FRFI 176 December 2003 / January 2004
On 24 October the Home Office announced it will be granting indefinite leave to remain to 15,000 refugee families who have been in Britain for more than three years. However this was not the reversal of years of progressively more vicious attacks on immigrants by successive governments, but simply a pragmatic clearing of the decks prior to the introduction of yet more attacks, particularly on families who arrived later than those covered by the amnesty. NICKI JAMESON reports.
The latest measures, announced in time for the Queen’s Speech, involve once again the withdrawal of welfare benefit. Benefits have already been withdrawn from would-be refugees who cannot prove they claimed asylum immediately on arrival in this country and from those who registered a claim but refused to then be ‘dispersed’ to far-flung parts of the UK, away from relatives or community support. Now it is asylum applicants whose initial claim has failed and who are awaiting appeal who are being targeted.
As soon as an asylum application has been rejected, the applicant will be ‘offered’ a flight back to their country of origin. If they don’t accept this, all benefits will be withdrawn in an attempt to starve them into leaving. The government has a statutory legal obligation to not permit children to be destitute, and its cynical way of fulfilling this whilst putting yet more pressure on parents to take their whole family and leave the country, will be to force the children of failed asylum seekers into care. They will then be permitted to remain until they reach the age of 18, when they will be forcibly deported.
The government has already engineered a situation whereby the refusal of state support to asylum seekers (under the now infamous Section 55 of the 2002 Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act) can only be challenged through the courts on an individual basis. On 25 October a High Court judge lambasted Home Secretary David Blunkett for claiming he had no power to provide emergency accommodation for destitute asylum seekers, after a meeting of 18 judges expressed extreme concern about the flood of ‘avoidable’ claims. The court is dealing with up to 60 challenges per week and in about 90% of cases grants emergency assistance pending a full hearing. There is a backlog of 800 such applications, which constitutes approximately half the total workload of the High Court.
Having created this situation where refugees have to take legal action if they want to eat, the government now plans to restrict access to legal advice. This is publicly touted as a clampdown on ‘unscrupulous immigration lawyers’, of whom there are indeed plenty; however the real aim is not to prevent asylum seekers getting bad legal advice, but to prevent them getting any advice at all.
Other anti-immigrant measures likely to be implemented in this session of parliament include reducing the number of appeals allowed against failed asylum applications, speeding up deportation of those who have previously claimed asylum in a third ‘safe’ country, and creating a criminal offence of arriving in Britain without travel documents.
This last measure has already been tried and failed in a different form. The 1996 Asylum and Immigration Act made it a criminal offence to use forged documents. In 1999 this was successfully challenged on the basis it was incompatible with Article 31 of the UN Convention on Refugees, which states asylum seekers should not be penalised for entering a country illegally. By this time up to 5,000 people had been imprisoned for the offence. Many are now seeking compensation and the bill for this could run into millions. In October a Kosovan couple was awarded £130,600 damages for loss of liberty, conditions of imprisonment, false imprisonment, injury to feelings and post-traumatic stress disorder. Once again, it is the government, not refugees, which is responsible for the creation of a huge legal bill to be paid by the taxpayer.
The government appears confident that those who arrive with no documents, or who have destroyed the documents they did possess, are not protected by the UN Convention, and can therefore be criminalised. It remains to be seen whether this too will be reversed and yet more compensation paid out for wrongful imprisonment.
Blunkett defended his plans in The Guardian of 27 November, appealing to the paper’s liberal readership on the basis that tightening up immigration controls was ‘good news for the left’, as it reduces the ‘ammunition…for the extreme right to fire’. ‘If Labour ducks the challenges of security, migration and criminality, it hands power to the right-wingers who promise more authoritarian certainties.’ In other words, the way to fight racism is by being a better-organised and cleverer racist.
This is the same old social fascist argument Labour has been using repeatedly over the last few years. On the one hand, Blunkett, and before him Jack Straw, have focussed on the xenophobic readers of the Sun and Daily Mail, feeding the prejudices of the very people who might be most attracted to vote for far right parties. At the same time, they have maintained Labour’s appeal to the liberal intelligentsia by playing on Guardian and Independent readers’ fears of a rise in overt right-wing militancy, and emphasising the government’s commitment to the limited ‘managed migration’ of skilled key-workers – a reactionary concept in itself, as it drains resources from poor countries to service the needs of rich ones.
Blunkett’s idea of ‘good news for the left’ could not be further from ours. Good news is not that Britain has managed to drastically cut the number of people seeking sanctuary here and stepped up the speed with which those whose asylum claims it rejects are deported. Good news would be an amnesty for all families and individuals seeking asylum here, the full restoration of benefits, an end to imprisonment and criminalisation of asylum seekers…Good news would be an end to all immigration controls and the overthrow of this racist Labour government.
