Source: Morning Star

This is the largest annual increase since records began six years ago, with unprecedented spikes around the EU referendum and terror attacks recorded by police.

In a 29 per cent rise from the previous year, data from police forces across England and Wales showed there were almost 80,400 hate crimes recorded in the 2016-17 financial year — a dramatic increase in incidents motivated by attackers’ hostility towards their race, nationality, religion or other factors.

Almost 80 per cent of the incidents recorded involved race-hate crimes. Rising hate crime is unacceptable, especially given the fall in prosecutions this year.

Hate crime is defined as “any criminal offence which is perceived, by the victim or any other person, to be motivated by hostility or prejudice towards someone based on a personal characteristic.”

They were mainly public order offences, which include making threats, insults and provoking violence, followed by violence against the person, criminal damage including vandalism, and arson.

A Home Office spokesperson said: “There were a number of spikes in racially or religiously aggravated offences. These were in June 2016 [after the EU referendum result], March 2017 [after the Westminster Bridge attack], May 2017 [after the Manchester Arena bombing]and June 2017 [after the London Bridge and Finsbury Park mosque attacks].”

While improved reporting may explain a part of this increase, Stop Hate UK’s Mike Ainsworth was among those who pointed out that “the rise is too great to simply be accounted for by a greater level of efficiency.”

I have dealt with such cases in my constituency and I have myself been subjected to a torrent of online racist abuse, not all of which has been reported.

The reports came during National Hate Crime Awareness Week, and we need to be clear that this is not inevitable and something can be done about it — we need to show leadership.

It is welcome that cabinet minister Damian Green is on the record as saying that political debate in Britain is currently too abusive, yet now members of his government must do more in this regard.

Change and a clear lead needs to come from the top to ensure that people do not feel discriminatory views are acceptable. In particular, politicians must end the race to the bottom on immigration.

The Tories have made great claims about tackling burning injustices. But they are clearly not tackling the great injustice of being attacked simply because of your religion, your sexuality, the colour of your skin or your disability.

Instead rhetoric from parts of the Tories legitimises those who will tell someone to “go home.”

The government’s own policies and rhetoric — both currently and over a number of years — have clear responsibility in this area.

From Go Home vans, to demonising international students, to talking about a foreigner-free NHS, this is a government whose policies are contributing to a climate of hate and fear.

Indeed it was only this August that a scathing cross-party report said the government was fuelling “toxic” anti-immigrant sentiment and that Theresa May’s discredited target of cutting net migration to under 100,000 was particularly to blame for “stoking anxiety.”

Furthermore, the rise of the far right across Europe arises within a hostile political climate which scapegoats migrants and Muslims.

This is mirrored by US President Donald Trump’s notorious wall and the ban on Muslim countries which has emboldened the Ku Klux Klan, who actively defended the slave-era confederacy in Charlottesville, where an anti-racist protester was killed.

The words “an injury to one is an injury to all” could not be more relevant than in the campaign against racism.

Emboldened by a hostile climate against migrants and Muslims, the far right targets Jewish, Black, LGBT, disabled people and others.

Labour will hire 10,000 extra police to ensure there are sufficient officers working in the community who can help tackle crimes like this, but most importantly we will stop legitimising those who seek to scapegoat the “Other.”

We stand up against this scapegoating — and clearly stand for both people’s rights and for a fair approach to immigration to the benefit of our economy and society.

You can follow Diane Abbott on twitter.com/HackneyAbbott and facebook.com/DianeAbbott.

This is Diane Abbott’s contribution to a new book, Free Movement and Beyond: Agenda Setting for Brexit Britain, published by Public Reading Rooms.

Last year’s Tory party conference represented a sharp rightwards turn. The rhetorical focus for all their attacks was foreigners, in work, in schools, in our health service. The political strategy was formed by the realisation that we cannot be in the Single Market and opt out of freedom of movement. So they have opted for anti-immigration and impoverishment, getting out of the Single Market in order to pursue a reactionary agenda on immigration.

When Jeremy Hunt announced his anti-foreigner plan for the UK to become ‘self-sufficient’ in doctors, he also included a reactionary new measure to be imposed on UK-trained doctors. But this was only one of the barrage of assaults on overseas workers announced at the conference.

