TMP Online

Labour Party Deputy Leader and Leader of the House of Commons, Harriet Harman MP, has kindly passed TMP a copy of a recent speech she gave in her constituency on migration and diversity, which we publish exclusively here today.

Harman, who is also Secretary of State for Equalities and Minister for Women, represents Camberwell and Peckham, an inner city South London seat with the largest black community of any constituency in England. It was in Harman’s constituency that the young Damilola Taylor was brutally murdered on the notorious North Peckham estate on 27 November 2007.

In the speech given to London’s South Bank University Harman admitted that “just as this country has long benefited from migration, there has too, regrettably, always been fear and hostility to blunt the welcome.”

With remarkable frankness for a senior politician, Harman highlighted the importance of skin colour in the national immigration debate and the paradox of second and third generations of immigrant families being treated as outsiders:
“How do the proud children born here to migrant families from Africa and the Caribbean feel about a national debate which sees even the second and third generation of those families as less British than the children born here to Irish or Polish migrants?”

In October the Home Office published a cross-government report on the fiscal and economic impacts of immigration. However, Harman said we should not only make the economic arguments for migration but also recognise the inherent benefits it brings in an increasingly globalised age:

“We should look beyond the balance sheet of migrants working in our health services or migrants using our health services; or migrants contributing through their taxes or migrants claiming benefits…..migration and diversity offers us the prospect of being internationally literate, being able to look outward, having a huge advantage over unchanging homogenous societies.”

She acknowledged that the government has a long way to go in tackling the poverty that disproportionately affects ethnic minority communities, pointing to the fact that “two thirds of black people live in the worst housing in the country” and that by every measure of poverty used in a Policy Studies Institute study including housing and worklessness, and the unique Families and Children Study index of hardship “minority ethnic children are more likely to live in households prone to hardship and marked by disadvantage and persistent low income.”

In October 2006, Justice Secretary Jack Straw caused much controversy with his disclosure that he asks Muslim women wearing the veil to remove it when they visit his constituency surgeries. Whilst the debate at the time focused on Muslim women’s right to wear the veil Harman used the issue in her speech to illustrate the lack of diversity in the House of Commons:
“Who does this issue most affect? Muslim women. Who have the strongest and widely different views on this issue? Muslim women. Who are the group that are unrepresented in the House of Commons? Muslim women. My point is that you cannot have sensible discussions about people who are not there to contribute to the debate.”

To read the speech, which also covers migrant worker rights and remittances, click here: tmp-speech-harriet-harman-december-2007.pdf.

Looking ahead to 2008, Compass will be holding a high profile Westminster debate on migration to coincide with the publication of its recent report on the issue “Towards a progressive immigration policy”.

The panel will include Immigration Minister Liam Byrne MP, Jon Cruddas MP, The Guardian’s Madeleine Bunting, Barrow Cadbury Trust Chief Executive Sukhvinder Stubbs, Don Flynn of the Migrants Rights Network and Neil Jameson from the Strangers into Citizens campaign.  The event, which will be chaired by The Guardian’s Polly Toynbee, takes place from 6pm on Tuesday 29 January in the Boothroyd Room, Portcullis House, Westminster, London. To register to attend email: gavin@compassonline.org.uk.