DOUBLE standards. The Prime Minister vows to close a “loophole” that allowed a Gaza family, whose home was destroyed by Israeli bombing, to claim asylum under a scheme designed for Ukrainian refugees.
There are deserving and undeserving refugees. Ukrainians are white, and fleeing from an army we don’t like, Russia’s. Palestinians aren’t and they are fleeing from an army we advise, fund and equip.
Labour’s anti-immigrant braggadocio won’t shorten NHS waiting lists or lower housing costs. Its zeal for action contrasts with its foot-dragging over employment rights and its indifference to rising energy and water bills. Keir Starmer only punches down: he cowers before the corporate crooks bleeding this country dry but talks tough when it comes to the powerless and penniless.
Most of all he cowers before Donald Trump. British laws can be amended if they offend the US president: an online safety Bill may be reshaped to please Elon Musk, and proper taxation of the digital sector’s huge profits may be permanently shelved.
Labour’s anti-refugee policy is inspired by the far right, which globally now looks to Trump as its leader. His own administration has made mass deportations its first major initiative. But Trump has double standards on immigration too, offering asylum to white South Africans offended by their government’s Expropriation Act.
The Act specifies a legal process for appropriating land and limits it to cases of “public purpose” (such as building strategic infrastructure) or public interest (such as equitable access to resources). It challenges a long-term legacy of racist rule. White people make up just 8 per cent of South Africa’s population but own 75 per cent of the land.
The US-South Africa feud has global significance. The Trump government sees itself as a champion of property rights whenever they come into conflict with democratic rights: its defence of white landowners in South Africa dovetails with its opposition to our government taxing corporate profits.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio says he won’t attend the G20 summit in South Africa because they “are doing very bad things — expropriating private property,” adding tellingly: “Using G20 to promote solidarity, equality and sustainability,” which is apparently outrageous.
All this points to the interrelation between domestic and international politics.
We cannot pursue social justice at home without standing up to Trump. Labour both appeases and imitates the hard-right US leader: but his agenda is ferociously anti-working class. Labour movement pressure must be brought to bear on the government to reject that agenda, both in developing an economic strategy that overrides transnational corporate interests and when it comes to ethnic cleansing in Palestine.
It points too to the importance of international solidarity with all forces resisting imperialism.
South Africa’s government is not angelic. Its Communist Party makes trenchant criticisms of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s programme, criticising its approach to private capital, industry and inequality.
But it is part of what Belgian communist Peter Mertens calls the “mutiny” of the global South. That’s clear from the leading role it has played in seeking to hold Israel accountable before the International Court of Justice for its war crimes in Palestine.
Mertens calls for Western working classes to join that mutiny, and it’s worth reflecting that one of the grounds for expropriation listed in South Africa’s new law — restoring former common land that has been taken into private ownership — would be a revolutionary step in Britain too.
The interests of the working class here are, like those of the majority of people worldwide, in ending an exploitative and unjust capitalist system and replacing it with socialism.
The road to that goal can be tortuous, full of contradictions and setbacks. Too often Western socialists use those to dismiss foreign revolutions and deny solidarity. But we have the same enemy.
The global South is rising, and Trump leads the imperialist counter-attack. We all need to pick a side.
