PLANS to slap electronic tags on refugees further criminalise people who have fled nightmarish dangers to reach these shores.
They show that for all the official expressions of dismay, the deaths of 27 individuals trying to cross from France last month have not moved this government to reconsider its lethal border policy.
A rise in refugees being forced onto exceptionally dangerous routes such as sea crossings is not due to evil smuggling gangs: these merely exploit the lack of safer routes, itself the product of the state crackdown on any and all points of entry.
Nor is it down to the “pull” factors trumpeted by Home Secretary Priti Patel, who insinuates that people uproot their families and cross continents and seas in the hope of being put up in a Travelodge.
The winter’s headlines have been dominated — at least, before the new variant of Covid-19 began sweeping the country — by the “refugee crisis” in the form of the Channel deaths and the Poland-Belarus standoff.
It being Christmas, we can point out that the nativity story we celebrate this weekend culminates in the Flight into Egypt when Mary, Joseph and baby Jesus have to cross the border to escape the murderous government of King Herod.
The moral of this tale won’t trouble the Tories. But as we worry that Covid might keep us from loved ones over the festive season, we should remember that the government is passing a Nationality and Borders Bill that fundamentally weakens the right to family reunion.
And as we reflect on Covid’s interference with our normal lives, we should spare a thought for those whose “normal” has been so shattered by terrorism, war and climate chaos that they leave everything they know in the desperate search for safety.
This Christmas edition of the Morning Star carries the theme of solidarity with refugees. The refugee crisis and our government’s response to it are core aspects of a global crisis precipitated by imperialism.
The families dying in the woods as they begged to cross into the EU mattered nothing to a Brussels determined not to lose face in what it painted as a “hybrid war” being waged by Belarus, just as Britain and France’s responses to the Channel drownings was simply to blame each other while each vowing to intensify their crackdown on refugees.
In both cases many of the refugees came from Afghanistan and Iraq, two countries ripped apart by US-led wars. But while rejecting the victims our government remains addicted to the wars, ordering more nuclear missiles, sending warships to the Far East to harass the Chinese coasts. British troops are among those on Nato’s “forward bases” stationed on former Soviet territory to goad Russia.
This reckless militarism is combined with a deepening authoritarianism at home. Tory indifference to flouting the Geneva Convention and criminalising asylum-seekers is of a piece with attacks on the freedom to protest and free speech in universities. Hard-won rights are being systematically dismantled.
These are the actions of a capitalist state that can no longer meet people’s expectations or needs — and which was seriously rattled by the revival of socialist, internationalist politics in recent years.
British officialdom, in the opposition as well as the government, has sought to choke off the message that revival gave us — that another world is possible.
Some of the actions detailed in today’s edition, from the green lamps lit on the Polish borders to bid refugees welcome to the “civil fleet” who risk life and liberty to rescue people from drowning, and the bitter, painstaking work of counting and naming the dead, remind us of the work being done, now, to make that better world a reality.
In the new year we must redouble our efforts to do that — by derailing the borders Bill, exposing the divide-and-rule tactics of our rulers and rebuilding the politics of hope.
