The Conservative government is systematically dismantling all legal protection previously afforded to marginalised groups in Britain via a raft of new legislation. Foremost amongst its targets are asylum seekers and migrants. The Labour ‘opposition’ is openly collaborating with this process. NICKI JAMESON reports.
On 10 May the inflammatorily named Illegal Migration Bill was debated in the House of Lords. The Bill takes further the draconian measures in the Nationality and Borders Act 2023, and will ensure that anyone arriving in Britain other than by ‘legal channels’ will be detained and removed, and will only be able to claim asylum from wherever they are sent. Currently such ‘legal routes’ are only in place for Ukraine and Hong Kong, and, under very limited schemes, Syria and Afghanistan. There is no ‘safe, legal route’ from Iran and Home Secretary Suella Braverman has made it clear that the government is not about to introduce one for people fleeing the civil war in Sudan.
Even if someone who arrives ‘illegally’ is ultimately successful in claiming asylum, they will be barred from British citizenship, as will their children. The Bill is clearly incompatible with existing laws and conventions on human rights, refugees and modern slavery, but the government is hell-bent on pushing it through, with the Labour ‘opposition’ squeaking pathetically from the sidelines about how it could be equally draconian but more efficient.
Labour keeps the Bill on track
Every Bill that goes through Parliament passes through a number of stages prior to becoming law, and the unelected Lords have the task of scrutinising and reviewing all Bills passed in the elected House of Commons. Despite being made up of a combination of former elected parliamentarians and others who have had life peerages bestowed on them by prime ministers, hereditary peers and clerics, the House of Lords frequently takes a more progressive stance on cases involving the curtailing of fundamental rights. However, its powers to actually stop Bills being passed are limited and its role usually restricted to proposing amendments, which may pass in the Lords but usually do not survive the subsequent return to the Commons.
On this occasion, Lord Brian Paddick, a former Deputy Assistant Commissioner of the Met Police and Liberal Democrat peer, attempted to up the ante and derail the Illegal Migration Bill entirely, using a little known procedure whereby, instead of proposing endless amendments, the Lords would show their disapprobation by refusing to discuss the Bill at all. He motivated this on the basis that:
‘The Bill seeks systematically to deny human rights to a group of people desperately seeking sanctuary… The Human Rights Act is being revoked, one law at a time. The Bill would undermine the rule of law, with Ministers able to ignore the rulings of judges. At the same time, we are asking Russia and China to abide by the international rule of law.’
Of the Lords eligible to vote in such debates, 261 are Conservatives, 175 Labour and 83 Liberal Democrat. There are a tiny number from other parties and 220 are not specifically affiliated to any parliamentary party. Had Paddick’s motion been supported by Labour, there is a realistic chance it would have been passed, leaving the government with a quandary as to how then to force the Bill through using the Parliament Act, which allows it to over-ride the Lords.
Instead, all but eight Labour peers abstained on the motion, which was defeated. Whatever amendments they now come up with, the Bill will eventually pass and the subsequent treatment of migrants will be down to the racist Labour Party, every bit as much as to the racist Conservative government.
Phony migration crisis
The government is touting the Illegal Migration Bill as a necessary response to an unprecedented migration crisis. This supposed crisis centres on the fact that last year 45,755 people arrived in Britain from France on small boats. This figure is bandied around by politicians such as Braverman, warning the public of a ‘swarm’ or an ‘invasion’. In reality the migrants who crossed the Channel in 2022 make up less than 10% of the net migration of 500,000 people into Britain during that period.
Indeed, as the right-wing of the Conservative Party goes into overdrive about Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s failure to ‘control the borders’ and reduce net migration to tens of thousands, a long-standing Tory pledge, ONS figures show that the high net migration figures for 2022 are due to a combination of the 172,000 arrivals on the ‘humanitarian schemes’, primarily from Hong Kong and Ukraine, together with 235,000 migrant workers, vital to the British economy, and 361,000 students and their families, overseas students being a major source of income for British universities.
Slum landlordism for some
Under the provisions of the 1999 Immigration and Asylum Act, once someone has submitted an asylum claim, the government has a duty to provide them with accommodation and basic subsistence. Successive governments have been increasingly grudging about the provision of this support, repeatedly consigning newly arrived migrants to insanitary, run-down accommodation, whilst deliberately stirring up confrontation with local people in areas where such housing is located. In recent years, the drastic shortage of serviceable local authority accommodation for anyone has led to asylum seekers being housed in hotels. On 29 March Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick made it clear that the accommodation he was looking to use in future would deliberately be of the most basic level possible: ‘We must not elevate the wellbeing of illegal migrants above those of the British people.’
