sponsors will be required to inform us if a sponsored migrant fails to turn up for their first day of work, or does not enrol on their course. Similarly they will be expected to report any prolonged absence from work or discontinuation of studies, or if their contract is being terminated, the migrant is leaving their employment, or is changing educational institution. Sponsors will also need to notify us if their circumstances alter, for example if they are subject to a merger or takeover.

Unprecedented surveillance

This level of surveillance is unprecedented in peacetime. Except today there is a new war – a war against workers. This primarily presents itself as a war on the undocumented. However the war extends even to the documented given the tenuous and circumscribed nature of immigration papers. It also extends to European Union workers. Workers from the new EU East European accession states are restricted in obtaining benefits and are bound by employment restrictions such as the need to register for work with the Home Office, a requirement which in itself may drive such workers into the underground economy of sweated labour (and it now seems there is an intention to restrict entry for Romanian and Bulgarian workers). It is a war on all imported workers.

Shifting the focus

The new factory floor mechanisms of control reflect the shift in the focus of immigration controls themselves.

For the last decade the focus, the demons, of control were asylum-seekers. In the 1970s and 1980s it was husbands from the Indian sub-continent who were accused of contracting marriages of convenience – along with children seeking to join parents here – and were accused of not being genuine as claimed. In the late 1960s it was Asians from East Africa… and it can go back in time to communists in the 1920s to Jews fleeing Tsarism at the turn of the century (leading to the first controls – the 1905 Aliens Act). Immigration controls always have their latest demons, real or imagined. Today it is “economic migrants” – whose labour is needed but whose presence is unwanted.

When it comes to migrant workers then, like every other construct tainted by immigration law, the very use of the term rights is an abuse of vocabulary. What rights the documented – those migrants with permission to enter and work – possess are usually impossible to enforce. The ability to bring a case for unfair dismissal requires having been in employment for a year – an impossibility for short-term, temporary labour. The right to a written statement of employment terms is pointless for those not literate in English.

And not all employment rights apply even to the documented. Parental rights under the Working Time Regulations – parental leave, time off in a family emergency, flexible working conditions to care for children – none of these appear to apply to the documented migrant at least where the child does not reside in the UK.

The undocumented, those without leave to be here and/or work, are simply non-persons. They are literally illegal – they live outside of the law, hunted and harassed by the law and without the protection of the law. For instance they cannot enforce their contracts of employment, secure payment of the minimum wage, claim unfair dismissal, demand not to have unlawful deduction from wages, indeed claim to have wages at all. The Court of Appeal in one case, [name removed on request of worker] has in essence confirmed all the above in deciding that an undocumented worker cannot bring a case against a boss under the Race Relations Act. Even attempting to join a union where the employer attempts to impose a non-union shop becomes a major obstacle as undocumented workers cannot assert a breach of trade union rights – as they have no trade union rights.

One of the suggestions made in a recent book showing the relationship between immigration status and employment rights (Labour, Migration and Employment Rights published by the Institute of Employment Rights) is that the laws against discrimination should extend to immigration status. As a practising lawyer I once thought this as well. However I now think this is as utopian – i.e. conceptually impossible – as is the demand in some quarters for fair control. Fair controls are utopian because by definition controls are both discriminatory and unfair. Just so, the issue is not one of achieving equality of immigration status. The issue is one of getting rid of immigration controls and indeed of status altogether. This might well require a revolution. Fair or non-discriminatory controls would require a miracle.

It is hardly possible to exaggerate the gravity of the situation. The economic rank of the documented, of those with papers, is at its best often equivalent to the villein or serf under feudal law – just as the villein was tied to the land and could not move elsewhere so the documented, other than the most skilled, is tied to the job and therefore the master. The sans papier is akin to that of a slave. It is true that the s/he does have one essential feature in common with the supposed free labourer under capitalism. So Marx in the – did not define slavery in terms of economic relations but as a relation of domination – with domination being direct under slavery and indirect under capitalism. However the undocumented in all other ways is quite distinct from all others under capitalism. The sans papier is entirely at the mercy of his/her master/mistress.

