Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No.130, April/May 1996
This is the edited text of a speech by Maxine Williams given at a London FRFI forum against the Asylum Bill.
The Asylum and Immigration Bill currently going through Parliament is designed to make it even more difficult to win asylum in Britain. Yet already, even before it becomes law, the odds are stacked against asylum seekers. We need only examine two examples.
A Cypriot politician applied for asylum after he had been tortured in Cyprus: he had 100 scars on his back, which a medical report called stupendous in ‘number and severity’. Nevertheless, he received a letter from the Home Office saying:
‘Taking into account your appalling lack of credibility, the Secretary of State considers… that these wounds were inflicted at your request in an attempt to strengthen your claim… The Secretary of State is of the view that the claimed beating is all part of a cynical attempt to circumvent normal UK immigration rules… your claim is a mixture of lies and embellishment.’
Asylum was denied.
The second case is of an African who was tortured by government forces but managed to flee captivity. The Home Office wrote to him:
‘During the period of alleged torture, when not in detention, you made no attempt to approach the authorities in your country… the Secretary of State believes… it would have been an appropriate course of action for you to seek assistance from the authorities’.
Asylum was denied.
We have here the grotesque idea that someone would arrange to have himself severely beaten to gain asylum, and an asylum seeker refused because he does not complain to the government whose troops tortured him. In another case an asylum seeker was at home with his family when government troops came in firing guns, killing his brother and wounding his mother. He managed to escape but was refused asylum on the grounds that there was no evidence that the troops were aiming at him and therefore he had no reasonable fear of persecution.
So it’s Catch-22 for asylum seekers. If they are tortured then their scars will be regarded as evidence of attempted fraud. If they manage to escape with their lives it is clear proof that they are not in danger. In fact the only way to meet the Home Office criteria for asylum is by being murdered.
That is clear in the case of Abdul Onibiyo who was deported to Nigeria last year having lived in Britain since 1974. Nothing has been heard of him since — he is presumed imprisoned or dead. His wife and three of his children are now threatened with deportation and his son has been in and out of detention centres for a year. Nigeria, ruled by one of the most corrupt and ruthless regimes, is said by the British Home Office to be ‘somewhat unsettled’ (remember Ken Saro-Wiwa and his fellow oppositionists hanged in November last year) but ‘there is no evidence that indicates that Nigeria is… so fundamentally unsafe as to mean that deportations to that country cannot go ahead.’ As a result 99% of Nigerian asylum seekers are refused.
In 1994 only 825 people were given refugee status in Britain and 3,660 were given leave to remain. Thousands remain in the system or in detention centres for months and years on end. At least four asylum seekers have been driven to suicide in these prisons. 18 children who arrived unaccompanied by adults were detained last year. In 1994, 121 people were detained for longer than six months and 18 of them had been detained for longer than one year. Some are held in the worst of the British prisons.
Profits first and last
Why is this new Act being introduced? There has been a relentless procession of legislation by both Labour and Tory governments since the 1960s making immigration, particularly by black people, virtually impossible. This latest Bill is partly an electoral ploy by a desperate government. But there is more to it. Across Europe, national governments have agreed since 1992 to tighten up immigration controls. Much of what is the new Act in Britain merely copies policies already in force in other European countries.
So the new Asylum Bill copies Germany and the Netherlands in having a ‘white list’ of countries where there is ‘no serious risk of persecution’. All asylum seekers from such countries will be deemed bogus unless they can prove otherwise. The Home Secretary alone will decide which countries are on the list. The first list includes Bulgaria, Cyprus, Ghana, India, Pakistan, Poland, India and Rumania. If someone from those countries claims asylum they will be automatically refused and then an accelerated appeals procedure will occur. Once refused there is no further appeal and they will be deported.
Initially Nigeria and Algeria were on this list but were subsequently removed. But in practice, there is also an unofficial white list which decrees that if the UK makes vast amounts of money trading with a country then it is automatically a great and democratic country to which anyone can be safely deported. Nigeria comes into this category as it generates £400m per year trade income.
This policy of profits first is what motivates a large part of immigration law in Britain and in Europe. Thus Germany, which has large arms contracts and trading agreements with Turkey, deals with the Kurds in Germany accordingly — it banned the PKK and allows deportation of Kurds to Turkey, where 17,000 have been killed in the past eight years. India and Pakistan are on Britain’s safe list because they are large arms customers, India buying £700m worth in five years. We know that the arms makers and sellers dictate these matters because we know that Sir Colin Chandler, head of Vickers arms company, told ministers to get rid of Saudi dissident Mohammed al-Masari in order to preserve lavish Saudi arms deals.
