Society
Celebrate new immigrants
Published 01 May 2008
On International Workers' Day, we need to extend our hands across nations, instead of greeting the new immigrants with fists and hobnail boots
Anniversary celebrations abound. Enoch Powell's xenophobic speech of 40 years ago was recalled by the press and the British National Party, some aiming to convince that his alarm about the consequences of postwar mass immigration was justified.
Fears have been stirred that we are in a similar position today. There have been scares about being overwhelmed by Eastern Europeans, about the pressure on social services at large, and more, much more. A House of Lords committee conjured up some voodoo economics to convince the nation that each immigrant contributed 58p to the gross domestic product - that we offer little or nothing to benefit society as a whole.
At one swoop, it attempted to eliminate a simple truth articulated by James Callaghan as he addressed the Commons, long before he became prime minister, on 19 June 1946. "In a few years we will be faced with a shortage of labour - not with a shortage of jobs," he argued. "We should break away from this artificial segregation of nation from nation . . . Who is going to pay for the old-age pensions and social services unless we have an addition to our population, which only immigration can provide in the years to come?"
Callaghan's warning against the danger of xenophobia rings true with the rise of hostility against Poles and eastern Europeans. "Wogs begin at Calais" has returned with a vengeance.
But the corrective to this vulgar nationalism is at hand as we celebrate International Workers' Day. Immigrants from Europe began arriving in the UK in large numbers in the late Sixties and early Seventies. In 1971 alone, the Home Office issued 43,100 work permits to European immigrant workers to perform menial tasks, often in hotels, for up to 60 hours per week. Within two years, in the last six months of 1973, the Grand Metropolitan hotel group, owned by Maxwell Joseph, declared profits of £50m. The European workers banded together to seek parity with their British peers wherever they could.
The movement grew at breakneck speed as the workers went on strike from hotel to hotel in London. Eventually the Transport and General Workers' Union formed an international section to incorporate the new workers. In other areas of the economy, Asian workers struck repeatedly in factories up and down the country. On 1 May 1974, Asians struck spontaneously to bring work at Imperial Typewriters in Leicester to a halt and demanded they be treated equally with others. The strikes of the past week may yet trigger a movement across nations, races and religions.
Here in my local community, the proletarian Poles work from sun-up to sundown in the building trade. As local councils promise affordable housing, it is the Poles and other European workers who will be called upon to bring their immense talents to the task.
We have got them on the cheap. After all, the Pole who stands at the immigration desk was born in a hospital in Poland. He was educated there before venturing to our shores, ready and willing. He costs the social services and our educational institutions not one blind penny. We get this fully trained and healthy workforce at no cost to the state. On International Workers' Day, we need to extend our hands across nations, instead of greeting the new immigrants with fists and hobnail boots.
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