Slave-like conditions

The precariousness of even the documented means they can easily slide into the world of those without papers. And those without papers and not already in detention are driven into the slave-like conditions of the underground economy where they service the rag trade, fast-food joints, garages, nursing homes and sex joints of our metropolitan centres. Then when their work is no longer required, or when they are so exhausted by work that they have no energy to fight to stay, they are transported (deported) in accordance with the economic needs and national prejudices of their masters in the UK – often to be returned into the hands of the masters from which they escaped in their country of origin.

In British immigration law recent statutory measures have judicially sanctioned these slavery analogies even further. Under the latest 2006 legislation those about to be deported and incarcerated in removal centres will now be allowed to work. But this work will not attract the rewards of a free labourer but rather those of the prisoner. Section 59 of the Act specifically provides that the law relating to the national minimum wage shall not apply.

However Section 10 of the 2004 Asylum and Immigration Act represents an even more vivid example of the statutory confirmation of a slave like existence. This makes provision of housing and other poor-law support for certain refugees to be conditional on their undertaking community services. These are refugees whose claim has been rejected by the Home Office but are unable to return home because of circumstances beyond their control – because they are stateless or ill or (paradoxically in the case of a rejected asylum application) the country of return is too dangerous. Section 10 transforms asylum-seekers into slaves. It makes their labour compulsory, as refusal to participate will result in deprivation of housing and other support. When the Act was being debated in its committee stage in the House of Lords (15 June 2004), Lord Rooker encouraged voluntary sector groups to get involved in tendering for this slave labour. He also suggested that this compulsory refugee labour could be used for the maintenance of the refugee’s own accommodation – which is a way local authorities and private companies can get otherwise run-down unlettable properties updated for free.

Successful resistance

There has been successful resistance to the implementation of section 10. In Liverpool the YMCA tendered for the scheme. But after outrage was expressed by the undocumented and their supporters the tender was withdrawn.

It is these slave-like conditions enforced and reinforced by immigration controls that indicate the impossibility of such controls being sanitised by reform or other legal mechanisms. The only options are abolition or further repression. Likewise classical slavery was incapable of reform – it had to be abolished. One writer (William Fisher) in describing forced labour has said In most contexts they were treated as things – objects or assets to be bought and sold, mortgaged and wagered, devised and condemned. He might as well be referring to today’s sans papiers. In fact he was describing the ideology behind the institution of ante-bellum American slavery. The 1696 Slave Code of South Carolina began by proclaiming Whereas the plantations and estates of the Province cannot be well and sufficiently managed and brought into use, without the labor and service of negroes and other slaves…

Substitute “economic migrants” for negroes and this well expresses the rationale, and uses the same language, as New Labour’s managed migration. It is not so new after all.

Taken from SSP website

If anybody had any illusions that Gordon Brown was going to be a better and more principled Labour leader than Tony Blair, they were soon rudely shattered. When Brown declared his support for British jobs for British workers, at the Labour Party Conference, he lifted a slogan straight from the BNP and National Front. His intervention made racist scaremongering respectable again. Both the TV and ‘quality’ press launched a media frenzy about the numbers of immigrants in the country, and the projected growth of the UK’s population by 2016.

If Brown was to make any attempt to implement his sound-bite policy, he would have to withdraw the UK from the EU. Tens of thousands of British workers, working abroad, would have to return home. Following the same logic, foreign-owned firms should be asked to close down their UK operations, and British firms be asked to confine their operations to the UK. Calls for repatriation (and worse) of all foreign-born workers would soon follow.

Racist posturing

It doesn’t take any imagination to see who benefits most from such racist posturing. Brown isn’t stupid, so why does he stoop to the gutter and imply support for a policy he has no intention of implementing? Attempts to hold on to the support of embittered and demoralised Labour supporters can’t be the whole answer. Such calls can only buy time. When they are not honoured, support will drift elsewhere, with the BNP being the most likely to benefit. They will be to the forefront of those pointing to yet another New Labour ‘pledge’ not honoured. They will play to the growing cynicism of an electorate that is losing sympathy for the mainstream parties.