The Tories were forced to retreat on their plan that companies are to be named and shamed for employing overseas workers. Yet students and scientists will still be turned away. The whole conference was an exercise in scapegoating. The crisis is caused by Tory policy and their allies and supporters, exploitative employers, rapacious landlords, rip-off private owners of formerly nationalised industries. It is not caused by immigrants.

Now under the Hunt plan, doctors trained in this country will have to work in the NHS for four years. Otherwise, they will have to repay the cost of their training, which the British Medical Association estimates at over a quarter of a million pounds minimum.

This demonstrates a general law that the labour movement has understood for a long time: an injury to one is an injury to all. Attacks on overseas workers always rebound and include regressive measures against domestic workers too. So, in a futile effort to restrict overseas workers the Tories are also ordering restrictions on workers trained here too, curbing their freedom of movement.

For the NHS, the drive towards a foreigner-free doctor workforce would be a disaster. There are 100,000 overseas doc-tors in the UK. There is already a significant shortage of doctors. Of course we should be training more doctors and other health professionals in this country, just as we should be training all sorts of skilled and highly-skilled workers across a range of sec-tors. But the idea that that we could or should seek to eliminate overseas doctors from the NHS and become ‘self-sufficient’ is a reactionary fantasy.

Even if all of Hunt’s additional new 1,500 UK-trained doctors don’t drop out, and even if he successfully compels them all to work for four years, this would not close the doctor shortage. It will grow and the number of overseas doctors will rise under current plans. Otherwise the NHS will go into absolute crisis.

It is a scandal that Theresa May and Liam Fox want to use EU workers here as a ‘bargaining chip’ in negotiations with EU countries. They should be offered guarantees of work and residency. But these existing workers here will also need replacing, and we cannot force UK-trained doctors to work here indefinitely. We need freedom of movement for doctors and other health professionals simply for the continued existence of the NHS.

The demagogic campaign against foreigners that was first championed by UKIP and is now mainstream Tory policy obscures a key point. It is important to remember that freedom of movement is a workers’ right.

In all societies where there are significantly greater freedoms for business and for capital than for workers, then in practice workers’ rights are severely curtailed. Business is at a huge advantage. This reaches an extreme in the most authoritarian countries.

So for example, the ‘pass laws’ in apartheid South Africa made black workers non-residents without rights in their own country, while they suffered the most brutal exploitation in the mines and elsewhere. Even in this country, the Poor Laws formerly restricted the movement of workers from one parish to another. They could not seek poor relief outside their own parish if they were unemployed and went looking for work. The Poor Laws were only effectively abolished by the Labour Government in 1948.

In all these cases, business was able to freely establish wherever it chose. The effect is that workers’ bargaining rights were severely curtailed, in some cases eliminated. They had to accept whatever jobs, and at whatever wages and terms that the employers in their locality chose. This is one of the key, overlooked issues in the current widespread assault on freedom of movement.

Economists for Brexit, the only grouping which produced economic arguments in favour of Leave, argued that UK manufacturing would be eliminated by the adoption of free trade and that inequality would widen dramatically as financial services would grow dramatically. This may be an exaggeration. More sober analysis from the UK Treasury is that in a European Economic Area agreement, government finances for services like the NHS will be £20 billion lower after 15 years, while falling back on World Trade Organisation rules reduces government finances by £45 billion. Public services would be decimated.

This Tory government is scapegoating foreigners to distract from its own complete failures of policy. Living standards are falling because of them, not migrants. The labour movement cannot accept living standards being lowered by Brexit and the attack on freedom of movement, and must stand to defend both. The Tory government doesn’t have an economic policy. Every time Theresa May gets up to speak the pound falls, and ordinary people literally pay higher prices as a result.

The Tories are desperate to shift the blame for this. They have declared open season on foreigners. That is why standing up to racism is so important. The broad forces of the labour movement, committed campaigners and the most oppressed sections of society can come together to combat all forms of xenophobia, anti-semitism and racism.

