It Is a Matter of Humanity

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It Is a Matter of Humanity

Bicentenary of 1807 Slave Trade Act:
Opposing Disinformation on Enslavement and Abolition

A Modern-Day Slavery Is Flourishing In Britain, and We Just Avert Our Eyes

How New Labour is Creating Slave Labour

One of the most important and urgent tasks of the working class and progressive movements is to wage the ideological struggle to settle scores with the old conscience. It is particularly crucial where the bourgeoisie seeks to demand that all should unite in a “British” identity which upholds the consciousness of colonialism, the superiority of the “civilised” values of Britain and neo-liberalism. The more these values are in crisis the more it seeks, in the words of Tony Blair, to combine “soft” power with “hard” power and become increasingly vicious and take Britain and the world down the path of war and fascism.

            A case in point is the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the African Slave Trade.  The government is spreading disinformation about the role of the people’s movements as opposed to the white men of property in this abolition. A study of history draws one inevitably to the conclusion that the bourgeoisie of the time were deathly afraid of revolution on the one hand, and were in competition with other colonial powers on the other. This is the context for the 1807 Act. Further disinformation is spread when the government claims to be the heirs of the values of those who abolished the slave trade, while refusing to make a meaningful apology or make just redress through reparations. The government does so precisely because it will not break from that old conscience, precisely because it refuses today to draw a line under the values of colonialism and the “white man’s burden”. It will not do so, because its programme is based on the same thinking in today’s conditions, and it is instituting slavery in a new guise under the signboard of opposing slavery.

            WDIE calls on the working class, as a contingent of the international proletariat, to combat this disinformation and break with the old conscience. They should hold high the banner of the defence of the rights of all, and uphold that all have rights by virtue of being human. They should fight for this in practice and insist that all laws which contravene this principle be repealed and that rights be given a guarantee in law. They should rally the people under this banner to become the political force that will constitute themselves as the decision-makers to ensure that this fight is taken through to the end. This is the line of march, with the workers’ and people’s movements setting themselves in motion against the old and for the new, which will rescue humanity from the degradation and barbarism into which the ruling elite and finance capital are dragging it, whether this is presented under the signboard of racism or anti-racism, of enslavement or freedom of choice.

This month large-scale commemorative events are planned to mark the bicentenary of the Parliamentary Act to abolish the trans-Atlantic slave trade, an anniversary which falls on March 25, although the Act came into force on May 1, 1807. Indeed, it is difficult to avoid this unprecedented commemoration of a historical event, in which the government itself is playing a leading role. Events include a service in Westminster Abbey, the issuing of postage stamps, media frenzy, speeches by politicians, meetings and exhibitions throughout the country and the release of a new film Amazing Grace, made with the active support of the government, and promoting the well-established myth that abolition was largely due to the efforts of William Wilberforce, the MP for Hull.

            It might be hoped that in the course of these events, and owing to the vast amount of coverage by the government, in the media and through academic institutions and charitable trusts, everyone would be disabused of such views. One might hope that people would be enabled to place both the so-called abolition and the centuries of trafficking of human flesh from Africa into historical perspective. The commemorative events certainly provide the opportunity for broad and in-depth discussion of Britain’s history and the crimes against humanity committed over many centuries. But within this, the fact is that a variety of disinformation is being spread, so as to prevent people understanding the magnitude of these crimes and drawing the appropriate lessons from the past.

            One of the greatest of the crimes in history was the so-called trans-Atlantic slave trade, in which British ships carried about 3.5 million kidnapped and enslaved Africans across the Atlantic, using the most barbaric methods. In total, this “trade” led to the forced removal of some 15 million Africans, transported to the colonies of the European powers in the Americas. Many millions more were killed in the process of enslavement and transportation, so that historians now estimate that Africa’s population actually declined over four centuries or remained stagnant until the early 20th century.

            Britain was involved in the trafficking of kidnapped and enslaved Africans from the mid 16th century when this enterprise was pioneered by John Hawkins and Elizabeth Tudor until the early 1930s when legislation was still being passed outlawing slavery in Britain’s African colonies. In the 18th century Britain was the world’s leading slave trading power, transporting about half of all enslaved Africans not only to its own colonies but also to those of other major powers such as the Spanish and French. In 1713 the British government, having developed the Bank of England and the National Debt for this purpose, was militarily victorious against its rivals in Europe and by the Treaty of Utrecht (the same treaty by which Britain lays claim to Gibraltar) it gained the lucrative contract to supply Spain’s American colonies with enslaved Africans. The government promptly sold the contract for £7.3 million to the South Sea company, whose first governor happened to also be the Chancellor. Indeed the trafficking of Africans was the business of the rich and powerful from the outset. The monarchy was a zealous supporter and beneficiary as was the Church of England.

