Asylum: Starmer panders to Tories

Conservative Home Secretary Suella Braverman’s xenophobic rhetoric and anti-refugee policies escalate. Braverman’s latest claim is that suffering from anti-gay or anti-women discrimination is no valid reason for seeking asylum. We urgently need firm political opposition, fighting for an alternative based on sanctuary, free movement and working-class solidarity.

Instead, the Labour leadership continues to pander to the panic manufactured by the racist right. Starmer’s team repeatedly claims that the government has allowed migration to get out of control, and promise they would more competently “get a grip” on the border to “stop the boats”.

Positively, they would scrap the Rwanda scheme, restore the right (removed by the Illegal Migration Act) to claim asylum on arrival, and resume processing asylum claims. This is all necessary, but only rewinds border policy back a couple of years.

Worse, it’s coupled with devoting more resources to accelerating deportations, and fast-tracking returns to supposedly “safe” countries. They propose India as “safe”, ignoring the violent persecution overseen by Modi’s far-right government.

Starmer also promises to negotiate a deal with the EU to enable the UK to send back people arriving irregularly, in return for accepting a share of refugees. This means deporting refugees to countries that already host more per capita than the UK.

He makes much of demanding a “crackdown” on smugglers — even though it’s already refugees facing criminalisation, induced to steer the boats while the smugglers keep their hands clean. More broadly, a “crackdown” approach is as futile and destructive as Prohibition or the War on Drugs. People take dangerous routes because legal routes are unavailable and tight policing blocks safer irregular routes. So the crackdown itself creates the smugglers’ business opportunities.

Starmer and his team couch all this in aggressive rhetoric, pandering to the nationalist xenophobia whipped up by the “take back control” right. Most recently, Starmer absurdly declared he wants to treat small boat channel crossings on a par with terrorism, and denounced his critics as “un-British”. Frontbencher Nick Thomas-Symonds followed up by pronouncing migration “totally out of control” under the Tories, insisting Labour is “a patriotic party who wants control of our borders”.

Toying rhetorically with paranoia about uncontrolled migration as an existential threat, and framing advocates of wider free movement as enemies of the people, risks inciting racist attacks and political violence. And it validates and entrenches the myths, fears and framing stoked by the racist right to advance their cause.

Labour members and unions must push back, by voting through policies drafted by the Labour Campaign for Free Movement and submitted to Party Conference by multiple CLPs, and campaigning for these policies even if Starmer’s leadership won’t. The core: restore and extend free movement; expand migrants’ rights including safe, legal routes for refugees; end raids, detention and deportations; equal access to social security, public services and voting rights.