“For years,” boasted Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer, “the Tories were trying to secure a deal like this.” After a meeting between Starmer and Macron, for every refugee who is legally accepted into Britain via France, an unsuccessful ‘illegal’ refugee will be deported to France.
By Chris Haughey
This policy was originally the brainchild of Robert Jenrick, former Tory leadership hopeful. Labour’s latest adoption of another nauseating right-wing Tory policy is based on the utterly false idea that anything will deter people already desperate enough to risk their lives crossing the busiest sea lane in the world in unseaworthy, overcrowded dinghies.
Of course, this will do nothing to stop people-smuggling, or to address the reasons why millions of people flee their homes. The United Nations estimates that over 120 million people were refugees at the end of 2024. Most, like the Palestinians, remain refugees in their own countries, trapped in warzones, fleeing from one slaughter and often into another.
42 million people escaped their country, of whom most became refugees in other poorer countries, often in appalling conditions at the behest of racist Western governments. Of those 42 million people, perhaps 60,000 have tried or will try to cross the English Channel this year. They are from countries such as Afghanistan, Somalia, or Sudan – countries ripped apart by imperialist invasions and ravaged by Western-backed warlords.
The aim is to distract the attention of working-class people away from our collapsing public services, unaffordable housing, sky-high prices and flatlining wages, or as a second best to have us blame 40,000 poverty-stricken asylum seekers for the crimes of the landlords, bankers, super-rich and their politicians.
We say: no-one is illegal, but the crimes against humanity of this capitalist system should be! Instead of demonising refugees, we need a revolutionary socialist transformation of the world, so that no one has to become a refugee, and no one is fearful of losing the little they might have to someone with even less.
What’s behind the anti-refugee turn?
There is a grain of economic self-interest at the bottom of the rich parties’ racism. Some parts of the British economy benefit from very low-paid workers who lack the same legal rights as others, such as parts of hospitality, agriculture, construction, social care and so on. But the main reason the ‘refugee crisis’ is being blown up now is because the main parties have no answers to the very real crisis facing workers and young people. While Labour and Tories bicker about ‘stopping the boats’ and ‘smashing the gangs’, the racists in Reform UK hoover up votes and council seats.
Emboldened by Labour’s drift to the right, they are now pushing forward with plans to corral traumatised migrants into mass holding centres and conduct mass deportations to oppressive countries of origin, measures straight from the Trump playbook.
An opinion poll at the time of writing has Labour and Tories on 17% and 15% respectively, or put together having the support of less than one-third of the electorate. The same poll shows Reform by itself at 34%. Endless racist incitement by politicians and media opened the door to riots last summer when the far right tried to violently attack refugees. This was cut across by mass demonstrations – and yet the lesson drawn by Labour was that it needed to be more racist.
Internationalism
Socialists approach the issues involved from an internationalist standpoint, which is necessary to understand what is happening, even moreso to find answers. A world of crisis – environmental, economic, military and so on – inevitably means a world in which people flee from catastrophe in hope of finding somewhere better. The world doesn’t have to be like this – there is enough food produced to feed the global population several times over. The wars being fought are wars for the rich in which the poor just get to do the dying, and the climate crisis could be managed with sufficient public planning. But capitalism is a blood-soaked system incapable of consistently planning or equitably distributing. It is inherently chaotic and unfair, and it is getting worse.
We defend those fleeing disasters, and oppose all attempts to scapegoat or blame them for the problems of the countries to which they have fled. Most ‘economic migrants’ are actually economic refugees, escaping poverty in the hope of better-paid work elsewhere. We reject the attempts to pit the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ migrants/refugees against one another, just as we reject the idea that some people are ‘legal’ and others are ‘illegal’. Most people would prefer to stay in their home countries, close to family, if they can live safely and make a living. But these are the conditions which capitalism cannot provide, and that’s why we fight it as a system.
To tackle the reasons for people being forced to move, we have to fight against war, poverty, disease and all the other evils of capitalism. We need a socialist world, in which the vast wealth and resources are used in a democratic, sustainable way for the benefit of people and planet, not for the frivolities of space-jockey billionaires or in perpetuating the slaughterfields of Ukraine, Gaza, Congo etc.
Fight for socialism
The same opinion poll quoted earlier in this article showed a ‘Jeremy Corbyn led new left party’ on 15%, neck and neck with Labour, ahead of Lib-Dems and Greens and almost overtaking the Tories. Millions of workers and young people are desperate for a political alternative to the racist ‘mainstream’ parties. The new party launched by Corbyn and Sultana has the potential to provide that alternative. Within the new left party, Socialist Alternative will argue for the socialist policies needed to successfully defend refugees, resist the racists, and put capitalism in a political grave.
We fight for:
- Refugee and migrant rights. We oppose cruel and often fatal deportations and defend the right for families to be reunited.
- As an immediate step to end the small boat crossings crisis, we call for the setting up of humanitarian ‘safe passage’ routes available to those seeking to claim asylum in the UK.
- The immediate closure of detention centres and rehousing of refugees in decent and humane conditions.
- A mass programme of council house building, providing jobs and affordable homes both for immigrants and the millions already living here.
- The right to work for all asylum seekers, as well as to the going rate for the job and the ability to join a union.