We can win. The Tory anti-foreigner policy would devastate our public services. It is already lowering living standards. It will lead to job losses. The majority will be worse off, and we have an alternative. Labour under Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell is committed to investment-led growth. This is the answer to the crisis, not a Tory campaign inspired by Enoch Powell.

Diane abbott is MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington and was appointed Shadow Home Secretary in October 2016.

Free Movement and Beyond – Agenda Setting for Brexit Britain

This new book featuring Diane Abbott MP, Yanis Varoufakis, Caroline Lucas MP, Professor Mary Kaldor and more, is available now from Public Reading Rooms. It draws together the current thinking of many of Britain’s most prominent ‘critical Remainers’ – those who argued to remain within the European Union while seeking its democratic and progressive transformation.

Price £9.95 (Post free)

Diane Abbott MP’s introduction to the pamphlet: Why immigration is good for all of us.

Unfortunately some argue that, even if you explain the facts, it is impossible to defeat the current anti-immigrant tide in British politics. This is extra-ordinary defeatism. On that basis we would not have seen any of the advances in social policy that have occurred over the last century. You do not get political advance by studying opinion polls and then echoing the public’s prejudices back to them. Every major social advance had to be campaigned for, often in the face of a hostile media.

It is time for the left to seize the debate on immigration and assert a counter narrative that is fact-based, positive and progressive about multi-cultural Britain. In 2012 the opening ceremony of the London Olympics was a compelling and electrifying celebration of multi-cultural Britain. It was widely praised. We need a political narrative that matches the artistic narrative of Danny Boyle.

We also need to understand the historical context of the current debate. Nothing that is being said in the current debate on immigration is new. Each new wave of immigrants has been subject to the same complaints, often focussed on labour market issues. And, for over a century, immigration has been code in the British political discourse for race.

Anti-Irish racism was common in Victorian England. The Irish were routinely portrayed in cartoons in Punch and elsewhere as having ape-like features, signalling the racial antipathy. Irish workers were accused of driving down wages and monopolising certain, low paid, job markets. In 1870 Marx wrote “Every industrial and commercial centre in England now possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life. This antagonism is artificially kept alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short, by all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes”

Later in the century Russian Jews fleeing persecution in Tsarist Russia came to Britain in their tens of thousands. They settled in cities like Manchester and Leeds, but above all they came to the East End of London. There were over 200,000 Jews in London by 1914. They were met with bitter hostility, including from some trade unionists. They were seen as competing for homes and work in an economy which was in recession. They were accused of being willing to work for longer hours in poorer working conditions at a lower wage than their British co-worker, thereby underselling the indigenous workforce. In 1905 the Manchester Chronicle wrote “the dirty, destitute, diseased, verminous and criminal foreigner, who dumps himself on our soil and rates simultaneously, shall be forbidden to land”.

In the years after the Second World War immigration from the West Indies triggered the, now predictable, complaints about housing problems and labour market issues. These complaints were often from people whose concern for the British working man and woman had been well concealed until then. So in 1954 the Conservative MP for Louth, Cyril Osborne asked the Prime Minister “What is Her Majesty’s government’s policy regarding…the immigration into this country of coloured people without tests of either health, technical skills or criminal record…in view of the recent increase in unemployment” But the advent of the welfare state meant a new set of complaints about immigrants. Labour and Conservative MPs complained that immigrants were adding to the housing problem, increasing the size of school classes and swelling demands on National Assistance (i.e. the benefits system)

So there is nothing new under the sun when it comes to the anti-immigrant narrative. And it is vital to separate reality from myth in the current debate on the subject. This is partly because it would be unjust to do anything else. But it is also because making immigrants the scapegoats for current economic conditions is a damaging diversion from formulating the policies which will address the real problems of British workers black and white.

Immigrants are not the cause of low wages. Predatory employers, deregulated labour markets and the diminution of trade union rights and freedoms are the underlying causes of low wages and labour market insecurity. Progressives have to turn people’s attention to the real cause of their discontents. This pamphlet gives us some of the facts we need to do just that.

Diane Abbott is a contributor to Free Movement and Beyond: Agenda Setting for Brexit Britain. She will be speaking at the book launch on 27 March 2017. Details and registration here…