There are two main purposes behind Brown’s call. Business, both big and small, wants to take advantage of cheap labour. The best way to do this is to have a two-tier workforce. New Labour’s drive to marginalise and outlaw immigrant workers is not so much designed to remove them permanently from the country, as to create a pool of workers who can be super-exploited. They have little or no recourse to legal protection. Furthermore, when such division is promoted between the two sections of the workforce – those with, and those without, rights – it becomes easier to fuel racist resentment and set worker against worker.

Dawn raids

Every now and again, there can be televised dawn raids, broken down doors, terrified children, police escorted removals and deportations, to show the government is acting ‘tough’. These activities are designed to whip up racist resentment amongst the legal workforce. They also push other outlawed migrant workers even further underground and hence make them even more vulnerable, in the face of a whole host of would-be exploiters.

Eastern European farm workers contribute to British society

A good example is the furore raised over all those eastern European workers who have arrived, particularly in England’s eastern counties. They mainly do menial work on farms, in food processing plants, and a whole host of service industries. The press has pointed out that these migrant workers are putting pressures on services such as schools. As it happens, the majority of these people are legal EU migrant workers, who pay tax. Nobody is asking why the large amounts of tax, which have been collected from these workers (with relatively few claims), have not been used to provide new services for the benefit of both indigenous and migrant workers and their families. No, their taxes, like those of other workers, are increasingly diverted to paying for endless wars, and to line the pockets of big business through PFI contracts. Instead, the government wants to divert attention from this shared reality, the better to divide workers and to set us against each other.

Those illegal workers, who don’t pay tax, are super-exploited by companies which make massive profits. These companies evade taxes on their profits. This situation could simply be ended by giving legal status to all workers, and by enforcing the minimum wage.

It is interesting to compare the treatment of commodities and profits, in the global corporate economy, with the treatment of migrant workers. Countless products, manufactured directly, or subcontracted, by global corporations, such as Nike, are made in semi-slave working conditions in Asia and elsewhere. These corporations ensure that the IMF, the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation enforce policies, which ensure the free movement of both their products and their profits. When it comes to the workers making these products and profits for companies, it is a very different story.

‘Deserving’ and ‘undeserving’

A misleading division is often made between asylum seekers and economic migrants. This suggests there is a split between ‘deserving’ victims of repressive political regimes and ‘natural’ disasters, and the merely economic and ‘undeserving’ job-seekers. The reality is that both movements of people are mainly a consequence of the political operations of global corporate capital, and of US/UK (and other state) sponsored imperialism.

Structural Adjustment Programmes have been imposed upon the ‘Third World’ to ensure that any government subsidies for health, education, fuel or basic foodstuffs are removed. State-owned companies have to be sold off, usually to global corporations. People are forcibly removed from their land. Agribusiness is promoting a ruthless policy of enforcing GM products to outlaw non-patented food production, leaving small producers at the mercies of hostile courts. Water is being privatised and access denied to non-payers.

Morecambe Bay, where 23 Chinese cocklepickers drowned in 2004

As a consequence of all these policies, massively increased poverty is leading to more social tensions. These create the mayhem associated with inter-ethnic and inter-religious in-fighting. Warlords and gangsters make their own direct deals with the global companies. Where people actively resist, as in Colombia, corporations (backed by the US and UK) resort to death squads. Otherwise, imperial armies simply invade. Not surprisingly, millions of people are uprooted in the process and take, often desperate, measures to ensure their families are safe(r) and have some form of livelihood. These conditions explain why millions are forced to move around the world looking for work.