            The “slave trade” was Britain’s trade in the 18th century. The British Prime Minister William Pitt declared that 80% of all British trade was generated in this way. It contributed to the development of banking and insurance, shipbuilding and several manufacturing industries. Most of the inhabitants of Manchester were engaged in producing goods to be exchanged for enslaved Africans and their trafficking led to the development of the major ports of London, Bristol and Liverpool. Today it is difficult to find any major stately home or major cultural or financial institution which is not connected with the profits generated by this “trade” and the luxury items associated with it such as sugar, tobacco and coffee.

            It might be wondered therefore why an enterprise that was so economically important to the rich and powerful in Britain in the 18th century should be ended in the first decade of the 19th century? The answer to this question requires the shattering of various myths and disinformation peddled from the 19th century to the present. One such myth is that abolition was largely the work of one man – William Wilberforce – and carried out largely for humanitarian reasons. The aim of such disinformation is not only to obscure the truth but also to make it impossible to draw the appropriate lessons from history. In particular, such myths ignore both the role of the masses of the people in Britain and elsewhere in the shaping of history. They also disregard who was represented in Parliament in 1807 and what their interests were.

            It is a matter of historical fact that the struggle to end the enslavement and trafficking of Africans was initiated and pursued primarily by Africans themselves. The facts speak of a two-centuries-long war of resistance in the Caribbean. But this resistance struggle also took place throughout the American continent, wherever enslaved Africans were to be found. There were also significant acts of resistance within Africa and on many ships engaged in the human trafficking, most famously on the Amistad. Such acts of resistance also took place in Britain, where enslaved Africans who liberated themselves were the subjects of court cases contesting the legality of slavery in the country throughout the 18th century. It was as a result of this self-liberation of Africans that some leading abolitionists, such as Granville Sharp, were drawn into the abolitionist movement in the late 18th century, while the resistance acts of Africans culminated in the famous legal judgment of 1772 which declared illegal the re-enslavement of self-liberated Africans in Britain, to be taken out of the country against their will.

            African resistance to enslavement and kidnapping contributed to growing public support and opposition to slave trafficking in Britain and elsewhere. In Britain, a popular movement in opposition to “the trade” began in the 1780s and soon became a broad mass movement of enormous proportions, possibly the biggest, certainly one of the first, mass political movements in Britain’s history, and one conveniently ignored in most historical accounts. This abolitionist movement coincided with a more general concern with and struggle for the “Rights of Man”, and its more advanced elements consciously promoted the view that the rights of Africans were indeed part of this struggle and that therefore what was required was a struggle for and defence of the rights of all. Africans themselves played a leading role in this movement both as propagandist and activists, the most notable being Olaudah Equiano , formerly enslaved, whose autobiography became a best-seller.

            But African resistance in the Caribbean and elsewhere was an even more important factor in the abolitionist struggle, since it had the tendency to make slavery both less profitable and more dangerous for the slave owners. Uprisings by enslaved Africans threatened not just the profits of individual owners but also the control of entire colonies and the fate of Europe’s economies. The most important of these liberation struggles, the revolution in St Domingue, the largest and most prosperous French colony in the Caribbean, broke out in 1791 not long after the revolution in France.

            In Britain, the popular mass abolitionist movement coincided with wider demands for political change, at a time when the vast majority were denied the vote. It also coincided with crucial economic changes, the industrial revolution and the emergence of the working class, but at a time when the bourgeoisie was consolidating its economic and political domination. Mass petitioning of Parliament against “the trade”, the only means open to the disenfranchised, was often strong in manufacturing towns such as Manchester, where perhaps a third of the entire population signed, and was viewed with alarm by the ruling class. However, their representatives, such as the Prime Minister William Pitt, recognised that popular sentiment might be used to persuade Parliament to abolish Britain’s exports of enslaved Africans to its main economic rival, France. It was Pitt who encouraged Wilberforce to bring an abolition Bill before Parliament.

