With Britain’s capitalist crisis driving increasing numbers of people into destitution and homelessness, the ruling class reaches for one of the oldest pages in its playbook – blaming immigrants for rising rents and shortages of social housing, creating a scapegoat for a housing crisis that is in reality a result of underfunding and privatisation. The government has deliberately used hyperbole, racism and propaganda to foment hysteria about small boat crossings and migrant hotels, and thus justify the increasingly dire and hostile conditions they are driving asylum seekers into.
Rising rents
Average rents across Britain increased by 9.56% in the 12 months to October 2023. The analysis organisation Capital Economics prompted headlines in the right-wing press by claiming that during that time ‘net immigration in the UK could have increased rents by up to 8%’ by creating a need for an extra 205,000 homes, adding to the pressure on rented accommodation. The analysis included overseas students and reflected a huge jump (by almost 100,000 people) in the number moving to Britain on working visas, but was deliberately turned into an attack on asylum seekers. The reality is that a rise in net immigration to Britain simply exposes further the dire underlying shortages in the private rented sector, and the refusal to build homes in the public sector. Meanwhile, the barbaric accommodation reserved for asylum seekers, which includes poor quality ‘dispersal’ housing, disused military barracks and prison barges, is a completely separate system. Deliberately mixing up the two issues is little more than a whipping up of racist rhetoric to further divide the working class.
Hotels, barracks and barges
In July 2023, then-Home Secretary Suella Braverman and fellow Conservative Jonathan Gullis drew up plans to house up to 2,000 migrants in tents on disused military sites. As the right-wing Centre for Policy Studies put it at the time, in a concise expression of British state racism, ‘why concrete over England’s green and pleasant land just to house migrants?’ This is the level of contempt the ruling class has for the poorest in society – the same contempt revealed in Braverman’s more recent bitterly ironic diatribe against homeless people living in tents on the streets of Britain, insultingly calling it a ‘lifestyle choice’ and threatening to fine charities who provided tents to those sleeping rough.
Instead, the government announced it would move to end its contracts with 50 hotels housing asylum seekers by January 2024, with more to follow. More than 50,000 asylum seekers are currently housed in around 400 hotels; they are now destined to be corralled in makeshift and inadequate accommodation including former military barracks and the Bibby Stockholm barge, where residents have said conditions are so awful they ‘despair and wish for death’ (quoted in The Guardian, 31 October 2023). This continual degrading of conditions for asylum seekers is endorsed by Labour, with Stephen Kinnock boasting that ‘Labour is committed to stopping the small boats crossings […] ending £8m-per-day asylum hotel use and fixing the broken asylum system’ and that ‘Labour would keep housing asylum seekers on barges’.
The ‘cost-saving’ element of ending the hotel contracts has since been exposed as pie in the sky since it costs more to keep migrants on barges than in hotels, which once again exposes the policy as racist, populist posturing. Housing Minister Robert Jenrick used the word ‘luxurious’ to describe hotel conditions for asylum seekers. A report from the charity Migrant Voice earlier this year exposed this lie, showing the reality of asylum seekers living in cramped, filthy windowless rooms for over a year, chronicling vermin in bedrooms, abusive housemates, insecure locks, collapsing ceilings, damp walls and bed bugs. Food was described as ‘rancid’ and ‘inedible’, and toilet and washing facilities inadequate. Women, in particular, said they felt unsafe. There were numerous complaints of constant racist abuse and obstruction by staff.
Now plans are underway for asylum camps at barracks in Wethersfield, Catterick and Scampton. Other asylum seekers have been transferred to the Bibby Stockholm barge. Charities have described the move as an ‘entirely preventable humanitarian catastrophe’.
Appalling housing shortages and shocking living conditions are affecting the working class across Britain. With social housing deliberately run down and sold off under successive Labour and Conservative governments, there are millions of people living in damp, overcrowded and unsafe private rental properties that are making them ill, struggling to pay their rents and at the mercy of landlords determined to wring every penny of profit out of their properties. Far from being at the root of this crisis, asylum seekers are simply being pushed to the very bottom of the pile. The demand for decent housing for asylum seekers and other migrants is part and parcel of the struggle for decent housing for the working class as a whole.
Joe Smith
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 297 December 2023/January 2024
