On 20 May British Prime Minister Tony Blair met his Spanish counterpart, Jose Maria Aznar, to discuss a three-point plan to ‘regain the initiative’ on asylum and immigration. Blair aims to ensure the European Union Summit in Seville in June takes a tough line against countries like Turkey and the former Yugoslavia by threatening to cut off aid if they do not prevent refugees moving to the EU. Blair and Aznar hope to hammer home to Europe that they can be every bit as draconian and racist as Le Pen or Pim Fortuyn, and that fascism is therefore unnecessary. Social democracy can do the job just as well. Nicki Jameson reports.
The day after Blair and Aznar’s meeting, a ‘leaked’ Downing Street document confirmed Blair was taking ‘personal control’ of British asylum policy and plans to send Royal Navy warships to patrol the Mediterranean and intercept ships which might be carrying refugees en route to Britain. He is also considering using RAF transporter planes to carry out mass deportations.
The Labour government is already locked into a fierce battle with France over which country can be harshest on the refugees currently housed in the Sangatte and other camps near to the French entrance to the Channel Tunnel. Blair now wants to resolve the problem through a ‘joint deportation effort’; however he threatens that if such a deal is not struck, he will implement the ‘unilateral threat’ option of simply sending back all immigrants who arrive in Britain from France.
All these new measures will no doubt appear in the next Asylum and Immigration Bill. Meanwhile the last set of anti-immigrant proposals is still in the process of becoming law. The Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Bill, based on the Secure Borders, Safe Havens White Paper (see FRFI 166), had its second reading in Parliament on 24 April. The debate on the Bill was characterised by total unity between MPs of all parties, with none of the usual mud-slinging about ‘soft touches’. All the parties agreed that the two biggest threats to British social cohesion were: 1) unwanted immigrants and 2) fascists. And they agreed that the best way to deal with the fascists was to restrict, ghettoise and expel the immigrants; thereby doing exactly what the fascists advocate, and reaffirming that racists don’t need to vote for the unpalatable face of the far right in order to express their views, as they can vote for any of the mainstream parties with precisely the same result.
This tactic did not prevent the BNP from winning three seats in Burnley. On the contrary, it legitimised its racism in the eyes of disaffected white voters. A vote for the BNP wasn’t so extreme after all.
Throughout the period of the local elections in Britain and presidential elections in France, much of the more extreme right-wing media also mounted two-pronged attacks on immigrants and fascists, with the latter depicted as no less ‘foreign’ than the former. Fascism was Nazism, or it was French. It was anything but British. And the Daily Express’ biggest fear about Le Pen seemed to be that, if elected, he might expel lots of immigrants from France, who would then come to Britain! But the BNP is not ‘alien’; it is home-grown. It does not create racism; it feeds off it. And with Labour in power, there is plenty to feed off. At the end of the day, who can really distinguish between these two attacks on British Muslims?
‘None of this should be held against ordinary Muslims, many of whom are not much more “Muslim” than Britain is “Christian”. Any hostility directed to them can only drive them into the arms of the fundamentalists. But…an understanding of what the Koran really says…should lead anyone with an ounce of common sense to realise that a growing Muslim population is a recipe for communal strife and violence, particularly in a country where Political Correctness prevents the political Establishment from closing the gates to the immigration flood, taking steps to reverse the tide, and saying to a minority which sees expansion and domination as its religious duty : “Mend your ways and keep yourselves to yourselves – or get out!”’ (‘The real face of Islam’, BNP Chairman, Nick Griffin, October 2001)
‘Some Muslims, he says, are cutting themselves off and feeding both rightwing politics and their own extremists: “We need an honest dialogue about the minority of isolationists, fundamentalists and fanatics who open the door to exploitation and who provide fertile ground for al-Qaida extremists.” Muslims are welcome but Muslim immigrants could be “very isolationist” and need to integrate more, he argues.’ (Peter Hain, Labour Minister for Europe and former member of the Anti-Nazi League, interviewed in The Guardian 13 May 2002)
And, showing how close all the mainstream parties are to one another, and how they can even swap roles at times, those listening to the Today programme were treated to the bizarre phenomenon of a Tory Shadow Home Secretary, Oliver Letwin, distancing himself from Labour’s David Blunkett, who had used the term ‘swamping’ to describe an influx of asylum-seeker children from the planned refugee ‘accommodation centres’ into local schools.
