BRITAIN’S city centres are adorned with grand buildings that testify to the wealth and ambitions of the men who had them built. And the landscape is adorned with grand houses and gardens that give form to the labour of all who produced the wealth that the owners of these imposing edifices appropriated.
 
Invisible to most, but those who can, see these buildings embody the sweat, labour and lives of toil not just of the British workers on the land and in the factories of Britain’s two industrial and agricultural revolutions in production — but the much more intensively exploited slave labour of the British empire.
 
The toppling of Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol brought home the ways in which such monuments to empire and exploitation appear in the natural order of things, with their historical significance and present-day relevance cloaked in familiarity.
 
With the patronage of the first King Charles, Edward Colston bought his way into the Royal African Company which transported over 84,000 Africans to live and die as slaves in the Americas. As many as 19,000 died on the journey.
 
A High Anglican churchman, and without children to endow, the bloodstained riches thus acquired enabled him to buy his way into God’s favour and ensure the salvation of his soul by endowing the cities of his birth and residence — Bristol and London — with charitable works.
 
Slavery in the British empire was more or less ended by 1833 — incidentally about the time pollution arising from the capital accumulation that slavery begat began to overcome nature’s equilibrium and our island’s industry started to warm the globe.
 
For 800 millennia, CO2 in the atmosphere did not rise above 300 parts per million. But since the Industrial Revolution, CO2 concentration has soared to nearly 420 ppm.
 
The average temperature at the Earth’s surface has also risen about 1.1C since 1850.
 
Reading University’s annual Global Carbon Budget, projected CO2 emissions of 36.8 billion tonnes in 2023, up 1.1 per cent from 2022.
 
The profits that arose from the triangular trade that exchanged British manufactures for human beings and transported the product of their slave labour, super-exploited in the Americas, to Britain was the foundation of our industrial revolution.
 
By 1833, two laws empowered the misnamed “Commissioners for the Reduction of the National Debt” to compensate British colonial slave owners with a £20 million payout. This 40 per cent of the Treasury’s income was paid out to 40,000 slave owners while the commissioners’ task continued until 2015 when we finished paying for the buyout.
 
This was just one factor in the enrichment of our manufacturing, commercial and landowning classes into the single class that rules today.
 
As for the value of human loss to Africa, this is today estimated at $75 trillion. The Indian Marxist economist Utsa Patnaik estimates India’s loss to imperialism’s predations to be $45 trillion.
 
Tuesday’s atavistic reflex by the Tory rebels against Rishi Sunak’s Rwanda policy is little more than theatre. Where migration is seen in the US, Australasia and Europe as a problem, for some on the right, even an existential problem for their conception of nation, people and themselves the very real existential problem for the indigenous peoples of empire — the genocide that accompanied the mass movement of migrants from Europe — is not conceived of as forming part of this national story.
 
Such bedrock racist thinking takes post-war immigration into Britain as the starting point of a perverse narrative. But, in truth, every Afro-Caribbean, West Asian, African or South Asian family living here is an inevitable consequence of the extraction of profit and the consequent capital accumulation that made Britain the world’s first industrial power and pioneer polluter.
 
Today all US presidents are exercised about the migration of people from Latin America, a continent that for more than a century has been subject to the Monroe Doctrine whereby the US feels entitled to plunder its natural resources, exploit the labour of its people and intervene with its military, economic and intelligence assets whenever it feels its hegemony threatened.
 
The imperial mindset finds incomprehensible the relationship between the export of capital, the extraction of profit and the poverty that drives millions to follow profit to its metropolitan destination.
 
Hence the wall that distinguishes the southernmost part of the land the US took from Mexico from Mexico itself.
 
Hence also, the European, more specifically EU, mindset that is hedged around with a hypocrisy in distinction to that more openly expressed in US and Australian official circles.
 
For the best part of a decade, the chanceries of Europe have been gripped by a fear that a new refugee crisis is imminent. Chancellor Merkel selectively appropriated the labour of a huge wave of skilled people fleeing the succession of West Asian crises that inevitably followed on from imperialism’s wars on the people of the region.
 
Other European states have now called time on this migratory flow and the EU has devised a new Pact on Migration and Asylum that has as its aim a more complete sealing of Europe’s borders and a more equitable relocation of migrants and refugees, especially those whose arrival the EU describes as irregular.
 