There is no problem for the rich and powerful when it comes to their international travel. Every country offers them motorway connections from the airports, luxury hotels and entertainment (including ‘cheap sex’). For the poor and outcast it is another story. They have to make tortuous journeys across the world, paying private people traffickers and bribing government and local officials. When (or if) they arrive at their destination, they are often employed by ruthless gangmasters. Women and children can end up as sex-slaves. The horrible deaths of ‘illegal’ migrants, found suffocated in a truck at Dover, or of the cockle-pickers drowned in Morecambe Bay, are but the tip of the iceberg. Unknown thousands die each year, drowned at sea, dehydrated when crossing deserts, or frozen to death, without adequate shelter. The fact that the conditions, and the abuse such migrants face, when they finally arrive, are so bad, just lets us know just how terrible the conditions are, from whence they have fled.

‘Naturalising’ the profits

Big business has no problem ‘naturalising’ the profits it makes from ‘illegal’ workers. The banks make no distinction between the differing origins – legal or illegal – of the money deposited with them. Once it has passed into their vaults or electronic accounts, it doesn’t matter whether it has its origins in profiteering from underpaid workers, drug dealing, prostitution, extortion, terrorism, or arms trafficking. Recycled, this money then becomes available to all ‘respectable’ and legal commercial borrowers. The Royal Bank of Scotland doesn’t want to know about the conditions workers face in the Burmese oil industry it helps to finance.

Big business asks no questions when it comes to the source of their profits. So we, in the SSP, should make no distinction between native-born and other workers, living in Scotland, when it comes to fighting for rights, or to winning support for a socialist future. We see ourselves as the representatives and organisers of that section of the international working class living and working in Scotland. We only recognise ‘illegal’ worker status in order to combat it. The fight to unite our class internationally, and to oppose all attempts to divide us, is as important today, as past heroic struggles to emancipate chattel slaves, to liberate women and to enforce workers’ rights. Indeed, the fight, to prevent the imposition of outlaw status on millions of workers, shows us that all three of these great campaigns still need to be re-fought.

When Marx raised the slogan, Workers of the World Unite, he did not insert a prefix ‘Legal’ before ‘Workers’. This is why the SSP gives its full support to the ‘No One Is Illegal’ Campaign.

No One Is Illegal
c/o Bolton Socialist Club
16, Wood Street
Bolton
BL1 1DY
Website: http://www.noii.org.uk

E-mail: No One Is Illegal

Motion passed at October 2007 SSP Conference

The Scottish Socialist Party recognises that the global corporations, and the national state governments at their beck and call, are pursuing a vicious strategy to divide the international working class. Immigration controls are being used to force millions of people into illegal status. i.e. outlaws.

This is being done to promote two tier workforces with illegal workers being subjected to super-exploitation, constant harassment and demonisation. This strategy is also designed to promote fear and racism amongst those workers enjoying legal status and to force legal workers’ organisations, whether political or economic, to pursue sectional protective measures (e.g. increased tariffs on imports, migrant worker quotas) instead of upholding genuine working class international solidarity.

To counter this strategy of dividing the working class through immigration controls, this Conference agrees to support the No One Is Illegal Group, which campaigns:-

• i) in opposition to all immigration controls
• ii) for internationalism and global links
• iii) for the self-organisation of those affected by controls
• iv) for work within the labour movement

Allan Armstrong reviews two albums, which address the world of migrant workers – dispossession and discrimination, longing and hope, oppression and resistance.

Road of Tears

The Road of Tears

Battlefield Band, £9.50

Battlefield Band released their 26th album, The Road of Tears, last year. The theme is emigration and immigration. The album makes the link between the experience of the dispossessed from Scotland and Ireland, in the face of clearance and famine, and the plight of the world’s migrant workers today. The band’s line-up highlights Scotland’s multi-ethnic character, with the Scots, Alan Reid and Alistair White, the Irish, Sean O’Donnell and Jewish American, Mike Katz (Highland pipe player!)

The title track, written and sung by Alan Reid, sets the scene by focusing on the Highland Clearances, the Irish Famine and the Trail of Tears. This refers to the Cherokees’ march to Oklahoma, in 1838. They were forcibly, removed by US President Jackson, to the Indian Territories (Oklahoma). Four thousand, mainly women and children, died on the trail. The survivors sent money to the Irish Famine Relief Fund in 1847.

