UK Immigration Service official checking vehicles moving through passport control at the ferry terminal in Calais, France. Gareth Fuller / PA Wire/Press Association Images.
“If there is a single deportation there’ll be riots of Poll Tax proportions,” he tells me, betraying a certain nostalgia. On his profile picture he is holding a copy of the Socialist Worker and on his bio he proudly tells us of his membership to one of the UK’s largest unions. He speaks to me about solidarity with Greek workers and those who die in the Mediterranean trying to make it into Fortress Europe. He is a perfect example of so-called Lexit, the many on the left who have decided to support a move outside the EU, an organisation they rightly identity as a neoliberal monster with racist immigration laws. He means good, like all Lexiters. And yet, with their integrity and all, I would say Lexiters are today complicit in one of the UK’s biggest political betrayals in recent history, that of EU migrant workers.
Scan articles written by any left-leaning Brexit supporter and you will find no mention of the millions whose lives and residency rights have currently been thrown out of balance in the UK (or the million British workers currently in the same situation in Europe, for that matter). EU migrants aren’t a preoccupation for the Suzanne Moores or Giles Frasers. And when they turn up in more hardcore leftist pages they do in contraposition to the plight of an abstract assemblage composed of distant Greek workers and faraway refugees. It seems Lexitist strategy to solve the refugee crisis entails an “either or” approach, in which we should all drown together until we force our governments find a way to revert a humanitarian crisis they greatly contributed to create. It is hard to see how taking a step back from the centre of decision making in Europe can contribute to stopping the death of people or the plight of Greek workers.
