LAST Saturday, a small boat carrying more than 60 people, including children, capsized and sank in the English Channel.

Six Afghan men died and some passengers are still missing. Others on the boat were from Sudan.

Imperialism’s military interventions and proxy wars continue to destabilise countries in Asia, Latin America, and east and west Africa in an aggressive drive to protect Western economic interests and impose political dominance.

Countries are being exploited by their former colonial masters. For instance, Niger’s rich uranium resources feed the French nuclear power industry, while more than 10 million people — almost half of Niger’s population — live in extreme poverty.

Tens of thousands of people fleeing zones of conflict, persecution or extreme poverty around the world are attempting to reach Britain.

Refugees from Afghanistan, Iran, Eritrea, Syria and Sudan made up half of those who crossed the English Channel last year.

Saturday’s tragedy isn’t the only time people have died trying to get here. In November 2021, 27 people died, among them seven women — one of whom was pregnant — and three children.

Yet these deaths were wholly preventable.

The Refugee Council and Care4Calais are both calling for more legal, safe and accessible ways in which people can apply for asylum and refugee status and — if granted — can come to live here. The current system is very limited and totally inadequate.

Government statistics claim that 45,000 people were detected or suspected of arriving in Britain by small boats in the year ending March 2023.

Yet the UK Resettlement Scheme, which prioritises the needs of people escaping from war zones, issued only 1,056 grants over those same 12 months.

The Refugee Family Reunion scheme issued only 6,029 visas during the same period to partners and children of adults already here. Two other schemes deal with very small numbers.

In the gutter

The reality is that there are no safe routes to Britain for people fleeing desperate situations.

No amount of blaming civil servants for delays and backlogs in a broken system, and attacking human rights lawyers, like Jacqueline McKenzie, who provide migrants with lawful advice, should shift the spotlight from a Tory Prime Minister and Home Secretary who want to fight the next general election in the gutter, against a callous and cowardly Labour Party leadership.

Echoing the brutal “Fortress Europe” asylum policy of an EU which now has far-right parties in government across the Continent, Rishi Sunak’s plan is to make it as hard as possible to enter Britain and claim asylum. Those who do will not be allowed to work and have no right to apply to stay permanently.

New rules have tripled the fines for hiring non-British-born workers without documentation, and many employers now think twice about hiring such people even if they can produce “leave to stay” papers.

The Illegal Migration Bill will not only affect those crossing the Channel in small boats but will trap most of the people already here but who seek asylum; at least a third of asylum applications last year were made by those who didn’t enter by small boat.

As the Refugee Council says: “It is not possible to apply for asylum without being physically present in the country and there is no visa that allows someone to travel to the UK for the purpose of claiming asylum.”

This could lead to more than 19,000 adults and as many as 45,000 children being detained in the first three years of becoming law, but it will do nothing to address the reasons why people take these dangerous journeys in the first place.

The British government is not having everything its own way as it battles to keep its flagship policy of migrant deportation to Rwanda airborne.

It is presently bogged down in the Supreme Court. With migrants having to be taken off the Bibby Stockholm barge due to Legionella bacteria in the water supply, this has not been a good week for the Tories seeking to appease their right wing by removing migrants from hotels.

War and peace

The ongoing war in Ukraine has reached a military impasse. The much-vaunted Ukrainian counter-offensive appears to have stalled and the Russians are dug in over a wide area.

Despite initiatives for peace from the Chinese, several African states, and a recent conference in Jeddah attended by Brics countries Brazil, India and South Africa and others, peace is not part of the game plan of the US and its allies in the Nato-EU military bloc as they pile more armaments into Ukraine.

The liberal left, by misreading the war and not opposing the US-Nato drive to keep it going, is making a very dangerous mistake.

We have just commemorated the dropping of two small atomic bombs 78 years ago on Hiroshima and Nagasaki which killed between 129,000 and 226,000 men, women and children.

The British government should sign the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, as 68 states have already done. As a nuclear power, Britain could lay down a challenge to others to begin a genuine process of multilateral nuclear disarmament.

There must be no concession to the arms trade by suggesting Britain increase its spending on “defence” to get us out of a recession.

Reaction on the march

Throughout Europe, authoritarianism and reaction are gaining ground. The Ukraine war has accelerated the growth of far-right and fascist parties, securing them legitimacy and credibility in the governments of many EU countries.

In Poland, Hungary and Italy, women’s reproductive rights are being attacked alongside rising racism and xenophobia.

Spain’s recent election has not seen off the far-right Vox party; the tied result leaves the possibility of a rerun.

The governments of Turkey and Israel both show a growing contempt for political rights and civil liberties.

And Donald Trump is waiting in the wings to claim another US presidency.

The stage is being set for hotting up the cold war on China, more global conflicts, a crackdown on progressive political activism across the US, Britain and Europe, and a world tipped into climate chaos by neoliberalism’s war on the environment, causing human migration on a scale never seen before.

The United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR, has calculated that, in the years between 2008 and 2016, an annual average of 21 million people have been displaced by floods, storms, persistent drought and the increasing number of wildfires principally caused by rising temperatures.

Hawaii a colony

In Hawaii, the death toll is mounting from devastating wildfires.

Annexed by the US in 1898, the indigenous peoples were denied a political voice or vote. The archipelago has provided the US with a strategic location for a military base and helped establish it as a world superpower.

The sugar trade has created economic dependence. The last sugar plantation closed some years ago, but invasive grasses now growing in abandoned plantations fuel fires started by heat.

As many as 1.2 billion people could be displaced across the world by 2050 due to natural disasters and the effects of climate change. Yet Sunak announced on July 31 that hundreds of new oil and gas licences will be granted.

Neither Tory nor Labour leaders will commit to honouring Britain’s Cop26 pledge of £11.6 billion towards the global climate and nature fund. This is intended to mitigate the impact of the climate crisis on the world’s poorest people by helping them to develop renewable energy.

The fight against fascism and for climate justice presents huge challenges for the progressive left as we escalate the struggle with our own ruling class. We can’t fudge or ignore these challenges. We must link these issues, make allies, build a united front, and take the battle of ideas into the labour movement.

It is the fight for our lives.