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Polanski clarifies ‘bum’ deal for carers comment

A clip is going around of Zack Polanski on Question Time which people have criticised. As I’ll get into, I actually agree with a lot of the criticisms. At the same time, the right-wingers who hate migrants are clearly being opportunistic:

Polanski — a bum deal for migrants

In the video above, Polanski said:

1 in 5 care workers are foreign nationals. Now I don’t know about you, but I don’t particularly want to wipe someone’s bum. And I’m very grateful for the people who do this work – this really important work – whether it’s in the care sector, or whether it’s in the NHS.

So right now there are three broad stances on migration, which I’ll summarise as follows:

  • The Right-Wing Position: Reduce migration to as close to zero as possible.
  • The Centrist / Neoliberal Position: Maintain migration at whatever level is needed to ensure a steady supply of low wage workers and to act as a counterweight to falling birth rates.
  • The Left-Wing Position: Support people’s right to come here, but also support global equalisation measures so that people don’t feel like they need to come here to experience a tolerable life.

The above positions don’t map neatly onto every individual, and stances have changed over time. Labour and the Tories, for example, followed the Neoliberal Position for the past few decades, but both have moved rightwards in recent years.

The reason people are criticising Polanski from the left is because the above comment — in isolation — makes it sound like he holds the Neoliberal Position. This is why he’s getting criticism like this:

 

It’s a problem for Polanski to come across like this, because he started off as a Liberal Democrat. If the broader left gets the sense that he’s still a Liberal Democrat — i.e. a neoliberal centrist — they will turn on him. It’s understandable too, given that the UK’s current prime minister presented himself as left-leaning only to pivot right as soon as he got power.

Polanski himself clarified his stance in response to Wes Streeting:

Ultimately, I think Polanski’s ‘bum’ comment was an example of poor framing rather than an indicator that he’s a true neoliberal. While Polanski does certainly make the case that the UK is reliant on migration for economic reasons, he also talks about ‘compassion’ and the ‘moral case’:

As people have highlighted, he’s also been supporting migrant carers for some time:

Politically, I understand why it makes sense to talk about the economic case for migration, as voters in post-Thatcher Britain are conditioned to consider their own interests first and foremost. There’s an art to doing that, though, and Polanski’s Question Time comments were applied with finger paint. At the same time, it’s not for nothing that people are focussing on the bum comment rather than everything else he said:

Oh, and there’s also this observation:

I don’t think Polanski was playing 4D chess, but some of his opponents have clearly forgotten what game they’re playing.

Featured image via Barold

By Willem Moore

This post was originally published on Canary.