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Fin24 user Pallo Jordan believes the South African taxpayer is subsidising the British health and education sectors through the UK's recruitment of our professionals.
Responding to a call to add your voice to the big labour debate, Jordan writes:
Isn’t the recruitment of nurses and teachers from South Africa merely a continuation of British colonial exploitation of the “colonies”? South Africa trains the teachers and nurses; because it can offer higher salaries, Britain reaps the benefits! In other words, the South African taxpayer is subsidising the British health and education sectors!
But pray, why are the Brits recruiting in Johannesburg and Durban and not Manchester and Liverpool? Because - and Terry Bell deliberately withholds this from his readers - the salaries in these two sectors, though higher than our South African salaries, are considered extremely low in Britain!
READ: Inside Labour: Patriotism, bloated salaries and civil service
So, as it has done for centuries, Britain is going to places like South Africa, buying the skills of nurses and teachers at what are considered low prices in Britain and putting them to good use to produce something a lot more costly: a healthy, relatively well-educated population.
Sound familiar? Remember the story of the Dutch East India Company? Or the British South Africa company? Buy cheap! Sell dear!
So, let us get this straight! Terry Bell is proudly “unpatriotic” towards South Africa but is, in practice, pro-imperialist towards Britain or, if you prefer, an empire-loyalist towards Britain.
Mind-boggling for a journalist who claims to be pro-working class???!!
In a follow-up email Jordan writes:
Since the 17th century Britain has bought goods and services relatively cheaply from the colonies: in the form of slave labour from the coast of west Africa; in the shape of spices, textiles, botanic species and indentured labour from India; in the form of unbeneficiated raw materials from everywhere in the world.
What Terry Bell has described is nothing more than the continuation of that practice. Its opponents, from John Adams through Gandhi, called it imperialism. The sectors that Britain recruits for, not only in South Africa but in all its former colonies, are low salaried or low-paid jobs that the native Britons find unattractive.
Thus London Transport is peopled by workers from the Caribbean and Indian subcontinent; Britain’s hospitals are staffed by nurses from Ghana, South Africa, Kenya, the Caribbean and Singapore. Teachers too tend to come from South Africa, the Caribbean and other former colonies. Ghana, South Africa, Singapore, Jamaica, etc invest in the training; Britain reaps the benefits!
Isn’t this what every anti-colonial movement sought to put an end to?
I fail to see the difference between current practice and what Britain has done since the 1600s. And, I ask myself, how does a journalist who purports to support the working class find himself applauding this practice on the pretext that a number of extended families in South Africa have benefited?
What about the British working class whose wages and salaries can artificially be kept low because there are other workers in Britain’s former colonies who are paid less and will be happy to receive what are low salaries in Britain?
What about the South African workers whose taxes paid for the training of the teachers and nurses who then go and serve in Britain? Yes! Let us remember the majority of South African taxpayers are the working class!
Pro-imperialism has been denounced as collaboration when the imperial power is in military occupation! Being unpatriotic is considered dishonourable not only by governments, nationalist or otherwise, but by ordinary people, like our working class whose sweat Terry Bell thinks should subsidise the British exchequer!
“Patriotism” may indeed by the last refuge of scoundrels, but pro-imperialism!!??
Terry Bell responds:
In the first place, I am not unpatriotic toward South Africa. I am simply opposed to the concept - as I wrote - of my country right or wrong and consider nationalism, whether based on regional, religious, linguistic or any other form, to be an intellectual poison.
Nor did I make any moral judgement about the recruitment of nurses and teachers referring, incidentally, to "from Dubai to Dublin", which is both accurate and alliterative.
I merely stated what is a fact which, in the context, revealed that I thought this should be halted by improving the wages and conditions of such workers in South Africa. Plainly, Pallo Jordan did not read clearly what I wrote.
In any event my column is, as its states, about labour; it is not about excursions into political theory other than where this comes into the context of the subject matter. And, as I have written and said on numerous occasions, my priority on this platform is to encourage debate and discussion about matters that affect workers and the working class. That Pallo Jordan has extended this into a discussion of imperialism and the history of exploitation will hopefully trigger wider debate.
In any event, the body of my work and activity over the years reveals clearly that I regard myself as an internationalist and a socialist, therefore, an extreme democrat. As such I do not, sponge-like, absorb and promote any policy or attitude that may be favoured by the working class majority.
Nor do I opportunistically support any majority view that runs counter to humanitarian, socialist principles.
If - as is probable in South Africa today - the overwhelming majority of the working class supports capital punishment, I shall still oppose it. The same applies to homophobia, sexism and racism and any form of exploitation which does, of course, include imperialism.
So the label of empire loyalist is hardly appropriate.
Regards
Terry
* Add your voice or just drop Terry a labour question. Follow Terry on twitter @telbelsa.
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