Transform Newsletter 21st May 2025

 21st May 2025

Welcome to issue 24 of the Transform Newsletter. We salute the 600,000 who marched in London on Saturday. We are all Palestinians !

Action call: Refugees and Asylum Seekers

Transform’s campaigning focus for June 2025 will be on asylum seekers and refugees. We will be campaigning against the Government’s immigration white paper, and attacking Starmer over his racist rhetoric which scapegoats refugees.

Keir Starmer is knowingly and deliberately borrowing from the language of the racist right. He says that his proposals will “take back control of our borders and close the book on a squalid chapter for our politics, our economy, and our country.” That “in 2023, net migration reached nearly 1 million, which is about the population of Birmingham.” (Starmer seems to have been watching too much GB News. Net migration in 2023 was 866,000, while Birmingham’s population is 1,166,000.) And that unless we curb immigration, “we risk becoming an island of strangers.”

We’re constantly being told that immigration is too high, and that governments have a duty to get a grip on it. Is this a fair point ? Let’s delve into the facts.

Immigration Briefing

Between 2020 and 2022 there was a huge rise in net migration, though since then the numbers have started to creep down. This rise had very little to do with the number of asylum seekers. For instance, in 2023 fewer than 30,000 people crossed the Channel on small boats, or just under 2.5% of the total number who came to the UK that year. The slogan ‘Stop the Boats’ never had anything to do with controlling immigration levels, it was all about instilling the idea that Britain was being invaded by undesirables.  

Asylum seekers are not of course milking the benefit system. They can’t claim any benefits, even though they’re not allowed to work. They receive £49.18 a week to cover all expenses. The asylum seeker hotels that the far right love to hate are one of several forms of short term accommodation housing people until they could be moved into the community. Due to backlogs, some were being housed in hotels for longer. Once the backlogs are brought back to more normal levels, the extra cost disappears.

What should we make of the general rise in immigration ?

People coming to the country on visas come for a purpose (which has nothing to do with claiming benefits), and they come to fill a need. There’s no evidence that rising immigration is taking jobs away from people born in this country: unemployment has remained at low levels for the last 10 years. It is putting pressure on housing, but the real culprit here is the failure of successive governments to build new homes.

Keir Starmer takes a different view. In his Foreward to the White Paper, he claims that rising immigration is causing “incalculable damage” to the country. The concerns listed in the Paper hardly justify this overblown rhetoric: a rise in lower-skilled migration, migrants tending to stay longer, underinvestment in skills training, abuses of student visas as more visas are issued and more dependants of students are also applying for visas.

It’s not just that the Government is overhyping these concerns. It’s worse than that. They’re lying to us.  

HMRC statistics show that over the last two years, the pay of UK nationals and non-EU nationals have kept pace with one another, while the pay of EU nationals has leapt ahead of both. If lower-skilled migration really was distorting the labour market, we’d expect to see this reflected in the data.

Home Office research, published just last week, found that median earnings for dependants of immigrants who are here as Skilled Workers,Health and Care Workers, and Senior or Specialist Workers were £30,200, £22,100, and £27,200 respectively. The numbers are lower, as you would expect, than the wages of the family members who came on the original visas; but by and large these dependants are plainly people who’ve come to the UK to work and pay taxes, not to scrounge off the state.

The Government offers no evidence that rising immigration is disincentivising employers to offer apprenticeships and skills training. It’s possible that there is a link, but if so, it’s a weak one. The main driver of the UK’s decline is the failure of the state to invest enough in vocational training.

Perhaps the government should just have said that it doesn’t like to see so many immigrants entering the country, and staying for longer. That would have been more honest.

The real problem that the government faces is how to reduce immigration levels without hurting the economy.

Will Dalton of the GMB is scathing about the eye-catching proposal to scrap care visas. “Scrapping this visa will be deeply damaging – potentially catastrophic for our beleaguered care system. The whole sector is utterly reliant on migrant workers – yet we still have more than 130,000 vacancies across the country.” The Government talks of improving pay across the sector, but doesn’t say where the money for this is going to come from, or what other ideas it has to address the chronic recruitment problems.

The Government hopes to reduce the number of student visas through higher fees for international students. This is effectively a tax on UK universities, for whom international student fees are a vital revenue stream.

And then we come to the purely nasty, vindictive aspects, like extending the waiting period for being able to apply for permanent right to remain from five to ten years. Starmer claims that he’s trying to promote greater integration through measures like tougher English tests – “if people want to come to Britain to start a new life, they must contribute, learn our language and integrate” – but how can they fully integrate when the state refuses to treat them as citizens ?

