KEIR STARMER’S encounter with Giorgia Meloni is really a meeting of minds. The British Prime Minister wants to learn from the former fascist/near-fascist/post-fascist prime minister of the Italian Republic how best to deal with the problem of small boat arrivals in Britain.
Meloni’s coalition of the Fratelli d’Italia, the direct lineal descendant of Benito Mussolini’s fascist party, with the xenophobic Lega and the remnants of Silvio Belosconi’s mafia-ridden political vehicle Forza Italia, has managed to “achieve” a more than 50 per cent reduction in small boat arrivals on Italian territory.
It has done this by a combination of measures, including interdiction by an Italian coastguard notoriously casual about the loss of life; it has also brought about criminal sanctions on voluntary organisations — including those motivated by Catholic Christian charity — that help migrants.
But most effectively it has contracted out to the notoriously corrupt and jihadi-ridden Libyan Coastguard the task of policing the waters between the former Italian empire in north Africa and the Italian mainland.
It will be interesting to see how many measures will be adopted by Starmer — whose track record as an instrument in the service of the coercive capitalist state has already been refined by a spell advising the police in Northern Ireland.
As director of public prosecutions, he was the principal intermediary in the conspiracy with the US security state to keep Julian Assange in detention pending extradition. How much does he think he can poach from Meloni’s arsenal?
It seems unlikely that he will be able to induce the French frontier police and coastguard to act in quite as mercenary a manner as the EU’s Libyan contractors.
The French must be exasperated by the British authorities. France, of course, is a refuge for many migrant workers and refugees, especially from Africa’s climate change conditions and post-colonial poverty.
The ones who stay in France do so because they speak French, come from former French colonies and can rely on a measure of sanctuary and solidarity at least from their compatriots.
The poor souls who pitch up on our shores — and by this week’s deadly metrics with a one in 100 chance of drowning — do so because they come from countries either formerly under the colonial dominance of Britain because they speak English as their second language and not infrequently as their first and because they are fleeing the consequences of the decades of war visited on their countries by Nato and its component states.
There are aspects to the present management of the migrant controversy that need spelling out.
First, it is only a problem of small boats arrivals in the most minor sense. The vast majority of migrants arriving in Britain do so because they are drawn here by the labour market mechanisms of 21st century capitalism and facilitated by the British state acting as the labour-recruiting arm of domestic British capital. They are licensed to migrate by successive governments.
Second, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper’s nonsense about the criminal gangs who are “responsible” for the cross-Channel traffic is a dangerous frivolity. This cross-Channel trade is an inevitable expression of precisely the market mechanisms that drive the larger migrant flow.
The gangs are responding to a market demand created by the policy of successive British governments to refuse to allow safer routes for people arriving here with genuine claims to refugee status or as migrant workers.
The reasons for present-day Britain becoming the destination for a minor fraction of the world’s migrants lie precisely in our historical role.
As the song sung last week at the Last Night at the Proms has it:
“Wider still and wider
Shall thy bounds be set
God who made thee mighty
Make thee mightier yet.”
