(c) Picture by Andy Taylor / Home Office, Wikicommons
Labour’s changes to asylum law announced this week represent a wholesale abandonment of any commitment to human rights and a staggeringly heartless attack on the most vulnerable people in society, including children.
Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood’s proposals include the effective end of settled status for recognised refugees. People who have successfully gone through the exhausting process of proving they face persecution in their home countries and need protection in the UK will have their cases reviewed every 30 months, and will have to live here precariously, not knowing if they face deportation or not, for at least 20 years before they can expect to settle permanently and try to build some sort of life here.
It also removes the meagre financial support for families with children whose asylum claims have been refused (as about half are at the first stage, with many claims granted later on appeal) – a move which will leave children destitute and starving. This government will also take ‘the assets’ of people seeking asylum, with one home office minister saying this would include ‘non-sentimental’ jewellery – as if this bunch could ever recognise sentiment – setting up the British government as boss-level people traffickers, waiting to shake out whatever is left in the pockets of people who have survived the most hellish journeys imaginable.
Not only are Labour’s new plans brutally cruel, the rhetoric that has surrounded their announcement this week has been lavishly spread with the most desperate racism. Announcing their enthusiasm for deporting children to war zones, the home office statement says: “Our hesitancy around returning families creates particularly perverse incentives. To some, the personal benefit of placing a child on a dangerous small boat outweighs the considerable risks of doing so.”
Is this satire? If it were, it would be epically Swiftian. How dare our government propagandise the idea that migrant people risk sacrificing their children somehow more casually than, you know, ‘we’ would?
In the presentation of her plans, Mahmood has repeated the lie driving anti-immigration protests, that the UK has “become the destination of choice in Europe.” It’s simply not true. Germany, Spain, Italy and France all process more asylum claims than the UK. Refugees form a tiny percentage of migrants to the UK.
The only people significantly exploiting the asylum system are the private companies wringing millions in profits from providing substandard, unsuitable accommodation, and the far right. Mahmood’s proposals have won applause from racists, and have shaken thousands of families in the UK with refugee status who face a terrifyingly uncertain future.
Jo Harvie
Jo Harvie is a socialist of long standing who has lived abroad for several years before returning to Scotland and re-connecting with Socialists for Independence.