Conclusion

The White Paper perpetuates the myth that rising immigration is the biggest problem facing our economy and our society. And by aping the language of the racist right, using phrases like ‘taking back control’ and ‘island of strangers,’ Starmer has sent a clear message to the Labour Party and to the country that this is a government willing to scapegoat immigrants. All this does is to play into the hands of Nigel Farage.

A Party that is serious about stopping Farage would shine the spotlight on the real issues affecting our jobs and our services. It would tell people that the problem isn’t immigration, it’s years of austerity and corporate greed. Austerity has driven down wages and left the health and social care sector on its knees, understaffed and lurching from one crisis to another. Austerity is the cause of years of underinvestment in public services and the decline of social housing. The cost of living crisis that continues to drive families into poverty is a consequence of government policies that have allowed corporate greed to flourish.

Stand up to billionaires, not to refugees. That’s how you defeat Farage.

We’ve been talking about a new Party of the Left

As expectation mounts that a new Party could soon be entering the political scene, on 15th May around 40 Transform members met on Zoom to discuss the situation. EC members reported that from what they’ve been hearing, the project will finally go public this summer, and the new Party will be launched probably sometime in 2026. It will be a membership based Party, and although local groups will play an important role in it, it will be a national Party and not some kind of federation.

Many people expressed their frustration at the length of time that the process has taken up to now, and the apparent lack of progress. The local election results underline the urgency of getting organised.

Questions were raised as to whether we can and should put our trust in any new Party that emerges. Given the current lack of accountability, can we be sure that it will be genuinely democratic ? Will the Party be accepting of people who may hold racist or transphobic ideas, and how much of a problem would this be ? It was argued that if we are to succeed, then we’ll have to get used to working with people with whom we have major political disagreements.

If Transform does back the new Party, what will this mean for the future of Transform ? One answer was that Transform should continue to provide direction and leadership for a period of time until the new Party finds its feet.

It was mentioned that the recent Huddersfield rally had been a success, and that work is underway to convene more such events in other locations. This will strengthen the Left irrespective of whether or not a new Party materialises.

Transform will hold a further members meeting in a few weeks time to continue these important discussions.

“We’re not going to wait for someone else to launch a party”

Activists in Huddersfield and Hastings have been speaking to the Newsletter Team about the work that they’ve been doing in their areas to make a new Party a reality.

Mike Forster, Huddersfield

“In 2016 we launched a huge campaign to save our hospital and A&E. After four years we forced the NHS Trust back. The hospital was reprieved, and they built us a new A&E. We were involved in Enough is Enough and held two big demonstrations in Huddersfield in support of their demands. And then Kirklees Council announced a whole series of cuts in public spending which was attacking vital public services, which resulted in eight separate campaign groups being set up to defend services that were threatened. We brought together all those campaigns into a movement called Stop the Cuts. This was successful in saving three leisure centres as well as two dementia care homes that were threatened with closure.

The political pressure over the cuts and anger over Gaza caused a big split in the Labour Party, and several councillors ripped up their party cards. The Independent Group on the Council grew further in May 2024 when we got several councillors elected. The revolt continued into the General Election, when Independent MP Iqbal Mohamed was elected to represent the newly created Dewsbury and Batley constituency,

We wanted to unite all these campaigns and developments in Kirklees under one banner. The Conference of Resistance on 10th May was 10 months in the planning. We released a proposal to trade union and labour movement organisations, Stop the Cuts groups, Freedom for Palestine, and a number of other significant organisations that had been active, and invited them to support the idea of joining an Alliance of Resistance. This became Kirklees PACE.

The Conference was an outstanding success with just over 200 in the room. We agreed that I should speak first at the Conference to explain what PACE was and also where it stood, and what we were calling for. So we made a very clear call at the start of the Conference that we support the creation of a new left party. That set the tone.

We think the creation of a party is quite urgent. We see PACE as developing into that party, and if one is launched nationally we would want to be aligned and affiliated to such a movement. We will want to maintain our own identity because we’ve launched as PACE, but it would be as an affiliate to a new party. So we hope that within the next few weeks that progress is made, and there will be huge support for that in our neck of the woods.

PACE has two arms: one is social mobilisation and the other is an electoral arm. Social mobilisation is supporting each other’s struggles. We took four coaches from Kirklees to the Nakba demonstration in London.

We’ve called a local demonstration in Huddersfield on 20th September which will be a big demonstration that will unite various campaigns. On the electoral front we will be registering with the Electoral Commission and standing PACE candidates in the 2026 local elections. We’re already looking at areas where PACE can either stand directly or support independents.

We’ve developed our own political programme which was endorsed by the conference, and that’s the programme on which we’ll ask all candidates to stand.