The album includes fine versions of two of Burns’ poems, sung by Alan Reid, The Slaves Lament and To A Mouse. Woody Guthrie’s Plane Wreck At Los Gatos is sung by Sean O’Donnell. Many will already know this song as Deportees from Christy Moore’s Spirit of Freedom album. Battlefield’s sleeve notes link the death of 28 illegal Mexican migrant workers in 1948 with the fate of the 18 cockle pickers who died in Morecambe Bay in 2004.

The first instrumental set includes the piece dedicated to Mr. Galloway Goes To Washington. This celebrates George Galloway’s triumph in the face of the US Senate sub-committee. There are another four instrumental sets which also show off Battlefield’s musical skills. The album finishes with The Green and The Blue, written and sung by Alan Reid, calling upon Irish migrants from Antrim and Fermanagh, arriving in Scotland to:-

Look onwards to Glasgow and all your tomorrows The future lies there, and its still waiting for you As the green crosses over to meet with the blue.

Its great to see that that some of Scotland’s leading musicians can fully live up to that Scottish internationalist spirit, so well demonstrated in Hamish Henderson’s Freedom Come All Ye.

La Radiolina

Manu Chau
Nacional Records

Manu Chau

Manu Chao first came to international fame for his Clandestino album, which sold three million copies worldwide, putting it just behind Bueno Vista Social Club as the best-selling world-music album of all-time. Not a lot of people know that – well not in the English-speaking world that is. Hopefully, things will change here with the recent release of Manu’s third album, La Radiolina.

Manu grew up in Paris, because his Galician father and Basque mother had to escape from Franco’s fascist Spain. Manu’s current home base is the Catalan capital of Barcelona, but he spends a lot of time in Buenos Aires, another city with a strong oppositional culture. He also visits Bamako in Mali, a major centre of world music.

La Radiolina includes songs in French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and English. It has a much rockier feel compared to his first album. This is because he uses Radio Bemba Sound System for backing. ‘Radio Bemba’ is the word-of-mouth system used by the Cuban revolutionaries, led by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, to communicate with each other in the forest of the Sierra Maestra.

When Manu recently toured the USA, he played to a 90,000 strong audience, at the Coachela Festival in California. They were waiting to hear their idols, Rage Against the Machine, but he won over the mainly non-Latin audience. His band performed with a banner draped across the stage – Immigrants are not Criminals. This followed the major protests organised mainly by Latin American immigrants, throughout the USA, on May Day, 2006.

The lyrics from one of Manu’s English-worded songs give an indication of Manu’s politics and highlight the reason why so many people are forced to emigrate worldwide. After verses about the appalling conditions in war-torn Zaire and Liberia, Manu finishes Rainin in Paradize with the following verse:-

In Bagdad
Its no democracy
That’s just because
It’s a US country!
In Fallouja
Too much calamity
This world go crazy
Its no fatality

Let’s get Manu’s new album up there to equal the sales of the justly famed Bueno Vista Social Club.

Battlefield Band
Battlefield Band (Wikipedia)
Manu Chau
Manu Chau Biography

Channel 4 showed Ken Loach’s latest film, It’s A Free World on September 24th 2007. We are reprinting this review by Corinna Lotz from ‘A World to Win’ website.

It’s a Free World follows the director’s earlier feature about the Irish war of independence, The Wind that Shakes the Barley. Producer Rebecca O’Brian and writer Paul Laverty agreed that rather than another big budget effort, they wanted to make a smaller film, more of a chamber piece about the migrants’ working conditions. After The Wind that Shakes the Barley we were keen to do something that was of the moment, with a real contemporary smack to it, explains Laverty.

Somehow the character Angie just popped into my head. She was totally fictional and from the very beginning I could smell trouble. Angie is a larger-than-life peroxide-blonde Essex girl who decides to strike out to run her own recruitment agency for migrant workers in east London after being sacked by her sexist bosses.

