Thanks to leaked proposals we now know that the guiding principle of the government’s post-Brexit immigration plan is to put British workers first. This much is clear in the statement that: “Wherever possible, UK employers should look to meet their labour needs from resident labour.” It’s driven home in the proposal to impose a “skills tax” on companies that still hire workers from outside the UK.

Post-referendum, our discussions over immigration are often wrapped in verbal cotton wool, for fear of upsetting anyone by suggesting that we have veered into ethno-nationalism and racism – apparently a greater misdeed than any actual racism. So it is that the shocking terminology running through this government’s leaked plans has not met with enough scrutiny. Instead, we’ve had news programmes asking representatives of job sectors from care to hospitality why they aren’t already employing British workers (essentially: there aren’t enough non-migrants with the right skills who want to do those jobs).

Labour MP Owen Smith appeared on the Daily Politics show to pronounce he had “no problem with British jobs for British workers as an aspiration”. Time and again this phrase reappeared, permeating our national conversation rather than being challenged for what it is: a xenophobic slogan with fascist roots.

Every time we talk about migrant workers, we’re not mentioning actual problems with pay, conditions and job insecurity

Gordon Brown, appallingly, used the term while Labour prime minister in 2007 but he did not invent it. As was highlighted in parliament by the then Conservative leader David Cameron, such slogans could be found in leaflets from the National Front and the British National party.

Go back to the 1930s and you find Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, declaring: “No more admitting of foreigners into this country to take British jobs.” At that time, the foreigners he meant were Jews.

Today this nativist claim that jobs are taken – for less pay – by migrant workers is a textbook case of truthiness: to some, it feels true no matter how many studies show it isn’t, while also being anchored in what seems like common sense but is actually just a bogus, zero-sum spin on life – the idea that you can only win if someone else (in this case, a non-UK worker) loses. The inconvenient snag is, of course, that there aren’t a fixed number of jobs in the economy. Far from nicking jobs, migrants are, by boosting the economy, helping to create them.

In any case, as journalist and author Daniel Trilling notes, what counts as a British worker or, in a globalised economy, a British job?

Who gets to define “British” here and on what basis: birthplace, citizenship, residence, skin tone? Stripped of absolute meaning, it is clear that this slogan has no purpose but to serve as xenophobic signalling.

This idea that we don’t want foreigners here is further cemented by the government’s plan to use two- and three-year work visas for EU migrants. It sets up an ugly vision of Britain where the status of European migrants is entirely altered; they would be grudgingly installed guest workers, rather than welcome residents who live alongside us. This soulless, spreadsheet calculation fails to conceive that people don’t move across countries for jobs on a government-stamped, time-limited period. They move to live full lives: a tangled mesh of connections and commitments spanning work, friends, families, communities, schools, social activities and all the social attitudes, values and humour that until recently made Britain so appealing. Why would the migrants this country needs ever view the UK as a destination on such hostile fixed terms?

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Meanwhile, just to know the government is thinking along these lines has thrown the lives of Britain’s 3.6 million EU citizens into greater uncertainty. For who is to say that their work prospects won’t now be thwarted by employers cautious over impending regulations?

And the bitter chaser to all this is that every time we talk about migrant workers, we’re not mentioning actual and worsening problems such as low pay, poor conditions and job insecurity. This is particularly galling in the week of the first ever British strike at McDonald’s over zero-hours contracts, union recognition and the right to a minimum wage. These brave workers kept the focus exactly where it should be: on workplace conditions and a government that allows exploitative practices such as zero-hours contracts.

Looking at strike action over the years, what emerges is that solidarity between UK and non-UK workers helps secure better pay and conditions for everyone. It is how workers have always won: collectively. It is what should now be front and centre of any discussion of jobs, workers, migration and employment conditions – not a revived far-right slogan deployed to blueprint an appalling society for us all.

• Rachel Shabi is a freelance journalist