The death of the Chinese cockle-pickers is only one-tenth of the story describing the lives of Britain's new migrants. Capital draws them like a magnet. The only rule which exists is the minimum wage, and this is being ignored with impunity.
Here in south London, hundreds of thousands of workers scrub, clean, wash, secure other people's property and perform a string of other menial tasks for rates of pay that could not even feed or house one of those dogs that go walkies on Hampstead Heath of a morning.
I stood at the corner of Atlantic Road and Coldharbour Lane in Brixton the other Saturday playing a game with four of my mates. We could identify from those who were passing which were recent immigrants, as opposed to those who had been here from the early days.
The shopping bags of the former were slight, containing only the bare essentials. Their clothes and those of their children were dreadfully shabby. I have visited a couple of them in their homes and discovered that they are only a notch up from African peasant life.
People from the Caribbean who came here 40 or more years ago did not stay for long on that level. We spoke English; we had the experience of trade unions and the Labour Party in the Caribbean, and in most cases these were based on the British model of organisation. In India, the various communist parties and the Congress Party had spawned militants who turned up in the UK and formed Indian workers' associations. They helped the Asian population challenge the grip of moguls in the textile and engineering industries. East African Asians benefited, too, as shown in strikes at Grunwick and Imperial Typewriters.
Today's migrants are in double trouble. They do not speak English and there is often no tradition of working-class organisation in their homelands. Many were peasants in their lands of origin. In the face of all this, not a pip, not a squeak can be heard from the trade union movement. It should be organising a grand mobilisation, putting up huge billboards in the streets, calling in different languages on the workers to join together and do battle.
