SUELLA BRAVERMAN’S latest attack on refugees emphasises the urgency of building a united anti-racist movement.
It should focus minds in a week in which a badly misjudged letter on varying experiences of racism provided Labour’s right-wing leadership with an excuse to suspend the first black woman ever elected to Parliament.
Braverman’s blather about people who arrive by irregular routes having “values that are at odds with our country” is simple scaremongering.
It is likely to be as well supported as her predecessor Priti Patel’s claim that 70 per cent of arrivals by boat were economic migrants, an assertion the Home Office was eventually forced to admit it had no evidence to back up.
Her poisonous insinuations are designed to justify the inhuman abuse of children, women and men who head to this country seeking safety — many fleeing countries devastated by wars in which Britain has played a direct or indirect role (Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria were in the top five countries of origin last year).
Braverman’s plans to detain asylum-seekers for up to 28 days without access to a lawyer, and for vast prison barges docked off the coast, are the latest intensification of a “hostile environment” policy begun over a decade ago by Theresa May.
Each Tory government has worsened the persecution, but they have not had things all their own way. David Cameron was forced to U-turn on a bid to shut out unaccompanied child refugees early in 2016 because Labour combined blistering attacks on the policy in Parliament with mobilisation of extraparliamentary pressure on Tory MPs.
More significantly still, Amber Rudd was forced to resign as home secretary over the Windrush scandal when it emerged long-term British residents had been detained and deported.
Specific protections from deportation for long-term residents included in 1999’s Immigration and Asylum Act were dropped from the 2014 Immigration Act that paved the way for the Windrush scandal. The 2014 Act was rammed through with all the familiar Tory tub-thumping about illegal immigrants. It took courage to oppose it and only six Labour MPs did.
One of them was Diane Abbott, who warned that the legislation would wind up with black British citizens being told to leave.
The course of the Windrush scandal showed how right she was. It also showed how a principled opposition can force ministers to change course — and even to resign. Rudd’s resignation was the result of pressure by Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party — and its shadow home secretary, Diane Abbott.
Hounding out one of the very few Labour MPs who stood up to the hostile environment a decade ago will not strengthen Labour’s anti-racism. It will weaken it.
And it’s weak enough already. If Abbott’s letter to the Observer wrongly implied some forms of racism are more important than others, the experience of Martin Forde KC shows the Labour leadership thinks exactly that.
Forde’s findings on anti-black racism in Labour have been entirely ignored by Sir Keir Starmer.
Starmer’s claim that the Observer letter is anti-semitic, while he ignores concerns that it downplayed anti-Irish and anti-Traveller racism, would again imply a hierarchy of racisms — if the truth were not simply that Starmer scents an opportunity to boot out a leading socialist and has little interest in the letter itself.
Labour’s contemptuous treatment of its black membership is underlined by the obviously disproportionate suspension of the longest-serving black MP, who immediately apologised and retracted the letter as a badly judged first draft.
Many on the left are staying quiet, presumably because they share concerns about what Abbott wrote, but we should know by now the consequences of a “wait and see” approach in the face of right-wing attacks.
An end to Abbott’s parliamentary career would be a serious loss to the anti-racist movement — one we can ill afford in today’s climate.