Western governments and banks have imposed ruinous debt payments and structural adjustment programmes on poor nations which cripple them economically and destroy them socially. The result is millions more refugees in the world as the ensuing wars and civil wars, popular resistance and increasingly violent repression take their toll. The regimes committed to imperialist interests are armed by British, European and US arms merchants. So, the Turkish government in the 1990s used US fighter planes and helicopters, British armoured cars, German armoured personnel carriers, rifles and machine guns and Belgian rifle grenades. But when the Kurdish victims turn up on their doorsteps the European powers use any trick in the book to keep them out. Europe’s rulers know that the majority of the world’s people must live in chaos and poverty if profits are to be kept high. So they have built a high wall to keep them out of Europe.
Starving them out
The new Asylum Bill also tightens the pincer on the financial side. It brings in a fine against employers who employ those without leave to work. But most viciously of all it withdraws the right to public housing and child benefit from not only asylum seekers but also those groups of immigrants that the Home Secretary shall later decide. That could affect people settled here for decades. Alongside this goes the removal of income support from asylum seekers who do not apply for asylum at the port of entry (ie the majority) and from those awaiting the result of an appeal. All benefits and entitlement to housing will go.
Other European countries have led the way down this road. In Germany benefits are often paid in vouchers and in kind, not cash. In Italy asylum seekers get benefits for three months only and 76,000 immigrant workers have been struck off from local health care. Germany is also going to withdraw health care from asylum seekers whose claims have been rejected. A Kurdish asylum seeker denied liver treatment died in Bremen. In Italy, a Zairean woman in labour was refused help and the child died. In Rome, a Romany baby was denied treatment for bronchitis because the parents lacked the £2 fee. The child died. In Palermo a Sri Lankan injured in a racist attack was refused treatment until gangrene set in. He died.
And that will be the situation here. Denied income support, asylum seekers will be thrown onto local authority services and national government will not pay the cost. The results will provide a rich seam for racist agitation. People denied help will be in a desperate situation. Last October Bayegh Arafayne, a 19-year-old Ethiopian refugee who had lived in homeless people’s hostels, set fire to himself at a petrol station.
With friends like these…
Judging from Dianne Abbot’s presence on the Asylum Bill demonstration and a message to the march (drowned by jeers) from Jack Straw, some might think that Labour was opposing this Bill. In fact Labour’s opposition is a fiction. Labour will vote against it in Parliament. Why not? It won’t stop it being passed. But what does Labour opposition amount to? Jack Straw made it plain:
‘Race relations in Britain are much better than in many other European countries but we have to tread carefully to ensure that they stay so… people must not be led to believe that immigration is out of control. If that happens, racial tension will rise… The Secretary of State says that immigration controls must be firm and fair. He is right…(but) …he has failed to achieve that balance in this Bill.’
Labour accepts ‘firm’ immigration controls but the now Bill is a little too crude: ‘There is no need for this measure to be controversial. There is agreement across the floor… on the need to cut abuse and delays while meeting our international obligations. The issue is how…that balance between firmness and fairness should be struck.’
Indeed, there is a racist consensus between Labour and Tory. ‘The House has established procedures that could achieve the consensus that the Home Secretary says he seeks.’ Straw’s main intervention in Parliament was about the need to set up a Special Standing Committee (SSC) to work out details of the consensus on how to keep out asylum seekers.
A right-wing Tory MP hit the nail on the head: ‘Is that not simply a rather long-winded way of saying that the SSC is a fig leaf that will enable the Labour Party to appear to be on both sides of the issue?’
Labour’s ‘opposition’ amounts to a call not to cut asylum seekers benefits, but to expel them from Britain more speedily. Straw estimates that £160m could be saved by expelling them in three months. He thinks things are fine: ‘Our system of immigration control has generally been fairer, less arbitrary and capricious’ than in Europe.
Parliamentary opposition, in so far as it exists, is led by the Liberal Democrats, who put down most amendments. Of the two put by Labour, the first calls for a register of immigration advisers and makes it an offence for an unregistered person to advise immigrants or represent them. What that would do to campaigning organisations is hard to imagine. The other was to tighten up procedures for getting copies of birth certificates to make immigration fraud harder.
Who on earth would know that this was what was happening in Parliament? The left colludes in covering it up. Every public meeting or demonstration has Dianne Abbot or some other Labour MP prancing about on the platform but never mentioning their own racist party. It is high time to say to these people — forget your little set speeches in Parliament, put your own party in order, let’s see you give Jack Straw a good duffing up and then, only then, dare to come to meetings against this Act.
In the meantime let the people who want to fight this law and fight racism get on with it. Opposition will demand not just marching or picketing but practical action. The recent squatting of building in Hackney by ARCH for asylum seekers was an example. The political fight too must be stepped up. They are wrecking people’s lives — let’s begin to wreck theirs a little.
Above all, let’s get the truth out about Labour’s actual position on these measures. Because Labour will probably be in government soon. Straw will be Home Secretary. Straw who hates the ‘squeegee merchants’. Straw who thinks that there are too many working class people on juries. Straw who wants ‘firm’ immigration controls. Why not make his life hot in his constituency? Let’s go and stand outside his surgeries and say, if British immigration policy is so fair, what killed Joy Gardner?
