10.08.2023

Fuelling the politics of hate

Once again the Tories are targeting migrants. Bibby Stockholm is meant to serve as a deterrent but, in fact, it’s a political weapon designed to prevent electoral meltdown, argues Kevin Bean

Given predictions of a coming recession, the ongoing cost of living crisis and truly dismal poll ratings, the spinmeisters and political consultants working at Conservative Campaign Headquarters (CCHQ) must be taking some small comfort from the recent furore about the government’s migration policy. They got the headlines they wanted and the chance for ministers and MPs to tour the media studios and give press interviews in which, once again, they banged away about the government’s policy to crack down on ‘people smugglers’ and ‘illegal migration’.

August is traditionally the silly season for the media, with many politicians and journalists away on holiday, and most of the political world taking a summer break. However, it seems that this year the strategists in CCHQ were not relaxing on the beach and instead took the opportunity to fan the xenophobic politics of fear and hatred that the Tories believe won for them in 2019. The none-too-subtle message is that if you vote Labour the borders will be thrown open and Britain will be swamped by scroungers, thieves, rapists and young men up to no good.

The main focus has been on the Bibby Stockholm barge, moored at Portland in Dorset. Due to house some 500 asylum-seekers, who are currently mainly in hotels, the scheme has hit a wall of refusals and appeals. Clearly, though, the whole barge farrago was designed to deflect attention from the news that the backlog in processing asylum seekers has grown to a record 166,261 and costs the exchequer a whopping £2 billion per year. This hardly squares with David Cameron’s manifesto promise to bring down migration figures to the tens of thousands or Rishi Sunak’s pledge to ‘stop the small boats’.

So getting some asylum-seekers, even if only a few dozen, out of hotels and onto the barge is politically essential, showing that the government was at last ‘getting to grips with the problem’. There was also the added bonus that the ‘basic’ nature of the accommodation on board could be contrasted with the perceived luxury of the hotels, further adding to the punitive and deterrent character of the policy. As deputy Tory chair Lee Anderson put it in ‘salty language’, “If they don’t like the barges, they can fuck off back to France.”¹ Taken together with hints that the Tories will campaign to leave the European Convention on Human Rights, which features in the Rwanda legal case, this shows that the politics of rabid national chauvinism will continue to be ruthlessly promoted in the run-up to the next general election ... meanwhile licence is given to local mobs, far-right grouplets and lone-wolf terrorists to launch their own attacks.

Though Anderson has been denounced by a range of former Tory cabinet ministers, such as Dominic Grieve - he was even branded as a ‘fascist’ by one of them - the calculation will be that being beastly to foreigners always goes down well with a certain section of Tory voters. Once it was the Huguenots, later the Irish, then the Jews, after that West Indians and Pakistanis … now it is Muslims fleeing from Iraq, Iran, Syria and Afghanistan.

The real sticking point for Sunak’s government is that the central plank of their policy on migration and asylum - the off-shoring of the application process to a third country, Rwanda - has been subject to legal challenge and a government appeal against a Court of Appeal ruling is currently awaiting a hearing by the Supreme Court. This could be delayed until early 2024 and, if the court rules that the policy is lawful, there will be little time for it to be implemented before the expected date of the general election in 2024.² So, the clock is ticking for the government and their options appear to be running out.

However, this legal case and a number of other unrelated legal challenges on different aspects of the policy have opened up another political front for the Tories, giving them the prime targets of lefty lawyers gaming the system, liberal judges thwarting the will of the people and Labour trying to politicise the legal system.

Justice secretary Alex Chalk’s comments on politically motivated lawyers obstructing the government’s migration policy, together with home secretary Suella Braverman’s attempt to muddy the waters by identifying lawyers defending the rights of their clients as potentially crooked, just ramps up the rhetoric still further.³ In these and other recent attacks by cabinet ministers designed to shift blame for the failures of the government’s policy we can see just how important migration and asylum will be in the general election campaign.⁴

Although the Tories think they can pin the ‘lefty lawyer’ label on Sir Keir and identify Labour with ‘open borders’ and do-gooding liberalism, the Starmer leadership’s triangulation strategy means that they have moved one step further to the right. When Labour spokespeople make a criticism of current migration policy, it is not about the principle, but focuses on the practice and the failure of the Tories to be hard enough and deliver on their promises. So, when Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, calls out Braverman, it is over inefficiency in dealing with the backlog, not the stated aims of the policy to penalise migrants and reduce the numbers of people coming to Britain. Likewise, Labour frontbencher Nick Thomas-Symonds’ hand-wringing over the issue of barges to house migrants is combined with the regret that, given the situation an incoming Labour government will inherit, the policy of using barges and other elements of existing arrangements will have to “temporarily continue”.⁵

While Tory and Labour politicians exchanged soundbites at Westminster, another closely related form of the politics of migration was playing out in Portland Harbour. One group of demonstrators gathered to proclaim that “refugees and migrants are welcome here” (Stand up to Racism), while another group (Nimby locals) countered this welcome with opposition to the barge being moored in Portland at all: it would put a strain on local services and disrupt the local community.

As one protestor put it in a radio interview, “Let’s look after our own first, not treat migrants like kings!”⁶ Ultimately these forms of the politics of migration are rooted in those of scarcity which underpin bourgeois society. Arguments that we cannot afford to house more people, that there are not enough jobs, that migrants put pressure on local services and that Britain is overcrowded reflect the concerns of many people when the issue of migration is raised. If you accept the logic of capitalism and the economic programmes of the parties that uphold the system, then resources are indeed scarce! Furthermore, if you frame your politics around these arguments, as both Tory and Labour leaders do, your policies will inevitably amount to little more than pulling up the drawbridge and trying to limit migration so ‘we’ can look after ‘our own’ first.

Despite the tough words, the never-ending stream of legislation and the continual crackdowns on illegal migration, within contemporary capitalism migration has its own dynamics and patterns of ‘push and pull’ factors, which shape the movement of people globally. The Tories focus on ‘stopping the boats’ crossing the English Channel, but, as we know from the recent tragedy, with 41 migrants drowning off the island of Lampedusa, and the continued exodus from Latin America into the US, these patterns of migration are essentially international. The ‘push’ of IMF and World Bank austerity, narco-wars, the petty warlordism of Islamic fanatics, the chronic lack of opportunities, along with the disastrous effects of climate change, combine with the ‘pull’ factors that encourage millions to leave their homes in search of a better, more secure life in the rich capitalist economies of western Europe and North America.

No matter how vile the chauvinist language or how punitive the ‘welcome’ migrants are offered by the likes of Rishi Sunak, Ron DeSantis, Giorgia Meloni and Nigel Farage, the flows of human beings across seas and land borders will continue. The push factors are so overwhelming and the pull factors far too attractive to be countered by the types of measures announced over the last few days.