TWO futures for our society battle it out in the headlines today.
We have proposals to remove fire safety regulations from accommodation housing asylum-seekers — rightly slammed by the Fire Brigades Union as “utterly shameful.”
They suggest that the current government regards asylum-seekers as something less than human. That fits with recent rhetoric from government and the media, attempting to portray refugees and other migrants as nothing more than a burden on society, dehumanising them and justifying more and more extreme proposals to prevent people from seeking safety or a better life in Britain.
This was the basis of the government’s cruel and inhumane policy of deporting asylum-seekers to Rwanda to deter others from coming to our shores. Thankfully, initial flights planned for June 2022 were cancelled for legal reasons — and the entire scheme has now been declared illegal by the Court of Appeal.
Of course, the reality of such systems is not to deter people-trafficking but to drive it further underground, creating an even more at-risk population of undocumented workers forced to work in what, for many, amounts to modern slavery.
Capital has never opposed cheap migrant labour, just sought to control it more and more tightly.
The solution is not to criminalise those fleeing war, torture and the threat of death, or those seeking a better life for themselves and their families, but to organise them, fighting back against the brutal exploitation they fight and to extend their civil, political and economic rights.
Of course, deportation of asylum-seekers is not the only area where senior Tories have been found to be breaking the law. We have the ongoing partygate scandal, where Johnson and his allies now face punishment for their campaign against the very committee trying to hold them to account.
Clearly caught breaking the rules, partying while people died alone and separated from their loved ones, their arrogance and belief in their natural superiority over the people who elected them leads them to continue treating this saga like a game.
That indifference to the law extends internationally, with trade minister Nigel Huddleston’s refusal to condemn remarks by Israel’s Itamar Ben-Gvir supporting genocide.
It extends historically, as the revelations of the Spycops report show. The fact that sections of the police, acting no doubt with support from the highest levels of government, felt there were above the law and could pursue entirely unjustified spying operations doesn’t even come as a surprise.
This paints a pretty bleak picture. A society where the rich and powerful feel they can dehumanise, manipulate and treat the mass of the population like cattle.
Meanwhile, our lives get harder and harder as the cost of living crisis they have created bites deep.
But a different kind of society is also visible.
Visible in the show of defiance by hundreds of steelworkers who marched on Westminster this week, demanding action to protect steel as a core industry, a source of high-skilled, well paid jobs and a key contributor to the British economy.
As GFTU general secretary Gawain Little has said, investment in steel must be part of an alternative economic policy involving a real industrial strategy, price caps to curb profiteering and wage increases to beat inflation.
Visible in the education workers and others who delivered a letter to the Prime Minister, calling for free school meals for all primary aged children.
As trade unionists and socialists, we must continue to emphasise the importance of universal services in rebuilding our welfare state and painting an alternative vision of a society run for the benefit of the many, not the few.
Our fight for a vision of society based on an alternative economic and political strategy continues. It will not be enough to sweep away the current, corrupt regime — we must replace it with a government prepared to change course.
