Below is the Labour Campaign for Free Movement motion for Labour Party Conference 2021 – as written jointly by us, Lesbians and Gays Support the Migrants, and the Momentum branches in Oxfordshire, Stevenage, Watford, Three Rivers and Hertsmere.
If you haven’t already submitted a motion to your Constituency Labour Party for this year’s annual conference, please submit the motion below.
What you need to do
There are 3 things you need to do to get our motions to conference:
1. Submit the text of the motion in an email to the secretary of your local party (or to the email address which sends you notices of meetings). Paste the text into the email, rather than just sending a link, and make it clear you want to submit it as the CLP’s conference motion for this year. In some areas you can submit directly as an individual to the CLP secretary; in others, you’ll need to get it through your Ward party first – all will become clear when you email it in.
2. Attend the meeting where the motion is being discussed and speak in favour of it.
3. Tell us what you’re doing. Have you submitted it? Has it passed? Has your party decided to debate it later? Whatever the latest news is, we want to know – please drop us an email at info@labourfreemovement.org
Title:
For solidarity and internationalism: towards a socialist immigration policy
Motion:
Covid-19 has underlined how Hostile Environment policies hurt us all. Excluded from social and medical support, migrants have been left hyper-vulnerable to employers. Many EU citizens are falling through gaps in the Settled Status scheme.
The Stansted 15’s exoneration, appalling conditions at Napier Barracks, deaths in the Channel and closing of safe routes for child refugees highlight the cruelty of Tory migration policy. The Windrush Lessons Learned review has been ignored by the government.
Attacks on migrants are attacks on the labour movement. Making migrant workers precarious diminishes our power to unionise and fight back.
Labour must reject divisive “good migrant/bad migrant” narratives and oppose all legislation that undermines migrants’ rights.
Conference resolves that Labour will work at all government levels, and campaign at the grassroots, to:
- Re-enter Europe’s free movement area, and pursue free movement with other countries, including in all future trade deals.
- Reject immigration systems based on migrants’ incomes, savings or utility to employers;
- Abolish “no recourse to public funds”, minimum income requirements, and all Hostile Environment policies including restrictions on NHS access.
- Introduce an easy process for all UK residents to gain permanent residency with equal rights.
- Introduce equal voting rights for all UK residents.
- Guarantee safe routes for asylum seekers and rights to family reunion, work and social security.
- End all immigration raids, detention and deportation, especially childhood-arrival deportations and racist “double sentencing”.
- Replace Settled Status with an automatic Right to Stay.
- Support workers who refuse to implement deportations or Hostile Environment measures.
(248 words)