06.07.2023

Enemies of the people

Kevin Bean asks why delays, objections and challenges to the Illegal Migration Bill are far from unwelcome to the Tories

As the general election nears, migration and asylum policy are being relentlessly pushed up the political agenda by the Tories and the rightwing media. ‘Stopping the boats’ and ‘cracking down on illegal migration’ is one of Rishi Sunak’s ‘five pledges’, trumpeted as “the people’s priorities” at every available opportunity - in TV interviews and at PMQs in the House of Commons.

It is clear that migration will be a central election issue for the Tories and that it is one they think will win them support amongst key groups of voters. So it is these electoral imperatives which underlie the Illegal Migration Bill, currently making its way through parliament, and which frame the political rhetoric. Tory politicians are trying to justify the policy of sending asylum-seekers to Rwanda to have their claims processed, but getting the legislation through parliament has not been plain sailing for Sunak’s government.

The bill has been subject to legal challenges in the courts - last week’s appeal court ruling that the policy was unlawful, because Rwanda is not a “safe third country” for those seeking asylum, will almost certainly be taken on appeal by the government to the Supreme Court. Meanwhile, the House of Lords has put down so many amendments to the bill that it will doubtless dominate much of this parliamentary session.

These challenges and delays are not unwelcome to the Tories. They can be turned to political advantage. Expect more ‘Enemies of the people’ type headlines in the yellow press - failure to reduce migration down to the “tens of thousands” being blamed on lefty lawyers, privileged judges and unelected peers. Better still if bien pensant religious leaders and other members of ‘the great and the good’ join in the criticism of a morally unacceptable and inhumane policy - what better opportunity to show that it really is the Tories who are on the side of common sense and ‘the people’ against the liberal elite? Although the Illegal Migration Bill largely has these political and performative functions, we should not overlook the harshness and cruelty of its proposals as so much rhetoric or headline-grabbing spin.

Outsourcing of asylum claims to an unsafe third country and the risk that unsuccessful claimants could be returned to the very countries from which they are fleeing has gathered the most criticism, but the detention provisions and the wider implications of the undermining of legal and human rights contained in the legislation should not be downplayed either. Critics in the Lords - including Tories - have pointed out how the bill is contrary to the European Convention on Human Rights and other international treaty obligations, and so runs counter to the position that the British state has adopted since the late 1940s.

One bright idea of the Tory right is to include a pledge to hold a referendum about leaving the ECHR in the general election manifesto. If that happens, and if the Tories win, and if the referendum happens, and if the referendum goes against the ECHR, and if parliament votes through the necessary legislation, then the UK would join Russia and Belarus as the only non-ECHR signatories. At lot of ifs, but it does explain why there is such disquiet about the Tories amongst the top ranks of the civil service. Leaving the ECHR is just not British.

Although there is a certain amount of self-congratulatory, patriotic blather about Winston Churchill and the role of British jurists in framing the ECHR after the horrors of Hitler Germany, the fact remains that the ECHR is an integral part of capitalism’s post-World War II international architecture. Leaving would doubtless complement Brexit, but amount to yet another self-inflicted wound by an out-of-control political class.

If Rishi Sunak is using tough action against ‘illegal migration’ as a political rallying cry, other sections of the Tory Party are attempting to widen the attack and focus on migration more generally.

Although they pledge loyalty to Sunak and claim they are committed to his campaign to win the general election, the New Conservatives, who launched their own 12-point plan on migration this week, are applying none-too-subtle pressure on the prime minister to move even further to the right. Pointing to the rise in non-European Union immigration following Brexit, they called for drastic reduction in all migration, the ending of temporary work visas, a sharp cut in the numbers of overseas students and their dependents, and a cap on council housing for non-British citizens.

In reality this group of far-right Tory MPs are actually looking beyond a probable election defeat and thinking more about future direction than the party’s immediate prospects. Liberal media commentators had a lot of fun reporting the launch of the plan, highlighting the inconsistencies in its proposals to cut migration and encourage ‘British jobs for British workers’, especially in social care and the health service. The half-baked prescriptions of evangelical, nativist natalist and Tory MP for Penistone and Stocksbridge, Miriam Cates, on raising low wages in the care sector, came in for particular ridicule, as did her “deep concerns about national and cultural security”.

Although Sunak rejected the New Conservative proposals for a more general blanket-ban on migration, both his Illegal Migration Bill and the ideas of Cates et al have a number of underlying political assumptions in common - despite the nativist overtones of much of the New Conservative rhetoric. Moreover, these assumptions are widely shared even by liberal critics of the harsher aspects of Tory government policy, who also frame their arguments around deserving (‘genuine’) and undeserving (‘bogus’) asylum-seekers and mere economic migrants.

Even the rather skewed and unreliable figures of the home office show that a majority of the asylum claims made by those people who ‘illegally’ arrive in small boats are upheld and that these ‘irregular’ arrivals come from countries such as Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. The political, economic and social push factors in those countries resulting from imperialist intervention and wars, combined with the impact of climate change and economic crisis in other areas of the so-called global south, have produced the recent waves of migration - by which we mean human beings who risk their lives to find a better life than what capitalism and imperialism makes available to them at home.

The real dangers and the desperate circumstances they face in crossing the English Channel and/or the Mediterranean in such flimsy craft only serve to undermine the hysteria and chauvinism whipped up by the disgusting, cynical campaigns of home secretary Suella Braverman, failed politician Nigel Farage, and the editors of the Mail, Express and Telegraph. The language of invasion and Cates’ fears of the threat to “cultural security” posed by migration has a long history in bourgeois politics and is, of course, by no means confined to contemporary British Tories. Similar language and policies can be found in Meloni’s Italy, Orbán’s Hungary and in a host of other European countries where the politics of the far right have been adopted by ‘mainstream’ conservatives and capitalist parties.

The recent National Conservative conference in London and the developing links between sections of the Tories and these far-right currents show the potential for this type of politics to become significant within the Tories after an electoral defeat. But there is no need for the Tories to seek out the exotic politics of the European far right or borrow from the American Christian right. They have a rich heritage of chauvinism and the politics of prejudice directed against foreigners and alien elements going back to the late 17th century Church and King mobs and their anti-Catholic hysteria.

The modern form of anti-migration legislation, the 1905 Aliens Act, was introduced by the Tories and directed against migration from Russia and eastern Europe - much of it poor Jewish people fleeing pogroms and tsarist persecution. Truly a despicable lineage, but one that the likes of Braverman and Farage (not to mention Johnson lying about the completely fictional dangers of Turkish migration during the Brexit campaign) are quite happy to draw upon. However, whatever the form - whether chauvinist Tories trying to stop the boats or concerned liberals arguing for ‘non-racist’ migration controls - these politics are rooted in a bourgeois political economy, which claims that scarce housing, hospital beds, school places and other social resources mean that capitalist Britain is somehow ‘full up’ and cannot admit any more people.

Labour leaders and even some who claim to be on the left parrot this line and accept the logic of capitalism, arguing that voters will not tolerate further immigration. As with other aspects of politics and society, the task of Marxists is to challenge those reformists and Labour bureaucrats who surrender to the limitations and the restrictions of the status quo, and advance instead an alternative political economy of the working class.