The provision of all types of asylum seeker accommodation is contracted by central government to three private companies: Serco, Mears Group and Clearsprings Ready Homes, who are responsible for different areas of the country. Much of the temporary housing these companies use is already substandard, and the government is currently planning to remove some of the few legal safeguards in place, increasing the likelihood of asylum seeker accommodation being insanitary and dangerous. The Houses in Multiple Occupation (Asylum-Seeker Accommodation) (England) Regulations 2023, issued on 30 March, and currently awaiting parliamentary ratification, will remove the requirement under the 2004 Housing Act for Houses in Multiple Occupation (HMOs) to be registered, if the people living there are asylum seekers. Currently an HMO is defined as somewhere where five or more people from two or more households share facilities; some local councils have their own, stricter rules relating to safety hazards. The government is looking to do away with all these regulations, both national and local. This will mean that the private companies running asylum housing provision can subcontract to completely unscrupulous slum landlords with impunity.
Prison camps
In recent years the government has used army barracks to accommodate newly arrived migrants. This is not housing; it is mass imprisonment, in all but name. Facilities such as Napier and Penally Barracks have been repeatedly condemned by inspectors, subject to litigation on behalf of people sent there and subsequently closed. Undeterred, Jenrick (who claims the ‘values and lifestyles’ of people crossing the Channel in small boats threaten the social cohesion of Britain) announced that the government would be seeking to make even greater use of military camps to provide accommodation for asylum seekers.
On 27 April the High Court ruled against an application by Braintree District Council to prevent a disused RAF base at Wetherfield in Essex being used to house up to 1,700 asylum seekers. Other planned sites are at Northeye, a former prison and military training centre in Bexhill, Sussex, and RAF Scampton in Lincolnshire.
Alongside the unofficial prisons, the government is looking at reopening previously closed official places of detention at Haslar Immigration Removal Centre (IRC) in Hampshire and Campsfield IRC in Oxfordshire. There are currently seven long-term and three short-term operational IRCs. On 29 April detainees at Yarl’s Wood IRC in Bedford staged a protest, during which 13 men escaped. Eight have been recaptured and are now being held in prison. The whole IRC has been locked down since in an act of collective punishment.
From small boats to prison ships
On 5 April the government announced plans to moor an ‘accommodation barge’ in Portland Harbour in Dorset, and use it to house up to 500 asylum seekers. The Bibby Stockholm is one of a number of such vessels owned by British based company Bibby Marine Limited, in the main used as temporary accommodation for workers. As FRFI goes to press, the ship is in Falmouth being refitted. Its planned mooring in Portland in June is widely opposed, both by people supportive of asylum seekers’ right to decent housing and by those opposed to them being here at all. The Bibby Stockholm is due to be followed by other similar vessels, moored at as yet unspecified locations around the country.
This is not the first time Britain has used floating accommodation for migrants. In 1987, Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government used a former car ferry to hold 120 asylum seekers in the port of Harwich, until the ship blew off its moorings in the huge storm of October that year. Portland harbour is also no stranger to prison ships, as between 1997 and 2005, another Bibby ship, the Bibby Resolution, was renamed HMP Weare and used to house 400 convicted male Category C prisoners.
No flights to Rwanda!
On 24-27 April the Court of Appeal heard the latest legal challenge to the government’s plans to deport people who seek asylum in Britain to Rwanda in East Africa. The scheme was introduced a year ago and the first flight was due to take off on 14 June 2022; however a combination of public protest, direct action and legal challenge prevented this going ahead, and there have been no further attempts since. The latest appeal was brought by several individual asylum seekers and the charity Asylum Aid, and has the support of the UN High Commission for Refugees, which has stated that the policy would expose refugees to serious harm and is incompatible with Britain’s international obligations.
Rwanda was previously used in 2013-18 by Israel as a dumping ground for unwanted refugees, and barristers in the current case have argued that the Home Office has refused to learn lessons from the failings of that scheme. Judgement in the case is reserved to an unspecified date; whatever the outcome, there may then be further challenges in the Supreme Court and European Court of Human Rights
Fight racist laws
Alongside laws attacking peaceful protest and criminalising the right to strike, the Illegal Migration Bill and accompanying measures are part of a drive by this right-wing Conservative government to assert a draconian agenda, which it hopes will assist it both to maintain control in a time of capitalist crisis and to retain the votes of the most reactionary sections of the electorate. There is opposition to this vicious programme in many quarters, although this resistance remains weak. Building on and uniting it is a crucial task.
Stand with asylum seekers!
Fight Britain’s racist and repressive laws!
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 294 June/July 2023
