The BNP is no friend of British workers

posted by: Nick Lowles | on: Saturday, 31 January 2009, 02:18

The BNP is trying to exploit the protests in Lincolnshire for its own racist ends by turning an issue about contracts and jobs into a racist one.

Everyone should be alert to the dangers of this protest spiralling out of control, as the BNP would wish, setting worker against worker rather than tightening employment rules to ensure that employers cannot use one group of workers to undercut another – of whichever nationality or race they may be from.

It is also vital that people are not fooled by fascist propaganda. Their policies would crash the British economy. Millions of Britons depend on foreign-owned firms for their jobs. If the BNP got their way and all non-whites and foreigners were booted out of the country then why wouldn’t all these foreign-owned companies pull out as well?

Despite the announcement of 2,500 job cuts this week, the steel company Corus still employs 24,500 people in Britain. When the BNP kick its Indian management out of the country they would be throwing these people onto the scrapheap.

Then there are the hundreds of thousands of British workers who rely on British companies winning overseas contracts. If it’s “British jobs for British workers” then will the BNP support the American aviation industry withdrawing all work from British Aerospace and Rolls Royce and giving it to American companies?

And finally, what about the millions of Britons living and working abroad? If the BNP kicked out everyone in Britain whom they did not like, why wouldn’t other countries do the same?

We live in a complex and interwined global economy. As we have so graphically seen during the recent financial collapse, what happens in one country quickly affects another.

What we need is for workers to enjoy the same rights and conditions across Europe and for people to be paid the rate for the job in the country they are working in.

This, together with proper trade union organisation of all workers – British and “foreign” – and not racial scapegoating is how we stop exploitation of workers and undercutting of wages. The BNP is no friend of the British worker.