Like the Tory Rwanda plan, EU governments want a fig leaf of a policy in place before the coming round of EU and domestic parliamentary elections.
 
The pact features delaying procedures in the initial registration of asylum-seekers, plus cruder and primitive asylum procedures and extended detention periods. The strategy is to lower standards and legalise mechanisms that until now, at least formally, were seen as a violation of internationally recognised refugee rights and even illegal.
 
Inevitably there are tensions between Greece, Italy and Spain with other, more northern, EU states because, so long as the borders of the reinforced and more intensively federalist EU become impermeable, the more the compromised rights of refugees and asylum seekers are dealt with at their point of entry.
 
The EU has abandoned the original priority assigned to a more equitable transfer of asylum-seekers away from this southern “confine di stato.” The various hypocrisies that hollow out the meaning of the EU’s illusory values of solidarity are now monetised in a new regime where states that refuse an asylum-seeker can be fined €20,000 for each one.
 
Like the Tory Rwanda policy, the EU pact, even if it makes it past the forthcoming elections where far-right, chauvinist and explicitly anti-migration parties may have the advantage, will not solve the problem exercising the EU’s leaders.
 
Both are political devices to allow a superficial reconciliation between reality and the political rhetoric that masks hypocrisy and chauvinism in equal measure. There is but a very slim outside chance that they are enough to defuse the controversies that threaten to upturn the routine operation of bourgeois democracy.
 
In a whole number of European states, the formal machinery of elections is likely to produce regimes that do not share the market-driven predatory desires of big capital for more imported labour that draws even more workers into the extraction of surplus value with the added bonus of depressing domestic wage levels.
 
This is not a new issue. As far back as 2010 the Financial Times reported: “New rules that restrict companies from hiring foreign workers must be ‘reviewed immediately,’ the CBI employers’ body said, putting the business lobby on a collision course with the government.”
 
In 2014 the FT reported: “The CBI director-general said he was concerned by the hardening of political attitudes towards migrants, especially in the light of Britain’s skills shortage.”
 
A more repressive admissions regime, tighter border controls, EU-subsidised fences, and even bribing jihadi patrols rebadged as Libyan coastguards, will not reduce irregular arrivals by much. Millions, pushed by war, climate change, poverty and unemployment will find ways through the EU’s reinforced borders.
 
As we can see from our own experience — replicated throughout the EU — the normalisation of xenophobia by mainstream politicians validates the politics of the far right.
 
There are no ways out of the refugee “crises” that periodically occur in developed capitalist countries without a wholesale repudiation of the imperial regime which visits war and climate change in the interest of profit, resource extraction and imperial domination.
 
A substantial exchange of population between the developed world and the developing world will always be to the disadvantage of the latter so long as capitalist relations of production dominate.
 
On an ideological spectrum that runs in an idealist arc from bourgeois liberal to deluded anarchist — but which includes many people who are simply horrified by the racism, discrimination and hypocrisy which accompanies the mainstream discourse on migration — there is a sense that borders are an intrusion into a natural order in which people should be free to move wherever they like.
 
This delusion could only make sense in a world where slavery, super-exploitation, imperial warmongering and climate change were absent.
 
The EU’s “free” movement of people exemplifies the parasitic nature of migration in modern capitalism. From the standpoint of workers in the robber-capitalist and oligarchic states of central and eastern Europe — even from the PIGS (Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain) — it is more a system of forced migration to where jobs can be found.
 
Even where migration today is not driven by war or climate catastrophe, it is often a morbid symptom that entails the theft of talent and human potential that nations themselves need.
 
Thus our NHS crisis is partly ameliorated by the parasitic import of labour compelled by the logic of the capitalist labour market to migrate here. Meanwhile, Britain is a country where a class-bifurcated education system fails to realise the potential of its own labour force and train enough specialists to meet domestic needs while still maintaining substantial levels of unemployment with a big section of the working-age population economically inactive.
 
It is not the business of the labour movement to join in the policing of immigration. Our job is to fight for equality and the best conditions for all workers wherever they find themselves.
 
It is in the interplay of these distinct but related phenomena that the case for a world socialist order lies.

Nick Wright blogs at 21centurymanifesto.wordpress.com.