THE HIGH COURT’S ruling that the shameful Conservative policy of deporting asylum-seekers to Rwanda is legal does not make it acceptable.
It reminds us that the fight for refugees to be treated as human beings in need of protection, rather than a supposed threat, is a political battle — though not one that is being fought effectively in Parliament.
At Westminster yesterday it was left to the Scottish National Party’s Alison Thewliss to call out the Rwanda plans as “immoral” and a “disgusting attempt to cover up ... domestic policy failings.”
No such principle was evident in Labour’s response to the ruling. Shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper instead tried to score anti-immigrant brownie points by accusing the Tories of insufficient efforts to break up human-trafficking gangs.
The callousness of gangs extorting huge sums from desperate people to abandon them to dangerous sea crossings is beyond doubt, but compared with the Tories these are small-scale criminals. They are not responsible for the rise in refugee numbers: they are merely exploiting it.
By contrast, a British political establishment — Labour as well as Tory — that supports warmongering abroad and shrugs its shoulders in the face of catastrophic climate change is a key driver of global instability. British state policy guarantees that refugee numbers will continue to rise.
That is a problem. Not because refugees pose any kind of threat to us.
As others on the left have said, the enemies of the British people arrive not in dinghies but on private jets. The spivs and speculators who have bought up our water and energy supplies, run our railways into the ground, sucked hundreds of millions out of our postal service and have their greedy eyes fixed on our NHS are the real threat to our “way of life.”
So is a Conservative government that has exposed us to the highest energy prices anywhere on Earth, which is using inflation to force down living standards and is planning legislation to outlaw effective strike action entirely.
Its assault on the rights of refugees is part and parcel of an anti-democratic offensive that encompasses voting, protest and workplace rights. Their struggle and ours are the same.
Britain is not one of the main destinations for asylum-seekers. In the last year France received almost twice as many asylum applications and Germany nearly three times as many. Britain has the space and resources to offer a safe haven for those who do arrive here.
The claim that it does not is rooted in the same pretence that sees the government plead poverty when we are living through what the Sunday Times rich list calls a “golden era for the super-rich.” Our problem is not a lack of resources but their hoarding by the privileged few.
The real reason to be alarmed at rising refugee numbers is what they tell us about the unfolding human tragedies in their countries of origin.
They speak to the ruination of entire countries through aggressive wars like those launched by our government against Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya.
To the flood of armaments to and beyond war zones, causing outward ripples of violence as the fallout from the Libyan war has done across north-west Africa.
And to the spreading famines caused by increasingly severe droughts and floods, the consequences of global warming our government is doing nothing to address.
The refugee crisis is a symptom of a world order that does not serve the interests of the vast majority of people worldwide: the capitalist system.
The system that forces millions to flee their homes is the same that is impoverishing us in Britain — and which enjoys the support of every Westminster party.
We fight for the right of asylum-seekers to seek safety on our shores — but we must fight too for an end to the system that forced them to.
