Taking Liberties: The Strong State in the UK
Mike Kay
Anyone who has recently visited the UK cannot fail to have noticed the growth of the strong state in recent years. It may well be Blair’s greatest “legacy” domestically.
We have heard about how lethal the strong state can be from the earlier session about the situation in the Philippines. Obviously, it is a long way from what we face in western bourgeois democracies. But the difference is only one of degree. Even extra-judicial killings are not unknown in the UK; for instance, the case of Jean Charles de Menezes who was shot eight times in the head by police as an alleged “terrorist”, when in fact he was just an innocent man travelling on the tube on 25 July 2005.
Many of the attacks on civil liberties have happened under the cover of anti-terror legislation. Walter Wolfgang, an 82-year-old Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, was ejected from the 2005 Labour Party conference for heckling the Foreign Secretary. When he tried to get back in, he was detained under the Terrorism Act 2000.
Britain was the first country to set up a National DNA Database (New Zealand was the second). By 2005, the UK database held data from 3.4 million individuals, 585,000 of them children under 16. A poll last December found that 79 percent of Britons agreed that the UK has become a “surveillance society” - not surprising when there are 4.2 million CCTV cameras (some with facial profiling capability). That’s one camera for every 14 people.
Added to this is a whole raft of “anti-social behaviour” legislation including curfews, electronic tagging and exclusion zones, which have been accurately described as imprisonment without prison.
Many bourgeois commentators have thrown up their hands in despair and wondered how this could have happened in the country of the Magna Carta and freeborn Englishmen.
A good part of the answer, at least, is provided by the immigration lawyer and “No one is illegal” activist Steve Cohen, who has persuasively argued that the growth of the strong state has been facilitated by the progressive “softening up” of the population to creeping authoritarianism due to 100 years of immigration controls.
The consequence today is that in every urban area in Britain there exists a whole layer of super-exploited, highly vulnerable, undocumented workers, mainly from the Third World, who may be subject to deportation at any moment. This situation has been dramatised in the recent British films, Dirty Pretty Things and Children of Men.
The current Labour government has introduced four major pieces of immigration legislation. In 1999 there was the Immigration and Asylum Act. This was followed by the 2002 Nationality Immigration and Asylum Act, and then the 2004 Asylum and Immigration Act. Most recently was the 2006 Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act. As Cohen commented, at this rate the cycle will soon be menstrual.
In response to the chaotic nature of the immigration system, the government will be replacing the current myriad immigration structure with a policy based on “managed migration.” In 2008 there will be points-based system introduced similar the one in New Zealand and Australia. However, the idea that there can be “fair” or “humane” immigration controls is utopian. To prove this, I will be looking into the nature of the state in general as well as examining the historical background to Britain’s century of immigration controls.
Engels argued that the authority of the state ultimately rests on “bodies of armed men”. In his day, this would have consisted of the military, the constabulary and the machinery of imprisonment. Today, this can include immigration officialdom. None of this apparatus is arbitrary; its function is to defend and reproduce capital and the rights of property.
The argument that so-called “economic immigration controls” are somehow fairer than outrightly racist controls is a fallacy. They are about constructing the national economy on the basest nationalism with brutal authoritarian enforcement to detain, deport and exclude anyone deemed to be economically unwanted.
The emergence of immigration controls in Britain was largely the success of a proto-fascist organisation, the British Brothers League. Formed in 1901, its base was in the East End of London. It organised mass meetings and agitated for proper housing for workers, the principle solution proposed being immigration controls. This was combined with violence and general propaganda about a world Jewish conspiracy. The League was dissolved in 1905, having achieved its main objective with the passing of the Aliens Act that year.
The 1905 Aliens Act had two lasting consequences: it legitimised the very notion of immigration controls; and it established a burgeoning bureaucracy to police those controls. The Act was a response to anxiety over the influx of Jews fleeing Tsarist repression in the wake of the failure of the 1905 revolution in Russia.
Jews were not specifically excluded by the Act, any more than black people are by today’s legislation. However, intentions and outcomes were obvious. The Act was confined to passengers travelling steerage (i.e. third class) - most Jews were too poor to be able to afford to travel any other class. “Want of means” was the most common grounds for refusal of entry. And the naturalisation fee was set at £5, which effectively prevented most Jews from ever attaining citizenship.
The next period I want to look at is 1948, when 9000 Ukrainians of the 14th Waffen SS Galizien Division were secretly transferred to Britain from a prison camp in Italy where they were due to be tried for complicity in genocide. This was facilitated under the European Voluntary Workers Scheme (a forerunner to today’s “managed migration”) which was meant to allow temporary stay to alleviate “manpower shortages”.
How was it that thousands of Nazis were permitted to be permanently secreted into Britain after the war? The answer is to be found in a report by a Royal Commission on Population established in 1944 in response to underemployment following the ravages of the Second World War. It recommended that the population be replenished by “good human stock” necessary for the maintenance and extension of western values, ideas and culture. In other words, the policy was founded on that most basic of racist constructs, eugenics - which divides the world up into pseudo-biological concept of “races” with one of these (the Aryan, the English, the European, the White - take your pick) being allegedly superior to the others.
The open door policy for fascists contrasts obscenely with the shutting of the world’s doors to Jews fleeing the holocaust. The scandal of the Ukrainian Nazis remained buried until it was uncovered in the mid-1980s by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre.
The next major period was the 1950s, when mass migration from the former colonies to Britain began. Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists was not finished off by the war. They re-emerged as the Union Movement, and together with other fascist groups and racist press reports were instrumental in instigating the anti-black “race riots” in Notting Hill, West London and Nottingham in 1958.
The consequence of this agitation was the Commonwealth Immigration Act of 1962. This contrasts with the two decades of agitation that led to the 1905 Aliens Act, which shows that once the principle of immigration controls has been established, it is far easier to tighten them up later.
Increasing racist tensions led to the Labour government passing the Race Relations Act in 1965. But in the same year, it further tightened immigration controls, which was the trade-off. Restrictions were placed on the entry of dependents, government powers to deport were increased and the number of employment vouchers issued was drastically reduced. As one commentator put it, Labour “took discrimination out of the marketplace and gave it the sanction of the state.”
Today, ever-tighter immigration controls and attacks on civil liberties are justified in terms of the “global war on terror”. In reality, such policies are about excluding and marginalising black and brown people, in particular Muslims. But this type of “racial profiling” is nothing new. When Jews first arrived in Britain they were stereotyped as anarchists and terrorists. And in 1947, when Zionist attacks claimed the lives of British soldiers occupying Palestine, the British press denounced Jews as terrorists and there was anti-Semitic rioting in London, Liverpool, Manchester and Glasgow. Synagogues, cemeteries and Jewish property were vandalised. The backlash against Muslims following the 9/11 and 7/7 attacks shows that it is only the victims that change.
The whole “war on terror” is primarily a strategy whereby imperialist states attempt to reconstruct themselves as authoritarian states on a super-nationalist and racist basis, for which ever-more draconian immigration control is fundamental. As such, it is vital that the labour movement challenge such controls in their entirety as never being “fair”, “humane” or “non-racist”. Deportations should be challenged on principle, not on the basis of exceptionalism, and unions must support their members who work in any of the increasing web of industries colluding with the state when they refuse to cooperate in enforcing immigration control.
The campaign to stop the deportation of five Iranians being held in Mt Eden prison is a great place to start.
