Supporters in Lewisham Deptford Labour have submitted this emergency motion to their CLP meeting tonight (13 Feb 2019) in support of the day of action against the Immigration Bill and for free movement. Please copy it for your own local Labour Party, or adapt it as appropriate for any other union, campaign group etc.
The Immigration Bill, which passed its second reading on 28 January and will return for its third reading in early March, is a brutal attack on migrants. It ends free movement between the UK and Europe, further extends the Hostile Environment, and hands the government a blank cheque to write new rules. In what immigration lawyers have called “a charter for the wealthy”, the Tories want to class all migrant workers earning under £30,000 as “unskilled”, strip them of the right to stay longer than a year, and leave them vulnerable to hyper-exploitation.
The Labour Campaign for Free Movement has just called a Day of Action on 1 March under the slogans:
We will add our name to the sponsors and organise action in Lewisham.
Labour must build the strongest possible opposition, inside and outside Parliament. We are concerned by the party’s weakness around the Bill’s second reading – because it lessens our chance of defeating it and because it highlights a wider equivocation on migrants’ rights. We call on the party to build a strong campaign against the Immigration Bill (including by backing and promoting the Day of Action) and to adopt and campaign for much stronger policies to end the Hostile Environment.
We additionally ask the EC to organise: