YVETTE COOPER’s pledge to accelerate deportations doubles down on the Tory “hostile environment” that criminalises and dehumanises refugees.
It reinforces a narrative shaped by Britain’s billionaire-owned media depicting asylum-seekers as a threat, which helped fuel the explosion of race hate that disfigured our country earlier this month.
The Tory Party may be down and out, but the Tory press haven’t skipped a beat in working to frame the political conversation along their favourite lines, screaming blue murder at pay rises for public servants and Labour’s (shock horror) links to organised labour. It will be a poor lookout for the working class if ministers keep dancing to the tune of the Murdochs and Rothermeres.
We know that anti-immigrant scaremongering crosses quickly over into explicit racism.
The 2014 Immigration Act, as veteran MP Diane Abbott warned it would, resulted in the targeting of black British residents and soon enough the Windrush wrongful detention and deportation scandal. The targets of racist violence in recent weeks were both refugees, through the attacks on hotels, and long-established Muslim communities through attacks on mosques.
Cooper may believe that by combining prison sentences for rioters with new detention centres (prisons, essentially) for refugees, she adheres to Blair’s famous soundbite “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime.”
But this panders to far-right myths about Britain being swamped. A political response to re-emerging fascism must understand that immigrant communities and refugees are a scapegoat for social and economic problems, not a presence in the country that automatically generates resentment.
That’s why the places that saw the strongest showing for Reform at the last election, and the sites of the worst fascist violence, are not the bigger cities with large immigrant communities but smaller, poorer and overwhelmingly white towns.
The lack of secure jobs and properly running public services in these areas has nothing to do with refugees. It’s the product of deindustrialisation and, over the last 14 years, the devastating cuts-and-privatisation programme dubbed “austerity” by David Cameron and George Osborne.
If Conservative policy is behind the deprivation and anxiety fascists exploit, it has also created an asylum system which is cruel, irrational — and extremely profitable.
Provision of asylum-seeker accommodation was privatised in 2012. The Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition claimed that replacing agreements with local authorities and housing associations with big, national contracts with for-profit firms would save public money.
Lucrative contracts have since been handed to outsourcing behemoths including Serco and G4S, companies notorious not only for poor treatment of people in their care but for defrauding the taxpayer.
Maximising profit margins is the name of the game, and predictably resulted in poorer-quality accommodation and worse treatment of asylum-seekers, as a 2016 study by the University of Manchester’s Dr Jonathan Darling found.
It is also the motivation for housing refugees in hotels in some of the poorest, and therefore cheapest, parts of the country. It’s big business, with Graham King, whose Clearsprings Ready Homes has a 10-year contract with the Home Office to house asylum-seekers, entering the Sunday Times Rich List this year.
The refugees these companies profit from are almost all banned from working, nor are they eligible for the vast majority of social security payments. So they live in poverty, targets for super-exploitation by law-breaking bosses and worse.
Cooper says she wants to fix the mess the Tories have made of asylum: she should begin by revoking the commercial accommodation contracts and returning to a local government-led approach.
Step one should be to kick the profiteers out of the system and start treating those seeking safety here as human beings, not pests or criminals.
If that requires an honest conversation about the causes of a global rise in refugee numbers — climate chaos and war — and the need to do something about them, so much the better.
