After weeks of outrage and protests, the detention camp at Manston, Kent was emptied on 22 November. Thousands of asylum seekers had been imprisoned in overcrowded, unsanitary conditions, many for far longer than the legal limit. One detainee died. The camp now resumes as a short-term processing centre. But the situation could easily reverse.
Manston was just one head of a hydra: the racist system of brutality and exploitation against migrants. We learned on 27 November that the Home Office put asylum-seeking children at risk by classing them as adults contrary to their identity documents. And that one year ago, French and UK authorities left 27 people to drown while arguing over which country’s waters they were in.
Suella Braverman promises even more repressive measures against irregular Channel crossings. I wrote in Solidarity 653 that the ever-escalating crackdown simply pushes desperate people toward riskier routes and drives up profits for smugglers. It also serves to stir a far-right core for whom no amount of racist violence can suffice.
New statistics, showing net immigration of 504,000 in a year, will surely further incense those racists. Though this peak is a blip due to loosening pandemic travel restrictions and a return to in-person study (the biggest group of arrivals were students), we can be glad the Tories again failed their promise to repress migration to five-figure levels.
Yet, after the end of (limited) free movement rights, even more of those arrivals are subject to visa conditions that empower employers, landlords and abusers.
Capitalists at the CBI conference expressed frustration with the government’s excessive restrictions. But their demand is for more work visas. These condition working-class people’s right to move on being useful to capitalists, and put their right to stay at the mercy of particular employers or industries.
Nor can we sympathise with university bosses who object to curbs on international students because they cut off a lucrative cash cow — we demand universal free education.
Against a government consolidating its base via murderous “vice signalling”, and capitalists wanting to tweak anti-migrant policies to improve profits, our answers are freedom and solidarity. We say, open the borders: restore and extend free movement, and create safe routes for people fleeing persecution and violence.
Yet, at this crucial, dangerous time, the Labour leadership doubles down on its amoral, cowardly, futile strategy of pandering to xenophobia. Starmer refuses even the pro-business path of backing employers’ demands, let alone to uphold the free movement policies voted through by party conference and pledged by him in his leadership bid.
Instead, his rhetoric falsely pits workers against each other. Rather than attack the government’s barbarity, his deputies Reeves and Cooper mainly complain that it should implement its barbarity more competently.
Affiliated unions have barely protested this fundamental betrayal. The union bureaucracies’ own histories on this are mixed at best. The tasks fall to the grassroots of the labour movement: to organise solidarity directly; to patiently persuade others in our workplaces and communities; and to fight to transform the policies of our unions and our party.
• Ben Tausz is a member of the Labour Campaign for Free Movement, writing here in a personal capacity