Young Labour’s national policy conference takes place 14-15 October at Warwick University. Young supporters of The Clarion are working with other left-wingers to submit a series of motions. Each motion needs a proposer and ten seconders who are individual party members under the age of 27: you can submit motions here. The deadline is 2 October.
The following motion has already been submitted. We will be advertising more motions to get support for their submission over the next week.
If you’d like any help with writing or submitting a motion get in touch: theclarionmag@gmail.com
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Policy Commission: Justice and Home Affairs
MOTION TITLE: Defend and extend free movement
Young Labour notes:
- The Government announced in July that free movement within the EU would end in March 2019.
- On 24th August, the ONS announced EU migration into the UK had fallen by 51,000.
- The transitional Brexit deal proposed by the Labour Party on 26th August includes free movement.
Young Labour believes:
- Falling wages, the housing crisis, and overstretched services are caused by the government and employers who are committed to making the rich richer by attacking working people’s conditions. These problems are not caused by immigration.
- The solutions to these problems are large-scale public funding programmes and the strengthening of trade union rights, making all workplaces easier to organise in.
- The recent victories of SOAS and LSE cleaners against outsourcing demonstrate that migrant workers are central to improving low-paid workers rights and conditions.
- Labour is an internationalist organisation, we stand in solidarity with working people regardless of nationality or race.
- Limiting free movement in any way makes migrant workers vulnerable to hyper-exploitation, and therefore makes downward pressure on wages more likely.
- The Labour Party should commit to maintaining free movement in the EU on a permanent basis.
- Labour should commit to closing down all detention centres in the UK.
- Labour should abolish the ‘no recourse to public funds’ visa requirement, as well as income thresholds for immigration into the UK, as these damage the ability of working people and their families to live and move together, and to challenge exploitative employers.
- Labour should abolish the requirement of police registration for migrants from specific countries, which discriminates on the basis of nationality.
Proposed by: Rida Vaquas
Seconded by: Jacob Armstrong, Nadia Edith Whittome, Alex Kumar, Jomaan Sherlala, Tom Zagoria, Ray Williams, Tom Ward, Vijay Jackson, Hannah Taylor and Charlotte Austin