Immigration and asylum

Nigel Farage’s return to politics amidst reports that his followers are planning to flood the Tory party in order to boost Boris Johnson’s bid for the leadership may simply be just another silly season diversion by our worthless national media. But there’s no doubt that the former UKIP leader intends to play a prominent role in a new Brexit movement called ‘Leave Means Leave’.

Workers have no say in the electoral procedures of the party that has been the chosen political instrument of bourgeois rule for the past 100 years or so. Whomever the Tories choose as their leader is a matter of total indifference to working people. Brexit is another matter.

It is clear that Farage and those behind him will play the racist card again in a new campaign designed to thwart the ‘soft’ Brexit that the May government seems to favour. It is equally clear that this is precisely the arena that the Remainers intend to fight them on, using the bogus claims on the ‘freedom of travel’ that is supposedly such a boon to workers trapped inside the European Union (EU).

The New Communist Party recognises the need for any sovereign state to set an immigration policy in accordance with its resources. But we firmly oppose any immigration policy that discriminates, either directly or indirectly, on the basis of race, creed, colour or gender.

It must never be more profitable for a boss to employ one worker rather than another on the basis of where they were born. EU rules that allow contractors to import labour from one country to another, to work under worse terms and conditions than those of the country where the work is done, will end when we leave the EU.

We call for the repeal of the Immigration and Asylum Acts of the 1990s that make it very difficult for many genuine asylum seekers to establish their claims. Asylum seekers must be treated humanely and their claims dealt with swiftly. Whilst this process takes place they must be given decent accommodation and welfare benefits to survive. No asylum seekers should be locked up unless there is good reason to believe they are criminals and no child asylum seeker should ever be locked up.

Crawling to the Americans

We shouldn’t be surprised at the Government’s renewed call for more sanctions against Russia. Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt claims that “President Putin has made the world a more dangerous place” and says: “The United Kingdom asks its allies to go further by calling on the European Union to ensure its sanctions against Russia are comprehensive, and that we truly stand shoulder to shoulder with the US. That means calling out and responding to transgressions with one voice whenever and wherever they occur, from the streets of Salisbury to the fate of Crimea.”

Licking the boots of Uncle Sam has been the policy of the British ruling class since the Second World War in the belief that this would help ensure continued American protection of their global interests in the post-colonial world. To a certain degree it did but only when it serves the over-arching interests of American imperialism.

During his presidential campaign Donald Trump claimed he was in favour of a rapprochement with the Russians. In the White House however, Trump is a prisoner of the most aggressive circles within the American ruling class – the ‘deep state’ that cuts across the American political divide to control Congress and the police and legal bureaucracy of the USA. They want a trade war with Russia and China. But whether they’ll give the British government a loyalty bonus remains to be seen.

The Government needs to turn to the Russian market if it seriously wants to restore the manufacturing and general export sector in the post-Brexit era. It can expect no favours from the Russians if Hunt carries on like this.

A nightmare called Jean-Paul Floru

Review

By John Marchant

The Sun Tyrant  -- A Nightmare called North Korea by JP Floru (2017). Biteback Publishing: London. Paperback, 304 pages, £12.99 ISBN: 9781785902215

When I first came across the title of this particular volume I thought that it was a biography of the French King Louis XIV – but alas no. Instead, The Sun Tyrant purported to be a travelogue of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). The book centres around the travels of JP Floru to the DPRK, who tagged along with three friends taking part in the Mangyongdae Prize International Marathon.

From the beginning to the end, the book is full of ceaseless anti-DPRK propaganda. The author repeats, ad nauseam, all the usual cliches about the DPRK from the bourgeois media, without having anything remotely positive to say about People’s Korea. JP Floru's travelogue also suffers from a lot of factual errors. For instance, he calls the main river running through the city of Pyongyang the Pudong, whereas it is actually named the Taedong River. The author is very disparaging about his tour guides and takes a very patronising view of the Korean people generally.

Jean-Paul Floru is a Belgian who came to Britain in 1994. The self-styled “libertarian” says he came here because Britain was a “land of opportunity”. He is a Conservative London councillor and wannabe MP, associated with all sorts of Tory extremists, who has been accused by Labour rivals of links with Belgian racist movements in Flanders. His heroes are Ronald Reagan and Mrs Thatcher, and he naturally associates himself with the likes of Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg.

 Jacob Rees-Mogg, a possible contender for the leadership of the Conservative Party, has written the introduction to Floru's book on his DPRK visit, where he duly denounces the DPRK's social and political system as being the evillest in the world. This is the same Rees-Mogg who said that foodbanks in Britain are rather uplifting. Rees-Mogg believes that poverty acts as an incentive for the poor to work on zero-hour contracts and without any employment rights. The sentiments expressed against the DPRK by Floru and Rees-Mogg demonstrate their class hatred of Korean style socialism. What the representatives of the bourgeoisie such as Rees-Mogg and Floru despise so much about the DPRK is the fact that it is a state run for and by the working people of that north-east Asian country.

The best thing to do with this publication is to deposit it into the recycle bin and make better use of the paper from which it is manufactured!