Blunkett, who just weeks earlier had publicly announced his opposition to the ‘vile racism’ of the BNP, refused to apologise, insisting that he had merely been explaining the practical need for on-site education and healthcare, to avoid an excessive burden on local services.
The ‘accommodation centres’ are a central plank of the current Bill. The first three sites, at Throckmorton West Bridgford and Bicester, are expected to house 750 asylum-seekers each. The Throckmorton airfield has already been used for one controversial government scheme – over 130,000 carcasses of animals slaughtered as a result of the foot-and-mouth panic were dumped there last year. Now a human warehouse will be built on top of the burial pit.
The long-term plan is for enough accommodation centres to be built to replace the current 1999 Immigration and Asylum Act ‘dispersal’ system, whereby refugees can be sent to hostels, bed-and-breakfast or run-down flats in any area of Britain, or face withdrawal of all state benefit. Most of the areas are ill-equipped to deal with asylum seekers, who face racism and often violence from local people, who are encouraged to see them as taking scant resources from which they might otherwise benefit. The accommodation centre system is virtually identical, except that dispersal will be to purpose-built centres. Unlike immigration detention centres, which are indistinguishable from prisons, the asylum seekers will be able to come and go; however in practice this will be difficult, as they will be located far from urban centres or transport.
This ghettoisation is part of the government’s current drive towards ‘managed migration’ – the Ministerial buzz-phrase to describe a system whereby well-off, highly skilled economic migrants are welcomed, while impoverished asylum-seekers are pushed through a series of centres (reception/accommodation/detention), until they are either accepted for ‘integration’ or swiftly removed and deported. So, if you are rich and come to Britain to get richer, that is fine. If you are poor and come here to become less poor, that is unthinkable and you can only remain if you can prove irrefutably to an incredibly suspicious and biased system that return to your country of origin would result in absolutely certain torture or death.
The debate about Blunkett’s use of the word ‘swamping’, to many reminiscent of Margaret Thatcher’s emotive racist rhetoric prior to her election in 1979, in some ways masked the real issues. Whatever word Blunkett used, his intentions would have been the same: to ensure that asylum seekers receive sub-standard services and do not mix with the local population in any positive way. Many successful anti-deportation campaigns have been started by school students who do not want to lose their classmates. And, while it was supposedly the plea of an overstretched GP in an area of high dispersal that led Blunkett to make his statement, the relationship between doctors and victims of torture and persecution is a strong and important one. If asylum seekers make no impact on a community other than to reaffirm its prejudices against outsiders, they will be so much easier to deport individually and vilify collectively. If their children go to local schools and they are treated by local doctors, there will still be prejudice and distrust, but there may also be possibilities of unity and support. It is these possibilities which the government is keen to avoid.
In Parliament, Blunkett admitted as much:
‘The difficulty sometimes with families whose removal has been attempted is that their youngsters have become part of a school, making it virtually impossible in some circumstances to operate the managed system to which we should all sign up’.
And he went on to relate this to the rationale behind all his measures:
‘…unless we believe in completely open borders, which would be an interesting free enterprise experiment – eventually the system would give and people would not want to come here any more as it would no longer be attractive, which would be crackers and crazy piece of politics.’
Labour’s policies are unashamedly about protecting the privileges of wealthy Britain from the poor of the world, and anyone who opposes them is to be depicted as ‘crackers’. But it is only freedom of movement for the poor of the world which is considered ‘crazy’. For the rich and for capital it is already a reality. The ‘free enterprise experiment’ is taking place all around us; it is called global capitalism; it is called imperialism. It means that capitalism can march into any country in the world and dominate it, wreaking havoc and destruction, and labelling any opposition as terrorism. And the system is already collapsing, which is why there are so many refugees and displaced people. Colonialism, globalisation, imperialist war and destruc- tion have created a situation where worldwide there are more refugees than ever before.
In Britain, as in all western countries whose prosperity is based on the plunder of the rest of the world, immigration laws will always be racist, and will always be aimed at excluding the poor. Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! stands unreservedly for open borders and against all immigration controls.
FRFI 167 June / July 2002