            Wilberforce’s Bill was first introduced in 1791 and was defeated as were several similar Bills during the next 15 years. But during this period several significant changes took place. First, the French Revolution and Britain’s declaration of war against revolutionary France allowed the suppression of the political activity of the people at home. The revolutionaries in St Domingue successfully defended their revolution against the French army and then against invasions by both Spain and Britain. In 1804 St Domingue declared its independence and was renamed Haiti. The revolution in Haiti contributed to other major insurrections across the Caribbean and severely threatened the entire colonial system. Toussaint L’Ouverture and some of the other leaders of the revolution became nationally known figures in Britain. Abolition came to be viewed by some as both a means to press home a naval and economic advantage over France and its allies, as well as a means to limit the numbers of Africans imported into British colonies and thereby prevent the likelihood of further revolutions and maintain the slave system.

            It was with these aims in mind that Parliament passed the Foreign Slave Act in 1806, banning the export of enslaved Africans to Britain’s economic rivals, a measure that effectively ended around 60% of Britain’s trafficking, but which is now hardly remembered and certainly not commemorated. The following year Parliament was persuaded to pass the Abolition Act, partly on the grounds that most of “the trade” had ended already, partly on the basis that limiting the importation of enslaved Africans would tend to preserve slavery throughout the Caribbean colonies, and partly it seems because it was seen as a way of diverting attention away from an unpopular war against France and its allies and persuading the people that such a war was being fought in the interests of abolition. Even some of the major established Caribbean planters were in favour of abolition since this worked against the interests of their commercial rivals, both foreigners as well as those who acquired newly captured territory from Britain’s enemies. They reasoned that this might be especially advantageous if abolition could be forced upon other countries as a consequence of Britain’s military and naval supremacy. Other representatives of the bourgeoisie supported the measure as a means to limit the economic and political power of those who had hitherto retarded the development of industrial capitalism and prevented its representatives dominating Parliament.

            The 1807 Act was subsequently used as the representatives of the rich envisaged, not least as a means of interfering in shipping across the Atlantic. But it did not end British citizens’ involvement in the trafficking of Africans nor slavery itself. Indeed following other major insurrections in the Caribbean and similar economic and political forces, slavery was only made illegal in 1838, but continued in some areas of the British empire for another century. The trafficking of Africans in general increased during the 19th century and many British slavers sailed under foreign flags of convenience. Nor did the 1807 Act end Britain’s dependence on slave-produced goods such as cotton, the mainstay of the industrial revolution. Even the so-called “legitimate commerce” subsequently developed with Africa, such as the extraction of palm oil, was largely produced with slave labour. The Act increased rather than diminished Britain’s interference in Africa which culminated in the so-called “scramble” for Africa at the end of the 19th century and the imposition of colonial rule. Britain’s first colony in Africa, Sierra Leone, established allegedly as a haven for liberated Africans, has been under Britain’s domination for the last 200 years, much of that time occupied by British troops. Today the government is demanding that even its basic utilities, such as water, should be privatised for the benefit of British multinationals, and Britain’s interference has produced a country that manages to be one of the world’s poorest and at the same time the world’s leading producer of diamonds.

            The trafficking of Africans over many centuries was one of the greatest crimes against humanity. The current commemorative events, which are organised for all kinds of purposes, provide the opportunity for widespread discussion. What is vital is that myths are shattered and disinformation is combated. The people themselves must draw the appropriate lessons from history and organise themselves to become the decision-makers, and ensure that reparation is made for slavery, colonialism and all crimes against humanity.

Next: Settling Scores with the Old Conscience

Madeleine Bunting, December 18, 2006, Guardian

Nehad has the hunched look of a man who has lived with fear for years. It was to escape fear that he fled Iraq for Europe in 2003, hoping to start a new life beyond the reach of the torture and prisons of Saddam Hussein's regime in northern Iraq. But after four years of failed asylum applications in the UK, he is still living in fear.

            He's too nervous to tell his story inside the cafe where we meet for fear of eavesdroppers, so we sit outside. He flinches as a policewoman passes. He says he never answers a knock on his front door at home in Birmingham; friends know to call first to tell him they are coming.

            He knows – as the Home Office officials remind him on his monthly required visits to sign in – that he could be deported at any time and sent back to Iraq. He could be snatched from the streets or from his bed in the middle of the night. But, as he is well aware, there is nothing unusual about his plight – he is just one individual out of an army of irregular migrants, which the Home Office estimates at more than half a million strong. They precariously exist in a kind of bureaucracy-made limbo in this country.

            Deportation is not the only fear he lives with. He needs urgent kidney treatment, but an operation would require several months' convalescence. If he can't work, who will pay his rent or food? He knows his kidney malfunction is slowly getting worse. "I came here to survive, not to die slowly." He rubs tears from his cheeks.