She and her flatmate/business partner Rose operate from an old pub near a ring road in Leyton, east London, hiring out migrant workers on a casual basis. She selects the lucky ones from clusters of Poles, Ukrainians, Spanish, near Eastern men and women who turn up at dawn each morning to be shoved into shambolic white vans, their doors hanging open as they rumble off.

When her father Geoff, played by former stevedore Colin Caughlin, turns up one morning to watch, he finds the sight disgraceful, saying, I thought those days were all over.

As Angie devises ever more exploitative ways of raising cash, she moves from legality to illegality, tax evasion, and even grassing up a group of the most vulnerable migrants forced to live in caravan camps.

The film refrains from moralising, instead showing her as a contradictory personality, drawn into in vicious spiral of debt to her workers, and unable, in the end, to protect the son she believes she is providing for.

Behind the story of Angie’s opportunism and cruel exploitation of her workforce lies meticulous research by Nina Lowe, backing up Paul Laverty’s own investigations. While the characters are all fictitious, the story is underpinned by a mountain of facts including first hand research, government and TUC reports, studies by university departments including Exeter, Queen Mary College, and work by the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants.

Reality is more dramatic and stranger than fiction, Laverty says.

Mafia activity in the underworld around migrant labour is more violent than what appears in the film. I heard Mafioso stories about people having their legs broken and worse. But we wanted to show something closer to the norm, not a shock-horror expose.

Loach insists that they wanted Angie to be a likeable person and that the world she inhabits is widespread, not an aberration. It is central to the functioning of today’s economy. Angie is actually a cog in a bigger wheel. We wanted to show the logic of the system, not just a victim of it.

The film achieves a fierce sense of excitement through dramatic twists in the plot. Angie’s hot temper and naked ambition are set against the more thoughtful personality of Rose, played by Julie Ellis. The clashes between them are amongst the most dramatic moments in the story.

With It’s a Free World, Loach and his team take their political film making on to a new level. Rather than simply highlighting the scandal of how migrant workers are exploited, they challenge the prevailing wisdom

that ruthless entrepreneurship is the way that this society should develop – that everything is a deal, everything is competitive, acquisitive, market orientated and that’s the way we should live. It seeks out exploitation. It produces monsters.

At the media screening, Loach called for the repeal of all anti-union legislation and said the unions should be much tougher and stronger so they could take action together. People are sacked for even proposing to join a trade union. If unions were free, British Airways stewards could have supported Gate Gourmet catering staff, he said.

It’s a Free World has succeeded in showing – through the conflict and unexpected actions of flesh and blood characters – the skeleton beneath the surface of society.

From an article in the US radical newsletter Dissident Voice (1.5.07) by Sharat G Lin

May Day 1886

Over 1.5 million people took part in May Day demonstrations in 2006 in what amounted to one of the single largest days of protest in US history. Many also participated in a general strike by refusing to conduct business, go to work, or attend school. The protests were called by immigrants groups and immigrant solidarity groups as a national day of action against House Resolution 4437, which would have criminalized those assisting undocumented immigrants as alien smugglers and turned undocumented status from a civil violation to a federal aggravated felony.

The importance of May Day for immigrant communities in the US is not only of demanding fundamental constitutional rights for immigrants, but for economic rights as immigrant workers. It was chosen because May Day is a living tradition in the Latin American countries from which most of the undocumented immigrants in the US come. May Day is also an international day of labor solidarity.

May Day itself was born, in part, out of fear of police raids on immigrant workers. In 1884 the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions, predecessor of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), called for an eight-hour workday. When implementation appeared unlikely, a general strike was called in Chicago on May 1, 1886. On that day, some 80,000 workers marched down Chicago’s Michigan Avenue in what is generally recognized as the first May Day parade. In the succeeding days, supporting strikes broke out in other cities, such as Milwaukee, Cincinnati, and New York City.

