The Morning Star against free movement

Keir Starmer addressed the CBI last week and said Britain needs to get off its “immigration dependency” and companies need to be weaned off “cheap labour” from oversees and to “start investing more in training workers who are already here”.

This marked a big shift in Starmer’s position: in 2020, while standing for party leadership, he’d championed freedom of movement and implied he’d continue to campaign for it even after Britain left the EU.

Few commentators (the exception being the i’s Ian Dunt) seem to have noticed that Starmer’s argument made no sense: as Dunt put it: “Is the problem with immigrants that they are highly-skilled and thereby taking away training advantages from Britons? Or that they are low-skilled and therefore reducing pay for Britons? Starmer’s little immigration aside didn’t seem to have put the slightest thought into it.”

One might have expected the Morning Star to take Starmer to task over this, but, strangely, their editorial the next day (23 November) was headed “Starmer and Sunak at the CBI: immigration is not the issue.”

The argument that “immigration is not the issue” seems to rest upon the banality that “the bigger problem is that Labour has turned away from the radical reforms that the deep-rooted social, economic and ecological crises we face demand.”

Tucked away in the editorial, there is a mention of “Sunak and Starmer’s hostility to immigrants” being “not a productive exercise”, but a close reading of the none-too-coherent arguments it contains reveals something that the Morning Star is loath to admit: it agrees with Starmer’s arguments about the effects of immigration on the labour market. The editorial makes this plain: “It’s true that CBI chiefs only want immigration rules relaxed so they can import labour without worrying about investing in training or raising pay. Dependence on super-exploited foreign labour in certain sectors is obvious.”

This should not come as a surprise: the paper has spent years claiming that immigration drives down wages, and in an editorial (3 February 2020) it welcomed the ending of free movement: “Brexit means that our nation state is no longer bound by the free and often forced movement of labour that accompanies the EU’s free movement of capital.”

In a further editorial (20 February 2020) the paper appeared to welcome the Tories’ points-based immigration system, stating: “It is presented as a bid to help British workers, and bosses’ ability to undercut pay and conditions by bringing in cheap labour has been a key factor in creating the ‘bargain-basement’ economy, dominated by insecure work and poverty pay, that we see around us.”

There is, in fact a long history of people associated with the Morning Star (and the Communist Party of Britain) using the argument that immigration drives down wages:

In 2011, the No2EU campaign (backed by the Communist Party, the Socialist Party, and the RMT rail union) published an article by Alex Gordon, then the RMT’s president and now a leading CPBer, calling for tougher immigration controls: “All nation states must have democratic control over their own immigration policy and have the right to apply national legislation in defence of migrant and indigenous workers.”

In 2013 the late Bob Crow, then RMT general secretary, declared that “free movement within the EU impoverishes workers”.

In the closing days of the 2016 EU referendum, Len McCluskey said: “Let us be clear — what has been done in the last ten years is a gigantic experiment at the expense of ordinary workers. Countries with vast historical differences in wage rates and living standards have been brought together in a common labour market. The result has been huge downward pressure on living standards.”

What is the truth? To quote the National Institute of Economic and Social Research in January 2016, “the idea that immigration is the main or even a moderately important driver of low pay is simply not supported by the available evidence.” And, surely, for socialists, the way forward is unionisation and solidarity, not stricter immigration controls. Sadly, instead of making that case, the Morning Star chooses to line up with Starmer.