            He works in a kitchen – and he apologises for it. He knows that he's not allowed to work but explains that after his asylum appeal was refused two years ago and he was ejected from the hostel and his vouchers were stopped, he had no alternative. He got himself false papers and his employer doesn't press him for his national insurance number. The arrangement suits them both. Nehad gets £182 net for a 40-hour week, and the employer gets cheap hard labour with no sick or holiday pay. Nehad will be working through Christmas.

            Nehad counts himself as one of the lucky ones. He knows someone who bought an old car for £50 just to sleep in it. Nehad rents for £100 a week, which leaves enough to pay the bills, and feed and clothe himself . He sometimes helps out other irregulars who are worse off.

            "There is another, terrible life underground in this country. The government calls us illegals, but how can a human being be illegal? We are here, and we are human beings. People ask me what my hope for the future is; I don't have a right to hope, but what I would like is to hold my head up high and tell people, this is who I am."

            That's what had driven Nehad to run the risk of talking to me. He needed recognition – it was the denial of dignity that had eaten into his soul, the way a whole society had decided to avert its eyes from his plight. The sheer indifference to the zombie category of "illegal" human beings our asylum bureaucracy has created.

            Some irregulars have been here for years, and many will be here for years to come. They might live in your street or be sitting on the bus or train next to you and you won't know because budget clothing shops ensure that poverty and desperation is now well hidden.

            The current rate of deportations is 20,000 a year. The public accounts committee has acknowledged it would take 18 years to deport all irregular migrants. That means Nehad could die of kidney disease long before his deportation order comes up, or, to put it another way, Nehad and those like him will have washed up many more of the dishes you eat off in restaurants.

            And then there's the cost: £11,000 per deportation. Deporting half a million people will push the bill towards £4.7bn, according to the Institute of Public Policy Research. No one is planning to stump up that kind of money, so this is make-believe policy land: it's never going to happen.

            Yet no politician is prepared to admit that, given the fevered anxieties about immigration in this country. These half a million have become a political no-go area: everyone has a vested interest in pretending they don't exist. They've provided labour for Britain's booming economy, filling the increasing personal-service job sectors of domestic work, cleaning, catering, food processing and hospitality.

            In this zombie category of irregulars, you are vulnerable to every thug, every kind of criminality – and yet you can never turn to the police. You get turned away from doctor's surgeries. Your employer can deduct money from your wages, increase your hours, withhold pay and you can do nothing or he will make threatening requests for a national insurance number. Likewise, your landlord can up the rent and ignore complaints about repairs.

            No one has wanted to broach the debate. Refugee organisations are too busy fighting for a fair asylum system, and trade unions, while aware of how employers can exploit irregular migrants and how that has a knock-on effect on other low-paid workers, have held back from an unpopular issue. Into this gap has stepped the Citizens Organising Foundation – representing community and faith groups in London and Birmingham – with plans to launch a campaign, Strangers into Citizens, in the New Year, which will aim to open up a space to discuss this subject sensibly. It's the COF that is hunting out the rare characters like Nehad who have the courage to speak out, and have learned good enough English to tell a story that booming Britain doesn't want to hear.

            There is an obvious policy option. Spain and Germany have both recently introduced regularisation schemes for long-term irregular migrants. It pays big dividends in terms of increased tax receipts as migrants start to pay tax – a billion euros in Spain in the first year and rising – which might tempt Gordon Brown. There are other advantages; any plan to successfully restrict the flow of new migrants depends on regularising irregulars. Regularisation would squeeze out those spaces in the economy that so quickly absorb and attract new migrants. But to date, advocacy of any regularisation scheme in the UK has been regarded as political suicide.

            The sheer extent of this institutionalised dehumanisation makes a mockery of any pretensions to decency. While politicians fret and pontificate about policies on social cohesion and integration, this is the real question at the heart of those issues: the army of cheap labour on which our comfortable lifestyles depend.

            Next year [2007] marks the second centenary of the trade in slaves from the empire that was abolished in 1807; slavery in Britain had been illegal after 1772 but it remained in the colonies until 1833. What makes the Strangers into Citizens campaign so challenging is that it is forcing us to acknowledge that its modern-day version is flourishing. People like Nehad may have some freedom of movement, but in reality, every detail of their daily lives is sharply circumscribed by fear. He bitterly knows that though he is 34, he has no chance of marriage, children, a home, a decent job, or a life worth living. He is just waiting – without any hope that the wait will end.

by Steve Cohen of No One is Illegal, December 12, 2006

Whatever the merits of Tony Blair's recent retrospective apology for Britain's leading role in the slave trade it would be less hypocritical if his government was not developing a modern system of slavery and the reintroduction of sweated labour through the reshaping of immigration controls.

