In August 2024, the new Labour government announced plans to deport more than 14,000 people by the end of the year. On 9 January 2025 the Home Office congratulated itself on having surpassed this figure, with Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Home Secretary Yvette Cooper boasting of their success in a statement that trumpeted ‘a surge in returns activity since the election leading to 16,400 people with no right to be in the UK being removed’. On 30 January 2025 the government published the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill it had been planning since the July 2024 King’s Speech. NICKI JAMESON reports.
The Home Office’s 9 January statement also crowed about the continuing ‘crackdown on dodgy car washes, nail bars and construction sites’, which has led to ‘32% more visits and 29% more arrests compared to the same period last year’. These attacks on low-paid, precarious migrant workers are set to continue, with biometric kits and body-worn cameras being ‘rolled out to frontline Immigration Enforcement teams throughout 2025 to boost arrests and prosecutions’.
Still smarting over losing the election and the cancellation of the hare-brained ‘Rwanda Plan’ – which would have seen asylum seekers arriving ‘illegally’ shipped off to east Africa – Conservative Party spokespersons were quick to find point out that the overwhelming majority of people now being deported by Labour were not in fact those who had arrived by small boat from France.
People migrate to Britain in many different ways, and the government has set its sights not just on asylum seekers but also on migrant workers, overseas students, visa overstayers and others. Nobody is safe from interference from this racist government. However, it remains the case that it is those taking the most dangerous migration routes who are in the frontline, both for tabloid vilification and for government legal attack. In the course of 2024 an estimated 78 people died while trying to cross the Channel from northern France. These deaths include at least eight children and one pregnant woman.
Punishment with or without trial
Labour’s opposition to the Conservatives’ Rwanda Plan has always been based around the claim that once in office it would introduce new powers to deter and punish people smugglers. These now appear in the new Bill both in the form of new criminal offences and in the shape of beefed-up Serious Crime Prevention Orders (SCPOs).
It will now be a crime, punishable by a sentence of up to 14 years to supply or handle articles for use in ‘immigration crime’. ‘Collecting information for use in immigration crime’ will be punishable by a prison term of up to five years, as will ‘endangering another during sea crossing to United Kingdom’.
On 2 January, in advance of the publication of the Bill, the Home Office announced that ‘Suspected people smugglers will face travel bans, social media blackouts and restrictions on phone usage under tough new laws to dismantle crime networks’. The SCPO process will be speeded up, with the National Crime Agency empowered to apply to the High Court for interim orders against alleged people smugglers, without that person having been charged with or convicted of any actual crime. The conditions of the order can include: travel restrictions; a ban on laptop or mobile phone usage; a ban on accessing social media networks, including via a third party; restrictions on whom someone can associate with; restrictions on devices and communications with certain individuals; restrictions on finances. Breaching such an interim order could lead to a prison sentence of up to five years.
Although the hype around all these measures implies they will target high level gang members in order to break up international crime syndicates, in reality many people so far accused of or convicted of ‘facilitating illegal entry’ or similar offences are themselves asylum seekers who, in return for free or reduced-rate passage, assist with piloting the boats or other aspects of the process.
Unworkable as the Rwanda Plan was and draconian as the Labour government’s new crime measures will be, none of this will actually stop people who are desperate to flee war, environmental destruction and economic devastation from attempting to reach Britain or other western countries. In 2024 nearly 37,000 asylum seekers arrived in England via small boat from France. Home Office statistics for the year to September 2024 show that the largest numbers by country are for people from Afghanistan, Iran, Syria and Vietnam. From 2011 to 2021 over 30,000 Syrian refugees were granted asylum in Britain, most of whom had arrived under various government schemes. In 2021 the main route under the Syrian Vulnerable Persons Resettlement Scheme was closed. In December 2024, following the overthrow of the Syrian government of Bashar al Assad, the British government cynically suspended the processing of asylum decisions in relation to Syrian asylum seekers.
Imperialism continues to wreak havoc on the oppressed nations of the world in the form of war, economic plunder and man-made climate change. Yet when people flee this barbarity and seek a safer existence, the very same imperialist countries use racist laws to try to keep them out. The left in Britain may posture over the perceived threat from the far right but it is the Labour government which is actually harassing, detaining, criminalising and deporting migrants. For communists, fighting imperialism and fighting racism are inextricably linked. We oppose all imperialist, capitalist endeavours abroad and all use of racist immigration laws at home.
Solidarity with all asylum seekers and migrants!
Oppose the racist British Labour government!
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 304 February/March 2025
