The British state’s relentless attack on migrants continues, with the racist climate this engenders spilling over to also affect all black and ethnic minority people, including those who are British citizens.
The investigation into the Windrush scandal, which was commissioned by the Home Office last year under pressure from campaigners, has still not been published. A draft leaked to Channel 4 in June accuses the department of recklessness and a refusal to acknowledge the racist consequences of its approach. 15 months after Theresa May promised compensation to those British citizens affected by the ‘hostile environment’ directed at migrants, not a penny has been paid.
In July the parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights published a report expressing concern at the punitive effects of the ‘good character test’, applied to adults and children as young as 10 as a basis for rejecting applications for British citizenship. Since the test was introduced by the Labour government in 2006, as many as 400 young people have been denied citizenship on these grounds, some for minor offences or even without a criminal record, based on highly subjective assessments of ‘notoriety’. This includes some people who have lived in Britain their whole lives.
In June, the Home Office was forced to apologise to Neville Heslop, who was wrongly accused of being a convicted drug dealer when he applied to renew his biometric residence permit, and subsequently threatened with deportation. Heslop, who has no criminal convictions and has lived and worked legally in England since arriving from Jamaica, lost his home, job and relationship as a result of these unfounded accusations.
International students are also being attacked – on the basis of accusations that they cheated on English language tests – 2,500 are thought to have been deported in this way so far, with a further 7,200 having left the country after being threatened with imprisonment and deportation if they stayed. Yet many have protested their innocence, and out of 12,500 people who have appealed against their charges 3,600 have won their cases, suggesting at least 30% have been wrongly accused.
Meanwhile Serco has been awarded a new contract for asylum housing, despite having paid £7 million in fines for failures in delivering the required service under the previous contract. Appalling conditions of damp, vermin, and health hazards have been widely documented in their housing.
Labour-run local authorities and homelessness charities continue to collaborate with the deportation of rough sleepers. Despite a High Court ruling in 2018 against the deportation of homeless EU migrants, Freedom of Information requests by Liberty recently revealed the Home Office has launched a pilot data-sharing scheme, whereby homelessness outreach workers from St Mungo’s and other charities enter rough sleepers’ details into a database misleadingly called the ‘Rough Sleepers Support Service’, which is then used to identify people for immigration detention and deportation.
A report by the Unity Project revealed the impact of the ‘No Recourse to Public Funds’ condition on some people’s immigration status, many of whom are single parent families and some of whom have been granted leave to remain – for example one mother with an eight-year-old child described having £15 per week to live on after paying rent and bus fares.
While the government claims to provide care for victims of trafficking, in 2018 nearly a fifth of those identified as suspected victims – 422 people – were sent to immigration detention instead of being provided with support, contravening the government’s own guidelines.
Opposition to Britain’s racist immigration laws continues, including from some of those charged with implementing them. In June the British Medical Association passed a motion calling for ‘the policy of charging migrants for NHS care to be abandoned and for the NHS to be free for all at the point of delivery’. In July whistle-blowers within the Home Office reported a series of abuses to The Guardian. This included cases of unlawful detention of migrants resulting from administrative failures, and fraudulent practices used by the Home Office to get around restrictions on deportations from Britain to other EU countries. Such developments create a political space that needs to be used to build a powerful movement on the streets and in communities.
Tom Vickers
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No 271, June/July 2019
The deadly Mediterranean
On 25 July two boats carrying around 300 refugees capsized off the coast of Libya. Libya’s coastguard reports that 145 people have been rescued and returned to Libya, leaving the remainder unaccounted for, feared drowned. Filippo Grandi, UN High Commissioner for refugees, has described this as: ‘The worst Mediterranean tragedy of this year’ and called on European countries to resume rescue missions in the Mediterranean ‘before it is too late for many more desperate people’.
Nearly 700 deaths have been recorded in the Mediterranean so far this year, almost half as many as the 1,425 registered in 2018, and an unknown number of deaths go unrecorded. The proportion of those who lose their lives while attempting the crossing has increased dramatically – more than 20 people lost for every 1,000 who attempted a crossing in the first six months of 2019 compared to 4 per 1,000 in 2015 and 14 per 1,000 in 2016.