            The mechanisms of immigration control are changing. They are locating themselves in the workplace and on the factory floor. The agents and enforcers of controls are becoming employers. They are the managers of New Labours "managed migration".

            In fact, this role began with the 1996 Asylum and Immigration Act which imposed criminal sanctions on bosses who employed those without the correct documentation. The real targets of these sanctions were never intended to be the employers but rather the undocumented, the sans papiers, the illegals, whose immigration status they were expected to police. The intent was to transform bosses into partners in control through the fear of criminalisation.

            The statistics speak for themselves. For example in 2004 there were 1098 "successful operations" (i.e. raids) by the immigration service, which resulted in the arrest of 3,332 workers – but the successful prosecution of only eight employers! In the previous year, only one boss was successfully prosecuted but 1,779 workers arrested, removed from the workplace and presumably deported.

            The 2006 Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act introduced civil penalties against employers as a deterrent against hiring those without status or without the correct status. Bosses will now have to check an employee's papers at regular intervals to avoid employing an irregular worker. Most immigration documents are time-limited. Yesterday's lawful entrant can become tomorrow's sans papiers.

            And it gets worse. Under the law regulating gangmasters – the Gangmasters Licensing Act introduced in 2004 after the drowning of Chinese cocklepickers – gangmasters will only preserve their registration if they show they are policing and refusing to employ undocumented workers.

            There has been considerable publicity given to the new points system controlling the entry of migrant workers as detailed in the government's white paper, A Points-Based System: Making Migration Work For Britain. Virtually nil publicity has been given to the requirement that employers will have to register before they are able to recruit overseas labour, and may jeopardise that registration if they are connected with employees who breach immigration law. Furthermore, employers will have to report their employee(s) to the Home Office for absenteeism.

            According to the White Paper: "Sponsors will be required to inform us if a sponsored migrant fails to turn up for their first day of work, or does not enrol on their course. Similarly, they will be expected to report any prolonged absence from work or discontinuation of studies, or if their contract is being terminated, the migrant is leaving their employment, or is changing educational institution. Sponsors will also need to notify us if their circumstances alter, for example if they are subject to a merger or takeover".

            This level of surveillance is unprecedented in peacetime. Except today there is a new war – a war against workers. This primarily presents itself as a war on the undocumented. However, the war extends even to the documented given the tenuous and circumscribed nature of immigration papers. It also extends to European Union workers. Workers from the new EU East European accession states are restricted in obtaining benefits and are bound by employment restrictions such as the need to register for work with the Home Office, a requirement which in itself may drive such workers into the underground economy of sweated labour (and it now seems there is an intention to restrict entry for Romanian and Bulgarian workers). It is a war on all imported workers.

            The new factory floor mechanisms of control reflect the shift in the focus of immigration controls themselves.

            For the last decade the focus, the demons, of control were asylum-seekers. In the 1970s and 1980s it was husbands from the Indian sub-continent who were accused of contracting "marriages of convenience" – along with children seeking to join parents here – and were accused of "not being genuine as claimed". In the late 1960s, it was Asians from East Africa... and it can go back in time to communists in the 1920s to Jews fleeing Tsarism at the turn of the century (leading to the first controls – the 1905 Aliens Act). Immigration controls always have their latest demons, real or imagined. Today it is "economic migrants" – whose labour is needed but whose presence is unwanted.

            When it comes to migrant workers then, like every other construct tainted by immigration law, the very use of the term "rights" is an abuse of vocabulary. What "rights" the documented – those migrants with permission to enter and work – possess are usually impossible to enforce. The ability to bring a case for unfair dismissal requires having been in employment for a year – an impossibility for short-term, temporary labour. The "right" to a written statement of employment terms is pointless for those not literate in English.

            And not all employment "rights" apply even to the documented. Parental "rights" under the Working Time Regulations – parental leave, time off in a family emergency, flexible working conditions to care for children – none of these appear to apply to the documented migrant at least where the child does not reside in the UK.

