By Mark Langabeer, Newton Abbot Labour member
The claim that Britain is ‘full’ is a popular refrain in right-wing circles. The expression is not new. I first heard this expression in the 1970s and it’s a metaphor being opposed to immigration. A Dispatches programme, first recorded in 2017, and presented by Michael Buerk, examined this claim. The programme is still available on the Channel 4 streaming service here and is a rebuttal of the claims made by the Tories, UKIP and other right-wing organisations.
Unfortunately, these ideas are often echoed by Labour’s right-wing. Before Corbyn’s election as leader, Miliband and other Blairites defended the idea of denying benefits to EU immigrants for a two-year period.
NHS workers have gone home
Dispatches suggests that immigration was a factor in the referendum result and showed a clip where a man was complaining that there was a two-week waiting list to visit his GP. Many of the healthcare workers are actually immigrants themselves and it is widely thought that both the NHS and care system would collapse without them. In fact, one of the reasons for the dire shortages of staff in today’s NHS is that tens of thousands of EU citizens, including many who formerly worked in the NHS, have left after Brexit, feeling themselves ‘unwelcome’ in the UK.
Immigrants are often blamed for the shortage of affordable housing, low wages and unemployment. This scapegoating is designed to divide working people. Rather than explaining the true causes of the problems that affect us, the Tories and most of the Press will blame the ‘other’.
Private profit
In my view, none of the problems that millions of workers face every day, will be solved until society is based upon need, rather than private profit. Collective ownership and democratic control of the economy is the only way that can offer lasting solutions too society’s ills.
Buerk makes the point that Britain has a population of over 65 million and is likely to grow by around 500,000 a decade. However, there are areas that have suffered population decreases, in particular, Britain’s northern cities. Liverpool has seen its population halved since 1931. There are currently 9,000 empty homes in this city alone, and this is mirrored in other cities.
Glasgow has seen a population decrease of 42% and Manchester by 25%. In London, the population has increased and suffers from an acute housing shortage. This has resulted in a relaxation of regulations on room sizes and so new builds here are around a fifth smaller than elsewhere. Canary Wharf is the most densely populated area in the whole of Europe.
Where the average wage in Liverpool is £27,000 (2017), in London, it is over £36,000, and of the 1,700,000 undergraduates in the UK, a quarter will end up working in London.
Spending on public transport
Dispatches also reported that spending on public transport in Britain’s northern cities was £376, per person, per year. In London, the figure was over £1,000. A contributor commented that the problem was connectivity with other areas in the UK. He claimed that freight could take ten hours to travel from the port of Liverpool to Yorkshire.
Buerk concluded that these areas needed more immigration, rather than less. The Tories made a big noise about the ‘Northern Powerhouse’, with promises of investing in transport links between the cities and infrastructure projects, yet this was dropped, as a report suggested that upgrading the rail networks would be financially unviable.
Since the 2019 general election, Johnson has claimed that he would ‘level up’ the north, but I wouldn’t hold my breathe on this. During the pandemic, the Tories cut the furlough pay for those that were in the highest tier. When the tier system proved a failure, and a national lockdown was reintroduced, the level of furlough pay was then reinstated. The political stature Andy Burnham, mayor of Manchester and former candidate for party leader, grew as a result of the public perception that he was opposed to the cut in support for workers in Greater Manchester.
The principal imbalance in society is not between North and South, but between the richest and poorest within Britain. The bosses continue to improve their living standards, week in and week out, while the rest of us suffer falls in pay and worsening terms and conditions. The Labour and trade union movement must challenge the myth that Britain is ‘full’ and offer policies that can cut across the ‘divide and rule’ tactics of the Tories and their friends in the boardrooms of the major companies.
The Despatches programme can still be seen here.
