The Labour Party has abandoned its 2017 manifesto commitment to ending Britain’s participation in the European Union’s Free Movement migration regime after Brexit, according to its Shadow Attorney-General.
Baroness Sharmishta ‘Shami’ Chakrabarti, a “human rights” lobbyist with a ubiquitous media presence prior to her elevation to the House of Lords as a Labour peer in 2016, told BBC interrogator-in-chief Andrew Neil that keeping Britain tied to the European Union’s unlimited and effectively unvetted Free Movement migration regime would be “a matter for negotiation” under a Labour government — at least eight times.
“Immigration will be a matter of negotiation, there’s no doubt about that,” she told the broadcaster, after he asked if Labour would accept continuing Free Movement of People in order to secure even closer alignment with the bloc that Prime Minister Theresa May is proposing.
“We would certainly continue with some kind of movement,” she explained vaguely, later insisting that Labour is “not an anti-immigration party, [and] if we have to negotiate on [Free] Movement in order to get the priorities we’ve set out… we would be prepared to do so.”
Asked in no uncertain terms if that meant Free Movement would be “on the table” in Labour-led Brexit negotiations, she assuredly responded: “Oh, I think so,” saying the party could envision a situation “In which Free Movement, some kind of Free Movement might not end.”
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has previously promised he would end the “wholesale importation of low-paid workers from central Europe” by unscrupulous employers if he became Prime Minister, admitting that the practice “destroys conditions” for British workers.
“What we wouldn’t allow is this practice by agencies, who are quite disgraceful they way they do it – recruit a workforce, low paid – and bring them here in order to dismiss an existing workforce in the construction industry, then pay them low wages,” he told the BBC in 2017
“It’s appalling. And the only people who benefit are the companies.”
Baroness Chakrabarti, a daughter of Bengali migrants who has long opposed controls on even illegal immigration, expressed no such concerns in her interview.