            The undocumented, those without leave to be here and/or work, are simply non-persons. They are literally illegal – they live outside of the law, hunted and harassed by the law and without the protection of the law. For instance, they cannot enforce their contracts of employment, secure payment of the minimum wage, claim unfair dismissal, demand not to have unlawful deduction from wages, indeed claim to have wages at all. The Court of Appeal in the case of Vakante v Addey and Stanhope School has in essence confirmed all the above in deciding that an undocumented worker cannot bring a case against a boss under the Race Relations Act. Even attempting to join a union where the employer attempts to impose a non-union shop becomes a major obstacle as undocumented workers cannot assert a breach of trade union rights – as they have no trade union rights.

            One of the suggestions made in a recent book showing the relationship between immigration status and employment "rights" (Labour, Migration and Employment Rights published by the Institute of Employment Rights) is that the laws against discrimination should extend to immigration status. As a practicing lawyer, I once thought this as well. However I now think this is as utopian – i.e. conceptually impossible – as is the demand in some quarters for "fair" control. "Fair" controls are utopian because by definition controls are both discriminatory and unfair. Just so, the issue is not one of achieving equality of immigration status. The issue is one of getting rid of immigration controls and indeed of "status" altogether. This might well require a revolution. Fair or non-discriminatory controls would require a miracle.

            It is hardly possible to exaggerate the gravity of the situation. The economic rank of the documented, of those with papers, is at its best often equivalent to the villein or serf under feudal law – just as the villein was tied to the land and could not move elsewhere so the documented, other than the most skilled, is tied to the job and therefore the master. The sans papier is akin to that of a slave. It is true that the s/he does have one essential feature in common with the supposed "free labourer" under capitalism. So Marx in the – did not define slavery in terms of economic relations but as a "relation of domination" – with domination being direct under slavery and indirect under capitalism. However the undocumented in all other ways is quite distinct from all others under capitalism. The sans papier is entirely at the mercy of his/her master/mistress.

            The precariousness of even the documented means they can easily slide into the world of those without papers. And those without papers and not already in detention are driven into the slave-like conditions of the underground economy where they service the rag trade, fast-food joints, garages, nursing homes and sex joints of our metropolitan centres. Then when their work is no longer required, or when they are so exhausted by work that they have no energy to fight to stay, they are transported (deported) in accordance with the economic needs and national prejudices of their masters in the UK – often to be returned into the hands of the masters from which they escaped in their country of origin.

            In British immigration law recent statutory measures have judicially sanctioned these slavery analogies even further. Under the latest 2006 legislation those about to be deported and incarcerated in removal centres will now be allowed to work. But this work will not attract the rewards of a free labourer but rather those of the prisoner. Section 59 of the Act specifically provides that the law relating to the national minimum wage shall not apply.

            However Section 10 of the 2004 Asylum and Immigration Act represents an even more vivid example of the statutory confirmation of a slave like existence. This makes provision of housing and other poor-law support for certain refugees to be conditional on their undertaking "community services". These are refugees whose claim has been rejected by the Home Office but are unable to return home because of circumstances beyond their control – because they are stateless or ill or (paradoxically in the case of a rejected asylum application) the country of return is too dangerous. Section 10 transforms asylum-seekers into slaves. It makes their labour compulsory, as refusal to participate will result in deprivation of housing and other support. When the Act was being debated in its committee stage in the House of Lords (15 June 2004), Lord Rooker encouraged voluntary sector groups to get involved in tendering for this slave labour. He also suggested that this compulsory refugee labour could be used for the maintenance of the refugee's own accommodation – which is a way local authorities and private companies can get otherwise run-down unlettable properties updated for free.

            There has been successful resistance to the implementation of section 10. In Liverpool, the YMCA tendered for the scheme. But after outrage was expressed by the undocumented and their supporters the tender was withdrawn.

            It is these slave-like conditions enforced and reinforced by immigration controls that indicate the impossibility of such controls being sanitised by reform or other legal mechanisms. The only options are abolition or further repression. Likewise, classical slavery was incapable of reform – it had to be abolished . One writer (William Fisher) in describing forced labour has said "In most contexts they were treated as things – objects or assets to be bought and sold, mortgaged and wagered, devised and condemned". He might as well be referring to today's sans papiers. In fact, he was describing the ideology behind the institution of ante-bellum American slavery. The 1696 Slave Code of South Carolina began by proclaiming: "Whereas the plantations and estates of the Province cannot be well and sufficiently managed and brought into use, without the labour and service of negroes and other slaves..."

            Substitute "economic migrants" for "negroes" and this well expresses the rationale, and uses the same language, as New Labour's "managed migration". It is not so new after all.