Following the Conference we have had a big follow-up meeting last week which was attended by 40 people. That meeting elected officers and it also elected an organising committee. We plan to hold open Assemblies where we’ll be inviting members of the public to attend. What was refreshing about our Conference was that over 50% of attendees were at their first ever political conference. I myself am a member of Socialist Alternative, but half of our elected officers are fresh to political struggle.

We are indebted to Transform’s Anwarul Khan for helping us to find speakers for our Conference.”

Grace Lally, Hastings

“We’d been having discussions for years about when is this new left party going to emerge. Some people went to the We Demand Change conference thinking that this was going to launch a new party, and after half an hour realised that this wasn’t the plan. They then contacted me and a few others, and that’s how it all started.

We got together and decided to issue a Call-Out for a New Left Party in Hastings. From this we now have a WhatsApp group with 60 people in the chat, and 30 of them came along to our founding meeting on Saturday 17th May. These were mostly people who we know from existing networks: trade unionists, and activists in Palestine campaigns, housing campaigns, and anti-racism groups. We had three college students there.

This was very much a working meeting. There were no big speeches, it was all group discussion. Each working group talked first of all about why they wanted to build a new left party, and secondly on what they all thought should be the main activities of the new left party.

It was really positive, really outward looking. There was a lot of consensus over things we’d like to do: training on community organising, educational work, looking at alternative economic ideas. There was no particular urgency about getting into policies, as we’re not anywhere near an election. But what was a very common theme was that people wanted to do more outreach to find out what people want from a new left party – creating listening posts, doing listening events (Assemblies), doing surveys.

Everybody volunteered, and several working groups were set up. Volunteers for raising money, volunteers for creating a youth outreach. It wasn’t like a normal left wing rally at all – no airy-fairy ambitions, and lots of people stepping up to do the work !

We’re not privy to national discussions that are taking place. Everyone wants to see a party emerge, and we’d want to be part of it. But even if there was a new national organisation, this is the work that would still have to be done on a local level. We’re just not going to wait for someone else to launch it for us to do the work that we would have to do anyway. And if the new national party is not up to scratch, then we’ll still have our own local organisation, and we’ll keep doing what we need to do, and hopefully other people will follow. There’s no reason why we have to wait for a new national party to build a left alternative on a local level. But ultimately we all know that we’ll be incredibly weak unless we can be part of a big national party.”

Inspired by these stories, but need some help to get started ? Please sign up here to register your interest in community organising, and/or contact us at info@transformpolitics.uk.

The Transform Podcast is back !

The Transform Podcast is back and is better than ever. Our first show of 2025 is a round table discussion in which we’re joined by two guests, 2024 General Election candidates Khalid Sadur and Maddison Wheeldon.

The opening question is ‘What about the Greens ?’. Zack Polanski has just launched a campaign for leadership of the Green Party, which is attracting a lot of interest and support from the Left. Can he bring about a Corbynist revolution within the Greens ? Or will the Greens always remain a broad-based party that adapts its message according to its audience ? Show host Anwarul Khan is sceptical: “I don’t want to be in a party where a socialist has to be elected into a position of leadership. I want to be in a socialist party.”

Listen on Spotify.

Transform Council: call for nominations

The deadline for Transform members to express an interest in joining Transform Council has been extended to 21st June.

This is an opportunity to get more involved in our work at a vital juncture for the left in this country. Council is the political leadership of the Transform Party. All elected officers are de facto members. Council meets on the first Sunday of every month.

If you are interested in joining the Council, please send your personal statement of no more than 300 words to info@transformpolitics.uk

Calendar of Events

Saturday 31 May: Don’t Buy Apartheid Day of Action

The PSC are organising protests outside supermarkets demanding that they stop stocking Israeli produce.

Saturday 7 June: People’s Assembly National Demonstration

A raft of trade unions are backing this demonstration on the theme ‘No More Austerity: Welfare not Warfare’. Assemble 12 noon at Portland Place, London W1 and march to Whitehall.

Tuesday 10 June: Protest to Save Ealing Children’s Centres

Ealing Council is proposing to close or repurpose 13 of the borough’s 25 Children’s Centres. A protest is planned outside the Town Hall ahead of the full council meeting.

Saturday 14 June: Merseyside Independents Rally

Help us to open a new chapter in Liverpool’s rich political history. Tickets here.

Next Newsletter

The next newsletter will be out on Wednesday 11th June. Is there anything that you want us to cover ? Tell us about it, and send us your reports and your photos. You can contact us at any time at info@transformpolitics.uk: please mark your email for the attention of the Newsletter Team.

In solidarity,

Transform Newsletter Team