Tories whip up racist divisions

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In the heyday of the British Empire the world was conveniently divided into English gentlemen and the rest.

Whilst the British ruling class played cricket, dined at their clubs and bemoaned the lack of delicacy of their servants, the colonial masses were subjected to the full benefits of capitalist civilisation-superexploitation, vicious oppression and religious cant, all tied up in a neat Union Jack bow.

Ihe loss of the Empire has done nothing to undermine the hatred and contempt of the bourgeoisie for blacks, women and youth.

As the Tory party conference showed, they still have a burning desire to birch every working class youth, lock women securely in the home and deal with the black communities, both here, in Africa and Asia, as inferior species.

This arrogance, bred of generations of oppression and exploitation of the 'rest" of society, comes through clearly in the proposed new legislation on Immigration and Nationality.

Harassment

Not content with the racist provision of the 1971 Immigration Act which set out to prevent the entry, wherever possible, of black immigrants, and subjected them to incessant official harassment, the Tories have now set out on a more elaborate attack on immigrants, and Asian women in particular.

That they feel sufficiently emboldened to do so is, of course, not unconnected with the zealous response of the Labourites undet Callaghan to their racist 1971 law.

Under Merlyn Rees, the harassment at immigration control of new entrants reached new heights.

The abuse of the rights of black immigrants was justified in the name of "vigilance", ., while behind this smokescreen officials subjected women to virginity tests, pregnancy tests and in one case caused the death of a baby while they debated whether its mother was entitled to have babies in Britain!

Such cynicism, coupled with a • craven acceptance of the need to limit immigration -except from the EEC-on the part of the Labour leadership, has, led the Tories to conclude that they may now safely return to their real outlook on the world-subjugation of blacks, women and youth.

It is for this reason that, while Peregrine Worsthorne waxes lyrical in the Sunday Telegraph about a return to the 1860's and the possibility of sending gun-boats to the Persian Gulf, the government have published their latest assault on immigrants, with especial emphasis on women and youth.

Second-class

Under the new provisions, not only will current residents be deprived of the right to bring in their parents, but they will also be unable to bring in any children over 18 years of age.

Furthermore, while men will continue to be allowed to bring in wives and fiancees, women will become second class immigrants debarred from bringing in a husband fiance who is not a British national.

This two-tier system of immigration is entirely in line with the previous policy of delberately degrading and numiliating Asian women entering the country. Having abused and hounded these women the Tories have simply taken the logical next step of denying them any rights at all, -removing totally the right of children to inherit nationality throuzh the mother.

This move, rooted in the whole bourgeois mentality of the patriarchal family where the man rules and the women ministers to his needs, is justified by the Tories as a means of countering arranged' marriages and unscrupulous misuse of the immigration laws by women asking to bring in 'fiances' from abroad.

Thus, the party of the Profumo scandal, the Lambton scandal, and the Lucan scandal, steeped in a history of exploitation of women and denial of their rights now presumes to legislate against the established practices of the Asian community with all the arrogance of the missionary slave owner.

Of course there are many arguments which can be raised against the system of arranged marriages, but that is a question for the Asian youth in particular to fight out by their own action, not through the crack of the whip of high church bigots in the Tory party.

What is important is that the clear class nature of these Tory attacks, coupled as they are with quite open racism and denial of women's rights, should be drawn out as part of the whole philosophy of decaying Toryism.

What the Tories plan for Asian women is no more than a foretaste of what faces working class women in post-Corrie Toryland, when the nurseries have closed, job security for maternity leave has gone and the welfare state has been dismantled.

Seen in this light, the building of revolutlonary cadres amongst women workers, in the Asian community and in the working class as a whole becomes a crucial part of the immediate objective of defeating the racist, chauvinist attacks of the Tories to prepare for the establishment of an open workers republic which can junk in the dustbin of history the garbage of bourgeois pretensions.

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