It wasn't immigrants who crashed the banks
It wasn't immigrants who said we had to tighten our belts
it wasn't immigrants who cut a million jobs from the public sector
It wasn't immigrants who slapped on the wage cap
It wasn't immigrants who stoked up the housing market
It wasn't immigrants who stopped building council houses
It wasn't immigrants who cut the budgets for schools and the NHS
It wasn't immigrants who closed down Fords Dagenham
It wasn't immigrants who hide billions in tax havens
It wasn't immigrants who spend billions on bombs
We'll never build a better society by singling out people on the basis that they've moved country, are born somewhere else, or speak languages other than the ones of the state they find themselves in.
Capitalism runs the whole system, and this produces people who suffer one way or another.
We build a better society by linking up those who suffer and those who sympathise with those who suffer.
Meanwhile the system can move its wealth wherever it wants by pressing keys on a keyboard.
Those who suffer and those why sympathise with them must have the right to defend themselves and one way is to move.
The moment we hoist barriers to moving, we hand more power to those who are running the system which causes the suffering, and we create elites and persecutions amongst ourselves.
There is no hope for us to build a better society on that basis.
What the poem also suggests that part of scapegoating is a system to invite us to blame the wrong cause.
I've listed reasons and ways in which people's lives have been substantially harder as a result of explicit government policy and/or the actions of extremely wealthy people.
These causes for people's suffering are nothing to do with the movement of people.
The sum of the factors in my poem far, far, far outweigh any apparent or so-called disadvantage accruing from the movement of people - and let's not forget the millions of Brits who move at the same time, to places where they become migrants.
'Mass' migration works in all directions, with people with different needs, skills and abilities trying to find places where they can make a living under a global system that they don't own or control.
Even the phrase 'putting pressure on public services' trotted out by Tories and Labour is obscene in its deceit.
The greatest pressure on public services comes from decades of underfunding and cuts and privatisations done so that - in theory - capitalists could have a bigger freer market. For what? Who's benefited from that?
The great struggle that capitalists are involved in is competition with each other.
They will take any steps necessary to win those competitions, all the way to war.
Our job is to unite those who are exploited, those who suffer, those who are oppressed, those seeking to defend themselves in order to lessen the burden in the short term and to built a better society in the long term.
Any scapegoating will make that job harder, or worse: it builds a lop sided society in which some are more equal than others, just as George Orwell said.
