There are many Latin Americans living in Lambeth and I discussed the Green Party's policies on climate change and the creation of new green and sustainable jobs. We also discussed the representative of the Bolivian indigenous movement who came to visit us in London at the time of the Copenhagen Climate Summit and who spoke on behalf of many of those indigenous at Copenhagen. I said that the main blocks to an agreement being reached there were the US and China who for their own economic reasons had put a real agreement in the bin. Also the fact that it was in many of the developing countries that the impact of climate change would be most visible at first, as was now happening in the Pacific islands and Bangladesh. We also discussed the presidential elections in Colombia where the Green candidate looks as if he could win and they told me that he is being supported by many young people there.
The subject of immigration was not discussed as such but I did refer to the many millions of climate change refugees who would be created if we did not tackle climate change both nationaly and globally.
Below is a piece on immigration written by Green Party Spokesperson and Head of Media, Spencer Fitzgibbon for the New Left Project Roundtable on Immigration.
http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/immigration_roundtable/#fitzgibbon
Spencer Fitzgibbon
The current debate around immigration only serves to highlight even further the reality that Labour, Tories and Lib Dems are essentially offering voters more of the same - and that the Green Party are the only real alternative for anyone interested in a more progressive society. All the other parties are making free with the word ‘fair’ during their general election campaigns, yet using immigration as a litmus test highlights just how superficial the commitment is to any kind of coherent social justice agenda. Just as on public service cuts, they jostle to see who can most impress the right wing media by promising to keep people out of Britain, rather than genuinely addressing the reasons why people migrate and the migratory role played by our foreign and trade policies, for example.
More than half the world’s population live on two dollars a day. To paraphrase Gary Young who put it so eloquently earlier this week in a Guardian piece, if you build a 10 foot fence and put food on one side, the hungry will build an eleven foot ladder. Nowhere in the immigration debate do we see proper recognition of the fact that it is economic inequality that drives the vast majority of migration - except from the Green Party.
I want to debunk once and for all the myth that people cannot access decent housing, for example, because of high levels of immigration. There is not enough high quality social housing because the govt has failed to invest sufficiently - and it is cowardly to use the immigration debate as a way of masking this fact. The same principle applies when it comes to jobs.
This is not to deny the experiences of the many people living in Britain today without work or a decent home. But we fail them just as much as we fail the immigrant communities that contribute so much to our culture and our economy by refusing to face up to the underlying problems. The far right is taking advantage of the lack of a proper honest debate on immigration. By failing to live up to their promises on fairness, the big 3 political parties are letting it happen. The Greens want a very different approach - a system that is fair and consistent, does not break up families, upholds the right to sanctuary and judges each case on its merits. A system that does not detain children and protects the large numbers of people living in the UK whose status is not defined. And above all we want immigration policies that are set in a context of tackling the poverty and inequality that prompt people to take the huge and daunting step of leaving their homes and familes to come to Britain.
Spencer Fitzgibbon is a Spokesperson for the Green Party.
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