On May 3, four striking workers were killed by police at the McCormick Reaper Works in Chicago. At an evening rally on May 4 in Haymarket Square, called to protest the killings, police moved in to disperse the crowd when a bomb went off, killing seven policemen. Police retaliated by firing into the crowd of workers, killing and wounding an unknown number of civilians.

Determined to crush the labor agitations, police interrogations and arrests went on through the night and the ensuing days. Homes of workers, most of whom were immigrants from Europe , were raided in the middle of the night. Hundreds of immigrants were rounded up without charges. A police reign of terror descended on the organized workers of Chicago and their families.

Eight people, including five German immigrants, were eventually charged and convicted for the deaths of the policemen, even though no evidence was ever presented directly linking them to the bombing in Haymarket Square. Four of the defendants were publicly hanged in 1887.

In Paris in 1889, the International Workingmen’s Association (Second International) called for worldwide demonstrations on May 1, 1890, commemorating the struggle of Chicago workers. The international tradition of May Day was born.

Affilation to the No One is Illegal Campaign is to be debated at the SSP Conference on October. The attitude an organisation takes towards the rights of migrant workers throughout the world defines whether it is international socialist or merely national labourist. We are publishing the first chapter of NOII’s pamphlet, Workers Control Not Immigration Controls, to highlight the issues at stake.

No immigration controls in the workplace!

The well known phrase workers of the world unite does not mean only workers with the correct immigration status unite. It means all workers both here and internationally. The function of immigration controls is to ensure the absolute reversal of this principal. It is to ensure the global division and antagonism between workers. This is divide and rule based on the crudest nationalism and racism. Workers’ unity means getting rid of controls. This may seem unrealistic, fantastic and utopian. It would certainly require an enormous political upheaval.

Some unions have indeed at some times adopted resolutions in opposition to controls in principle and in so doing have effectively accepted the slogan No One Is Illegal. This has been the result of the self organisation of those threatened by controls – organising either within the unions or through anti deportation campaigns.

The programme that dare not speak its name

However opposition to controls in their totality has with rare exceptions become the programme that dare not speak its name. Instead another and opposite orthodoxy is dominant in the labour movement. This is the demand for fair or benign or compassionate controls. And meeting this demand would not require a political upheaval. It would require a miracle. By their very definition controls are inevitably, unjust and malign. It is the idea that controls can be non-racist or fair that is unrealistic. There cannot be equal opportunities immigration control.

Most of the reasons why there cannot be fair controls are really transparent and don’t require much reflection. First, the initial legislative controls, the 1905 Aliens Act, were based on that most primitive of racisms, anti-Semitism, and were directed against Jewish refugees fleeing Tsarist Russia. Second, the next wave of controls, starting with the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, were directed at black people (this itself being in some ways anticipated as early as 1925 in a Coloured Alien Seamen Order requiring the enforced registration with the police of coloured seafarers). None of this is much of an advert for the idea that controls can be turned inside out and rendered non-racist. Third, controls are anyhow based on the vilest nationalism – the idea that the right to come to or stay in the UK should be a reserved only for members of a privileged club who somehow have managed to acquire the franchise. This is why they should be opposed to both the present work permit scheme and also the proposed new scheme based on a points system for workers. Fourth, controls can never, by any definition or redefinition, be fair to those excluded by them. Fifth, the very first control on peoples’ global movement prior to legislation was slavery out of Africa – which again was hardly susceptible of being rendered benign or compassionate.

All this is obvious. What is less obvious, because it is less known, is that controls are in fact a result of successful fascistic agitation. The 1905 Act was largely the result of agitation by an organisation now lost (suppressed) to history – the British Brothers League. The 1962 Act followed quickly on the so called Notting Hill riots (actually racist white riots) of 1958 which were organised by fascist groups such as Oswald Mosley’s Union Movement. The idea that a political construct such as immigration restrictions which are a product of fascistic activity can somehow be sanitised and rendered harmless simply does not make sense. It is equivalent to arguing that all that is wrong with fascist groups like the British National Party is that they are unfair and we ought to fight to make them non-racist. As the saying goes – a leopard can’t change its spots.

