KEIR STARMER’S anti-refugee summit picks up where the Tories left off in giving unauthorised migration exaggerated status as some kind of national crisis.
Just as Rishi Sunak penned a joint article with Italy’s far-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni calling for a Europe-wide crackdown on irregular arrivals, Meloni took centre-stage by video link today, citing Italy’s use of a third-country processing hub in Albania as a model increasingly adopted across the continent.
Meloni depicts Italy as a pioneer. It is, though not in a good way. It successfully pushed the EU to abolish its last official search-and-rescue service in the Mediterranean nearly five years ago and it has led the way too in prosecuting civilian search-and-rescue missions it smears as people-smugglers.
As the Public and Commercial Services union and Care4Calais recently urged, the easiest way to end criminal people-smuggling operations would be to provide safe routes for people to claim asylum, perhaps through an extension of the scheme for Ukrainian refugees to people of other backgrounds.
There is no reason why victims of one war should be privileged over victims of others, and Britain bears responsibility for many of those wars. Yvette Cooper’s own reference to gangs working from the “hills of Kurdistan to the money markets of Kabul” cites two countries devastated by invasions we took part in, Iraq and Afghanistan.
The delusion Starmer tries to sell the public is that smuggling gangs drive demand, when in fact they exploit it. The international refugee crisis is driven by war, poverty and climate change.
His government is directly implicated in the ongoing mass displacement of human beings by war — most clearly in continued military support for Israel. It has cut foreign aid programmes aimed at alleviating poverty, even if we ignore the wider connection between underdevelopment in the global South and Western foreign and trade policy.
Even so, Britain does not take in significant numbers of refugees, most of whom end up in states neighbouring those they have fled from. Like the Conservatives, who whipped up hysteria around “stopping the boats” while significantly increasing legal migration to Britain, Starmer pretends that we have unmanageable numbers of irregular arrivals.
The numbers are small compared to those who come here through authorised routes to work or study. And these latter are hugely important to Britain’s economy. A decline in the number of foreign students would be financially disastrous for British universities. Essential services from the NHS to social care are dependent on migrant labour.
There are ethical dilemmas here — Britain should not be poaching essential workers from poorer countries, and labour shortages reflect the poor pay and treatment of those sometimes termed “key workers.” But neither question is addressed by immigrant-bashing.
This April, British residents will be hit by steep price rises in energy, water and broadband bills, as well as rising council tax.
The left needs to keep attention focused on the profiteers being licensed to fleece us for essentials, as well as the refusal to tax profit and wealth that sees the burden on ordinary people grow heavier each year.
Refugees have nothing to do with these pressures, and the Prime Minister’s claim that they represent a security threat comparable to terrorism is reckless scaremongering.
The lies of groups like Reform UK that tie declining living standards and deteriorating public services to immigration get a hearing partly because the real culprits are not called out.
It falls to our movement to popularise the case against the rich, for the class politics that will drown out the distractions. Initiatives like Unite’s day of action against energy price hikes are an important part of mobilising communities along class lines. Local organisations, from trades councils through People’s Assembly branches to Morning Star readers’ groups, can all play a role.
