On 4 October 2020, Home Secretary Priti Patel used her speech to the Conservative Party conference to declare a vicious war on migrants in general and asylum seekers in particular, promising to bring in a ‘Fair Borders Bill’ next year to make it harder for migrants arriving other than via one of the highly restricted ‘legal routes’ to claim asylum. As Brexit looms, Patel is also playing a major role in the removal of rights from European Economic Area (EEA) nationals. NICKI JAMESON reports.
Attacking asylum seekers
This war on people trying to migrate to Britain has previously been declared many times by Patel’s predecessors, each insisting that those who went before were not sufficiently ruthless. Patel’s supposedly new twist of the knife is that she will overhaul the system to include an assumption that anyone arriving by an ‘illegal route’ will not be granted asylum, while the government will work with the UN and refugee organisations to ‘identify the most vulnerable in camps in the Middle East who might apply for asylum’. None of this is actually new, and as a contributor to the legal blog Free Movement wrote on 5 October, ‘… all this looks like a tired rehash of New Labour asylum policies. For example, judges are already directed to doubt the claims of asylum seekers who travel through safe countries …’
What she lacks in originality, Patel makes up for in venom, with a full frontal attack on ‘those who are well rehearsed in how to play and profit from the broken system [and who] will lecture us on their grand theories about human rights’ and ‘those defending the broken system – the traffickers, the do-gooders, the lefty lawyers, the Labour Party’. And, to leave no doubt as to her mettle for the fight, she accompanied the conference speech with an interview in The Times entitled ‘I’ll sink smugglers and throw a life ring to the needy’, in which she again castigated ‘well-known legal firms that have grown their business by using judicial review, immigration review and immigration bail’.
Leaving aside the gratuitous attack on the Labour Party, which in practice is no less racist towards migrants than the Tories, Patel has had lawyers in her sights for a while. In September she claimed on Twitter that the government’s attempts to remove migrants were being frustrated by ‘activist lawyers’; comments which appear to have directly led to an attempted racist knife attack on an immigration law firm.
Deadly crossings
By the end of October, 7,444 people had arrived in southern England in small boats from mainland Europe in 2020, with 416 on a single day on 2 September. This is four times the number who came to Britain in this way in 2019. The overwhelming majority have made the crossing safely but there have been seven tragic deaths. Most recently on 27 October, when an Iranian Kurdish family, Rasul Nezhad, Shiva Panahi and their children Anita and Armin, all drowned in the Channel – the latest victims of the racist border regime and with no life ring from Patel to save them.
Despite this recent increase, total cross-Channel arrivals remain a small proportion of overall immigration. As we reported in the last FRFI: ‘The rise in boat crossings … is largely in response to the stringent measures which have been implemented over the past 20 years by successive British governments to prevent migrants from crossing in lorries and cars, including tight security at the port of Calais and massive fines for hauliers who knowingly or unknowingly transport migrants.’
Inadequate housing
The government is legally obliged to house asylum seekers while their claims are processed. This involves a range of different types of accommodation, from the barbaric conditions of the initial screening centres to generally more decent but precarious and frequently overcrowded and unsuitable student accommodation and hotels administered by contracted private companies such as Serco, Mears and Clearsprings. A report from the Inspectorate of Prisons into Tug Haven reception centre in Dover found it was ill-equipped to deal with cold, wet new arrivals, especially children, had inadequate safeguarding and Covid protection, and was strewn with rubble inside the compound.
On 17 November, asylum seekers in the Napier Barracks in Shorncliffe, Kent staged a protest, chanting ‘Freedom’ and complaining that the Home Office was telling them nothing about how long they would be held in the disused army camp. The barracks began use as migrant accommodation to house 400 single men in September, since when there have also been demonstrations outside the facility, both by solidarity activists and by right-wing counter-protesters.
Patel’s attitude to her legal duty to house asylum seekers and process their applications is reflected in her giving serious consideration to plans to do this in specially constructed centres on British overseas islands 4,000 miles away in the South Atlantic, following discussions with racist Australian ex-PM Tony Abbott. Although this idea has now been shelved, she appears to have borrowed other tricks from the Australian system. On 23 November The Guardian published details of a confidentiality agreement akin to the Official Secrets Act, which volunteers were being asked to sign prior to entering the Napier Barracks camp, a tactic used by the Australian government at its Nauru and Manus Island immigration centres.
European migrants
The Immigration and Social Security Co-ordination (EU Withdrawal) Act 2020 became law on 11 November. It revokes the ‘free movement’ arrangements via which EEA nationals and their family members have been able to live, work and claim benefits in Britain. This means that – other than for Irish people, who remain in a separate category due to the ‘special relationship’ between Britain and the 26 Counties – European nationals will be subject to the same migration regime as other people from around the world.