Workplace immigration controls

The fact that the destruction of controls would require a huge political movement – maybe even a revolution – is not a statement of pessimism. It does not imply any acceptance of controls until the day of complete deliverance. Rather it is a statement that all criticisms of control, all demands made against particular controls, should be on the basis of opposition to restrictions in principle – on the basis that No One Is Illegal! Within this political framework trade union agitation becomes crucial.

This is because of something often ignored – namely immigration controls come into conflict with union organisation on a daily basis at the workplace. Immigration laws are a total system – they are about internal controls as well as exclusion and deportation. In particular most welfare entitlements (social housing, non-contributory benefits, hospital treatment) are dependent on immigration status as is the right to work itself. As a consequence of this total system it is inevitable that controls regularly and directly impinge upon workers in the course of their employment or their union activities. Of course trade unionists should oppose controls in every context in which they arise – such as detentions and deportations – because in every context in which they arise they are a manifestation of racism. However the need for trade union involvement goes well beyond this and extends into the heart of the employment relationship itself.

A danger to all workers

Immigration controls are a danger to all trade unionists – including those workers with full immigration status. One of the functions of immigration control is to undercut the wages and conditions of all workers by transforming migrant labour and labour without any immigration status into a non-unionised low-waged workforce unprotected by labour legislation. Which is why there is a need to fight for the regularisation of immigration status, for full unionisation and for equality of wages and conditions for all. In the past the trade union movement has, unfortunately, often been in the forefront of agitating for controls. For instance the very first controls –the 1905 Aliens Act aimed at Jewish refugees – was preceded by the TUC demanding controls. Again in the 1950s and 1960s the TUC supported controls against black commonwealth workers.

Today the labour movement has once again begun to change its position, to begin to take a critical position towards the present laws –and again this is due to a great extent to the resistance and anti deportation campaigns of those threatened by controls. Today it is possible to once again open up the whole debate. It is possible to start to challenge the very existence of controls.

Published by ‘No One Is Illegal’, on May Day, 2006
NO One Is Illegal
c/o Bolton Socialist Club
16, Wood Street
Bolton
BL1 1DY
Web: http://www.noii.org.uk
E-mail: Info@noii.org.uk

We are not alone!

‘No One Is Illegal’ is a phrase first used by Elie Weisel, a Jewish survivor from Nazi Germany, a refugee and a Nobel prize winner. He was speaking in 1985 in Tuscon, Arizona at a national sanctuary conference in the USA in defence of the rights of refugees to live in the USA. The sanctuary movement undertaken by religious communities in the USA (and to a far lesser extent in the UK) in support of those threatened by immigration controls is one of many pieces of resistance to controls. Over the last few years ‘No One Is Illegal’ groups have been formed throughout Europe and North America — for instance in Germany (‘Kein Mensch Ist Illegal’), Spain (‘Ninguna Persona Es Ilegal’), Sweden (‘Ingen Manniska Ar Illegal’), Poland (‘Zaden Czlowiek Nie Jest Nielegalny’) and Holland (‘Geen Mens Is Illegaal’). In August 1999 anarchists organised a demonstration in Lvov Poland against the deportation of Ukrainian workers under the banner of No One Is Illegal. In France the ‘sans papiers’ campaign under the slogan personne n’est illegal/e. There have been ‘No One Is Illegal’/’No Border’ camps at the joint borders of Germany, Czech Republic and Poland, and No Border camps at Frankfurt, southern Spain and Salzburg. In June 2002 there was a demonstration against war, globalisation and in defence of refugees under the same slogan in Ottawa, Canada. In England groups are emerging calling themselves ‘No Borders’. The demand for no controls, rather than being seen as extreme, operates as a rallying call to the undocumented and their supporters. Our aim is to encourage the formation of ‘No One Is Illegal’/’No Border’ groups throughout this country — groups specifically and unreservedly committed to the destruction of all immigration controls.