As we enter 2023, the Tory government remains desperate to deflect from the capitalist crisis which is drastically affecting the standard of living of the working class and increasing sections of the middle class. Although refugees and migrants bear zero blame for the collapse of the NHS, or soaring fuel and food prices, they continue to be the government’s prime scapegoat. NICKI JAMESON reports.
In April 2022 parliament passed the draconian Nationality and Borders Act, which divides asylum seekers into two groups: those who enter the country ‘via lawful means’ and those who enter via ‘irregular routes’, such as crossing the Channel in small boats. It also provides the legal framework for the government to shift responsibility for processing asylum claims by removing people to a ‘safe third country’, weakens protection for victims of trafficking and increases Home Office powers to conduct pseudo-scientific age assessments on young people and children claiming asylum.
Not content, the government is planning more legislation, with Prime Minister Rishi Sunak telling parliament on 13 December that ‘early next year we will introduce new legislation to make it unambiguously clear that, if you enter the UK illegally, you should not be able to remain here. Instead, you will be detained and swiftly returned… You will no longer be able to frustrate removal attempts with late or spurious claims or appeals, and once removed, you should have no right to re-entry, settlement or citizenship’.
Talking tough and declaring ‘Enough is Enough’, Sunak also announced a ‘five-point plan’, aimed at clearing the current asylum backlog and speeding up deportations:
- 700 new staff and doubled funding for the National Crime Agency (NCA) to ‘tackle immigration crime across Europe’.
- A 50% increase in immigration raids on workplaces, and the reinstating of ‘hostile environment’ bank account checks partly suspended following the Windrush scandal.
- Hotel accommodation for asylum seekers to be replaced by ‘a range of alternative sites, such as disused holiday parks, former student halls and surplus military sites’.
- More immigration caseworkers to push cases through at a faster rate, with some of the safeguards for victims of trafficking removed.
- A set of measures specifically designed to prevent migration from Albania, centred on ‘a new dedicated unit, staffed by 400 new specialists, expediting cases within weeks’.
Although Labour opposes the Rwanda deportation scheme on the basis it is a costly gimmick, it has essentially an identical approach to that of the Conservative Party. In November, Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper had set out similar plans for a major new NCA unit with ‘hundreds of specialist officers dedicated to working with forces across Europe to break the organised criminal gangs’. In early December Starmer spoke in favour of GPS tracking asylum seekers’ movements. Cooper also made it clear that Labour, which when last in power had operated such a system, supported the fast-track deportation of people from Albania, and complained that the Tories had failed to ‘get a grip’ on the asylum system.
Nazi terminology
On 5 December the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS), published a report entitled Stopping the Crossings – how Britain can take back control of its immigration and asylum system. The foreword was written by Home Secretary Suella Braverman.
The CPS is a right-wing think tank founded in 1974 by Margaret Thatcher and Keith Joseph, to push free market ideology in opposition to post-war Keynsianism. Although libertarian as regards fetters on the free movement of capital, when it comes to immigration CPS ideologues have very different views. The report sets out a programme for criminalising anyone arriving by boat to claim asylum, capping asylum claims at 20,000 per year and indefinitely detaining asylum seekers in ‘communal accommodation such as Napier Barracks’. The need for ‘control’ is backed up with a slew of racist propaganda about the failure of Muslim communities in northern cities to ‘integrate’ and the fear that expanding visa entitlement for skilled workers will bring not just ‘astrophysicists and doctors’, but also ‘bricklayers and shopkeepers’ – all of which has nothing to do with asylum seekers crossing the Channel.
Braverman repeatedly talks of the system being ‘gamed’ by ‘illegal migrants’ and describes those coming across the Channel as an ‘invasion’. At a public meeting on 13 January, following an intervention by holocaust survivor Joan Salter – who likened such terminology to the language of the Nazis – Braverman point-blank refused to apologise.
In fact, like the Nazis, Braverman and her ilk know that language is key to the battle to stay in power and displace public anger against the government onto a convenient scapegoat. Her predecessors, of all parliamentary parties, have done the same, with Thatcher complaining in 1979 that Britain was being ‘swamped by an alien culture’ and Labour Home Secretary David Blunkett in 2002 again invoking the image of refugee children ‘swamping’ local schools.
Alongside such words go accusations of criminality and degeneracy. The Tory-supporting Sunday Express on 15 January led with the front-page headline ‘Sex Assault During Riot at Migrant Centre’, although the actual article explained that the sum total of injuries to immigration staff at the disturbance at Harmondsworth in November was a broken finger, and that although the police had investigated a series of allegations including one of sexual assault, they had not found sufficient evidence to arrest or charge anyone.
Amidst all their inflammatory invective against migrants and ‘criminal gangs’, Braverman and her cronies are remarkably silent in relation to revelations that 220 asylum-seeking children are missing, 79 from one hotel in Brighton alone, and that they may have fallen into the hands of traffickers.
At the same time, any use of the media to put across a different view is under attack. The Online Safety Bill is due to be debated in the House of Lords in early February. In a parliamentary statement on 17 January, Culture Secretary Michelle Donelan confirmed that – following lobbying from Dover MP, Nathalie Elphicke – the government had agreed to propose an amendment criminalising ‘posting videos of people crossing the channel which show that activity in a positive light’ and requiring platforms ‘to proactively remove that content’.
Rwanda flight decision appealed
On 19 December 2022, the High Court issued its judgment in response to legal challenges earlier in the year against plans to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda. The court ruled that in principle the government had a right to use such a scheme but that in the cases of eight individual claimants the proper process had not been followed.
This did not mean that those eight people were now necessarily safe on a permanent basis. Their lawyers have therefore continued to pursue the case. On 16 January 2023, the High Court granted these individual asylum seekers permission to proceed to the Court of Appeal. The judges also granted permission to Asylum Aid, the charity which had put forward the wider claim that the policy itself was unlawful. The other organisations which had brought challenges were ruled to have insufficient ‘standing’ (ie direct involvement) to proceed further.
It is unlikely the government will attempt to restart Rwanda flights until all the legal challenges are complete. This may involve both the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court, and potentially the Tory right’s favourite bugbear, the European Court of Human Rights.
No to divide and rule!
47,000 people risked their lives last year to seek asylum in Britain via the Channel. These men, women and children, who are fleeing war, poverty and environmental catastrophe, much of it caused by British imperialism, are the focus of an intensifying hate campaign. No such vitriol is heaped upon the 123,000 people from Hong Kong and 115,000 from Ukraine welcomed in during the same period as a result of Britain’s propaganda offensives against China and Russia. The vilification of the Channel refugees is not really about migrant numbers, but about the creation of convenient scapegoats to deflect from the real issues confronting people in Britain.
Energy and food prices are skyrocketing, and growing sections of the working class face increasing poverty. Meanwhile billionaires continue to fiddle their tax returns, and the government promises to spend £100m on a coronation and £2.5bn on arms for Ukraine this year. The Conservative Party’s popularity is at an all-time low and its prospects for continuing to govern after the next election do not look good. In an attempt to retain some of the ‘red wall’ voters they took from Labour in 2019, and appeal to their own racist base, the Tories are reaching for the age-old weapon of divide-and-rule. The Labour Party in turn is coming back with more of the same. Socialists and anti-racists need to be prepared to confront and argue against this racist rhetoric. No-one is illegal! United we stand!
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 292 February/March 2023