This paves the way for the implementation of the new version of the ‘points based immigration system’ which Patel boasts will allow British employers to ‘attract the best and brightest from around the world.’
Like many immigration laws, the current ‘points based’ work visa system was introduced by the 1997-2010 Labour government. Complex and patchy, with no real use of the actual points to make decisions, it has been subject to various amendments over the years; the over-riding political aim being to bring workers into Britain who this country has not had to train, but only for as long as they are useful to the capitalist economy. This is what Labour Home Office Minister Barbara Roche first referred to in 2000 as ‘managed migration’.
Patel’s ‘new’ system is a tidier version of the unwieldy existing one, as now people really will have to have a specific number of points (70) in order to enter the country. These points are generally gained by having a job offer from an ‘approved employer’ (20 points) at an ‘appropriate skill level’ (20), speaking English (10) and earning at least £25,600 (20). For those who don’t meet the salary threshold, extra points are available for having better qualifications (10 for a relevant PhD or 20 for a PhD in science, technology, engineering or maths) or a job offer in a category where there is a shortage (20). In July, the government agreed that people coming to do certain jobs in health or education can still get 20 points if their salary is less than £25,600 – so long as they are paid a minimum of £20,480 and in line with national pay scales.
Rough sleepers
Many subsidiary changes are also being made to the Immigration Rules in the run-up to Brexit. Whilst none of these are likely to contain anything progressive, one of the more hideous ones once again targets rough sleepers for deportation. Despite the government being defeated in court in 2017 on this issue, then in specific relation to homeless people from EEA countries, the new rule, effective from 1 December, tells Home Office caseworkers they can refuse permission to stay or cancel permission held by someone who has been rough sleeping, defined as ‘sleeping, or bedding down, in the open air’ or in ‘other places not designed for habitation’.
Windrush and the hostile environment
The Prime Minister is currently standing by the Home Secretary, despite an inquiry into her treatment of civil servants at the Home Office finding Priti Patel guilty of ‘behaviour that can only be described as bullying’, including shouting and swearing at members of staff. The report’s author Sir Alex Allan has now resigned from his post as Independent Adviser on ministerial standards. Whilst his resignation and the earlier one of Home Office Permanent Secretary, Sir Philip Rutnam, which led to the commissioning of the inquiry, have generated copious press headlines, far less coverage has been given to the resignation of Alexandra Ankrah.
Ankrah was the most senior black Home Office employee in the team responsible for the compensation scheme for victims of the Windrush scandal, in which thousands of predominantly Caribbean migrants and their families, who had come to Britain between 1948 and 1971, invited by the government to work and settle, were treated as though they had no residence status. At least 83 people were wrongly deported.
Ankrah told Amelia Gentleman, the author of The Windrush Betrayal, that the team working on the compensation scheme largely consisted of people whose previous role had been in immigration enforcement: ‘the very same people who hadn’t questioned the Windrush situation in the first place’, describing the scheme as systemically racist, miserly and very slow. On 9 November, Patel was forced to respond in Parliament to opposition questions on the drawn-out and contemptible nature of the process; so far nine people who have applied for compensation have died while waiting for their cases to be settled.
On 25 November the Equality and Human Rights Commission published a report into the impact of the ‘hostile environment’, particularly on the Windrush generation. The report found that the Home Office unlawfully ignored warnings that changes to immigration rules would create ‘serious injustices’ for the Windrush generation.
The long war
It is a staple part of subsequent Home Secretaries’ rhetoric to insist that previous administrations have been lax, that the current system is ‘broken’, as well as heavily weighted in favour of asylum seekers with spurious claims and ‘economic migrants’ who have only come here to claim benefits and commit crime, and that their new measures will be the most far-reaching overhaul in decades.
Labour politicians in the 1997-2010 government made repeated announcements in a similar tone to that now employed by Patel, from Jack Straw’s exploitation of the deaths in 2000 of 58 Chinese migrants in a lorry found at Dover, to the unequivocally bellicose 2009 statement by Jacqui Smith: ‘The message is clear – whether you’re a visa overstayer, a foreign criminal or a failed asylum seeker, the UK Border Agency is determined to track you down and remove you from Britain.’ Labour’s period in government left behind five new highly punitive immigration and asylum laws, in addition to 12 immigration removal centres (there having only been one when they came to power), as well as a network of Short Term Holding Facilities at airports and reporting centres. Yet all this was still insufficient for Theresa May, Coalition and Conservative Home Secretary from 2010 to 2016 who ridiculed the existing system, giving false examples of lenient decisions, as she brought in the now infamous ‘hostile environment’ for migrants.
Patel has set out her stall in this ignominious competition to be yet more punitive than her predecessors. With a right-wing Conservative government in power with a very safe majority, and a Labour Party that shows not even a hint of opposition, the struggle to defend the rights of migrants will be crucial in the coming period.
