Working from first principles –

A person born outside the UK has equal worth as someone born inside the UK and should be trated equally

Discrimation along grounds of nationality or race is is wrong because it is racist.

National borders are a social construct that institutionalise discrimination along these grounds – for jobs and movement and access to services

National borders are therefore inherently racist.

It should be added that every new immigration restriction since the aliens act, through the commonwealth immigration act and so on came as a direct result of fascist agitation.

As I said before – these first principles are important and should not be subsumed to other arguments.

However – as outlined above there are other secondary arguments for freedom of movement.

Freedom of labour would help balance out freedom of capital, and enrich working people. Indeed if controls were put on capital this would be even more the case.

Freedom of movement is compatible with the goal of building welfare states everywhere, not just in the UK. It would also incentivise this and give a greater sense of global responsibility.

Global population will be equally high wherever people live.

and there are thousands of uninhabited homes in the UK – as the super-rich own two or three while the majority own none.

People who come to the UK as economic migrants have every right to do so. I myself moved from Scotland to England for a job and rightly so. My office has many EU citizens in it, because they are the best people for those jobs. This has not caused disasters. If they can work in the UK, then so should Indians, Africans, Chinese or whoever else wants to. Freedom of Movement universally will also mean more Brits moving abroad.

So. Bit of an essay. But I think the trend is inevitable. All it would require would be the AU, ASEAN and other regional blocs to properly liberalise migration, then the US, ASEAN, AU, EU etc to do a deal. Sorted. Universal freedom of movement. And the world will be better for it.

Your inference is that I would say yes to the first statements but no to the last, and therefore I am racist. I find your inference insulting and insist that the post is removed.

I cannot understand how you can infer from what I have written to imply I think that someone cannot do a job simply because they are born in India.

Your second post raises a number of questions. Why is the ‘what if we don’t need their skills?’ argument false? How can an open borders argument be reconciled with one which supports a welfare state? How do we avoid a surplus of unskilled workers driving down prices (without reverting to a Soviet style government)? “Hardly falling into the sea” could equally be applied to global population, yet we all acknowledge it is a problem; thousands of unoccupied houses – really? then why the need to build on every patch of ground (until the recession) and the homeless? Sorry Tim, I think you need to think this out a good bit more.

Also, I think these blogs should be addressing these questions rationally rather than as outlets for ultra-left rants – I am in favour of free movement of labour but see real issues which need to be addressed rationally rather than by inferring anyone who disagrees is a racist.

All other arguments are secondary to the Human Rights argument,

however as it happens, innovative, economically active migrants create jobs. If there is a perception that immigration drives down wages (which is questionable anyway), the culprits are the people exploiting them.

As for our dense population – we’re hardly falling in to the sea, and there are thousands of unoccupied houses.

Besides, I don’t want to live in the UK for ever. If other countries scrapped immigration controls we’d see plently of people who feel the same moving to their favoured climate or job.

No Borders, No Nations

(My guess is you would answer yes)

Regardless of age, race, class, orientation etc?

(My guess is you would answer yes)

Even if they were born in, say, Wales?

(My guess is you would answer yes)

What if they were born in, say, India

erm…

Yes, saying someone from Britain can do a job but someone from India cannot is indeed racist.

That said, I think you’ve missed the point on that issue somewhat. The “implicitly racist approach” was to accept the BNP’s premise that immigration is a problem and something we’d ideally like to limit but that we’d be nicer about the than the BNP would. Immigration is not a problem for this country, it benefits us, it enriches the country and if the rules and system were fairer would benefit us even more. Our public services often rely on immigrants. To present otherwise is to pander to the far right and we’ve seen only this week what happens when you adopt that approach. A huge jump and resurrection for the FN in the French regional elections. What we also saw, more positively, was that when a progressive party like the Greens (Europe Ecologie) run a positive anti-racist campaign they can make big gains too. That’s the lesson we need to learn and one labour and the liberals seem to have completely missed.

UKIP’s Lord Monckton, who previously described climate activists as “Hitler Youth,” launched your party’s climate policy last month.

It reflects the party’s position, opposed to that of the scientific community, namely that “Our [UKIP's] conclusion is that there probably isn’t a problem.”

The policy promises that UKIP, if elected, would:

- Build new fossil-fuel power stations,
- End all support for wind power, and
- Ban public authorities like councils from fighting climate change.

Not to mention, just for the LOLs, banning An Inconvenient Truth from being shown in schools – because we know how UKIPers like free speech.

Um…how is this different from what we have now?