Labour Campaign Says UK Needs Open Borders Because Brits are ‘Old and Creaky’

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Virginia Hale

Britain needs “open borders” because people in the UK are “old and creaky”, according to the Labour Campaign for Free Movement (LCFM), a group backed by MPs.

Thousands of Labour activists, along with union bosses and several Labour MEPs and MPs have signed up to the campaign, which will put forward a motion at the party’s annual conference this month calling for the free movement of migrants across Europe to continue after Brexit.

“Economic success means being open to trade and migration – with both the EU and the rest of the world,” writes LCFM representative Hugh Lanning in a piece on LabourList, which asserts that industry, education and public services in Britain “all need open borders in a modern world.”

Attacking Tory plans for a post-Brexit migration system that would make it easier to deport foreign murderers and rapists, which appeared in a leaked Home Office document earlier this month, Danning said Labour must hit back with migration policies “based on protecting migrant rights, not taking them away.”

“Curbing immigration will make us poorer”, the LCFM alleges. The group says that Britain “exports old, creaky people and imports young tax-paying ones,” adding: “We need more and more migrant workers across industries to support our ageing population.”

Analysts from Citi bank and academics at Oxford University have warned that 57 per cent of jobs across the OECD will likely be lost to automation, so it is unclear why Danning  — a former trade unionist  — believes an ageing population is a problem for the UK that should be “offset” with further mass migration of unskilled workers.

While Danning states that Britain “imports young, tax-paying people”, the fact is the vast majority of migrants  — who are in low paid jobs that neoliberal commentators claim British people “don’t want to do”  — cost the state more than they contribute.

Migration Watch calculated that EU migrants cost taxpayers £1 billion in 2014/15 while non-EU migrants strained the country’s finances by £16 billion.

Moreover, the Home Office report International Migration and the United Kingdom: Patterns and Trends concluded that “The impact of immigration in mitigating population ageing is widely acknowledged to be small because immigrants also age” many years ago.

Dr Joseph Chamie, director of research at the Centre for Migration Studies, described economic growth driven by mass migration as a Ponzi scheme which boosts corporate profits at the expense of quality of life and the environment.

“The underlying strategy of Ponzi demography is to privatise the profits and socialise the costs incurred from increased population growth,” wrote the demographer, who for 12 years directed the United Nations Population Division.

He explained that, with mass migration, corporations reap the profits of a having a larger pool of consumers while the general public is left to pick up the tab for mounting costs of education, healthcare, housing, and crime.

In his piece for LabourList, Danning said there is no point in Britain enacting border controls, because he says it is only in people’s imagination that the country can “sort, sift and stop the good, the bad and the ugly.”

He writes: “However much money is thrown at the border, it will only criminalise migration and drive it underground.”

The campaign by the LCFM  — whose two and a half thousand supporters include former shadow cabinet minister Clive Lewis and Tottenham MP David Lammy  — is likely to cause further division in a Labour Party the Financial Times describes as “bitterly split … with [Labour leader Jeremy] Corbyn trying to balance the views of the party’s metropolitan pro-European members with the working class Labour voters who voted for Brexit.”

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