Britain’s gaping division between left and right was unambiguously laid open by the two main parties’ positions on freedom of movement at their respective 2019 party conferences.

In last month’s Labour conference in Brighton, a motion tabled by the Labour Campaign for Free Movement – a network of Labour members and supporters campaigning to defend and extend free movement – was passed. The policy promises to extend free movement as part of a number of radical immigration policy pledges, including giving all UK residents equal voting rights regardless of their nationality.

A week later, the Tories vowed to end free movement “once and for all.” Addressing the Tory conference in Manchester under the slogan “Get Brexit Done,” Home Secretary Priti Patel outlined a hard-line immigration policy that would end free movement and enable the country to “take back control.”

Since the decision to hold an EU Referendum was announced by then-Prime Minister David Cameron in February 2016, an anti-migrant tide has been swelling in Britain, spawned by xenophobic government policies designed to strip the rights of migrants.

The pro-Brexit campaign was awash with scapegoating lies that blamed immigrants for unemployment, stagnant wages, insecurity, a crumbling infrastructure, the housing crisis and more. Such anti-migrant propaganda has played its part in sowing division and making migrants more vulnerable to hate crimes and exploitation.

But there is no evidence that shows migrants are responsible for Britain’s failings. As Clive Lewis, Labour MP for Norwich South and a supporter of the Labour Campaign for Free Movement, notes in the organisation’s "Solidarity Has No Borders" publication:

“Abandoning the cause of migrants’ rights is always a moral failure for the left. There is not a shred of truth to the idea that immigrants are to blame for our failing public services. But it’s not just false. It’s a lie put forward by those desperate to deflect responsibility for their own criminal wrecking of our society – the Tories, exploitative bosses and those who want to crash us out of Europe so they can turn Britain into their exploitative tax haven.”

In the wake of the referendum result, Freedom of Information figures revealed that race and faith attacks reported across the country had increased by the highest rate of record. In 2018, a UN special rapporteur on racism found that Brexit has contributed to an environment of increased racial discrimination and bigotry, nurturing “explicit racial, ethnic and religious intolerance.”

But government-driven, racially motivated anti-migrant sentiment was embedded in British culture well before the EU referendum and the Brexit saga reared its head. Since 2012, the government has been implementing an inhumane and cruel approach towards immigrants through the Hostile Environment policy, introduced by the Home Office under the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition.

The policy involved a set of administrative and legislative measures aimed at making staying in the UK as difficult as possible in an attempt to reduce immigration figures to the target promised by the Tories in their 2010 manifesto.

Since the name of the policy alone reeks racist connotations and promotes division, it’s hardly surprising that the Hostile Environment mandate has been met with widespread disdain. Incorrect threats of deportation and the under-reporting of crime against undocumented people due to fear of arrest, and the deportation of victims, are just two of the criticisms to the Tory-led cruel and inhumane approach to migrants.

Another principle critique of Britain’s Hostile Environment era is the "No Recourse to Public Funds" (NRPF) policy, which denies many migrants access to a social security net, such as social housing and other welfare benefits.

Ben Towse, a member of Camden UNISON, sums up the inhumanity of the NRPF policy in the "Solidarity Has No Borders" publication:

“NRPF throws individuals and families into destitution, desperation and sometimes homelessness. The racist cruelty of this policy extends even to denying means-tested free school meals to the children of migrants’ subject to NRPF. Children are going hungry – or just being sent bills their parents have no way to pay – simply because of where their parents came from.”

With hate crime and xenophobia rising in Britain, driven in part by Brexit and the extreme views of the staunch Brexiteers plotting to take the UK out of the EU regardless of the costs, expelling myths related to the so-called ‘damage’ that immigrants have done to Britain couldn’t be more critical.

At the heart of the Tories’ politics on immigration is the belief that immigrants, especially unskilled immigrants, depress wages and take the jobs that could otherwise go to "born and bred" Britons. The illusion that migrants "take our jobs" and drive down wages couldn’t be further from the truth.

Writing in the Guardian, the former Liberal Democrat leader Vince Cable, who in 2013 commissioned a range of reviews and studies to establish the facts around immigration, jobs and wages, said there is “no evidence” that unskilled immigrants lower wages and steal jobs.

“By and large, immigrants were doing jobs that British people didn’t want to do (or highly skilled jobs that helped to generate work for others),” he wrote. Cable also noted how the research was inconvenient to the Home Office, which vetoed the publication of its results.

As well as paying billions more in taxes to the UK than they are in receiving welfare benefits, migrants from eastern Europe and other parts of the world are subsidising vital work in hospitals and schools – a far cry from the racist hysteria whipped up by the right wing faction that migrants are squeezing Britain’s hospitals and schools.

Amid Britain’s toxic climate of growing bigotry hatched by a right-wing government and diehard Brexiteers adamantly driven to stamp out dwindling migrant rights, the fight for freedom of movement needs to be a prominent focus on the forthcoming general election.

While undoing years of xenophobia concocted by the far right in several weeks of election campaigning is challenging, for the hordes of anti-Brexit, pro-immigration protestors that gathered outside the Tory conference in Manchester last month, the plight of migrants needs to top the election agenda.

As Jake, a student in Manchester who attended the anti-Brexit protest outside the Tory party conference, told Occupy.com:

“The rhetoric of hostility towards immigrants is unacceptable in Britain. We need a government that’s going to look after everyone in our country, regardless of their nationality or background, not one that’s doing its best to send them packing in humiliation and fear.”

The Labour Campaign for Freedom of Movement, which was passed by Labour members in last month’s party conference, aims to provide an alternative to the “division, disempowerment and rampant exploitation” of Tory Britain.