This Tory Government is probably the most right-wing government in British history. The irony is that including the Prime Minister, quite a few key positions are held by those from ethnic minority backgrounds. You would be right to ask why that matters. However, one would perhaps naively expect people from those backgrounds to have more empathy for similar people. They have shown that they do not have an ounce of that wonderful quality. Quite the contrary in fact.
Rishi Sunak, the PM, outlined his government’s ‘Illegal Immigration Bill’ in Parliament last week. The bill if passed will place a duty on the Home Secretary to return those arriving the shores of UK in small boats, to Rwanda or a safe third country at the earliest opportunity. What is more, those people will never be able to make an asylum application in future.
You will remember that last year the previous Home Office Minister Priti Patel’s attempts to send asylum seekers to Rwanda failed due to challenges in the European Human Rights Court. Her futile attempts cost the country more than half a million pounds.
The words ‘illegal’ in the title of the bill is very paradoxical, as most law experts state that the bill itself will be deemed as ‘illegal’ if passed. The experts’ views are that this will contravene the European Human Rights Convention. The Convention was developed at the end of the Second World War in order to prevent countries breaching people’s human rights.
Last week, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees stated that the bill if passed would also contravene the UN Refugee Convention.
Suella Braverman had said during the Tory leadership campaign that she would take the UK out of the European Human Rights Convention. So far, she has not mentioned that. Of course, as a lawyer who has acted as the Attorney General in the past, she is well aware of the difficulties this would cause. Promising outrageous things during a campaign is not so difficult.
In fact, Sunak, Braverman, the whole Cabinet know full well that the bill will fail. It’s a re-hush of previous, collapsed attempts. The real reason according to a lot of commentators is to attack Labour. They want to show that the Labour Party is opposed to any attempts to protect the borders of the UK, which of course is nonsense.
The Tories are yet again mercilessly using the most vulnerable people as scapegoats to prolong their stay in power. They are trying to cover up their monumental failures in the 13 years they have been in power.
They employed the same tactics during the Brexit campaign. Who can forget Boris’s claim that 80 million Turks would arrive at UK if Brexit did not happen? Braverman is now suggesting that 100 million asylum seekers could come to the UK without her planned immigration crackdown!
The Tories are very angry with an unlikely person. One of the biggest names in British football. They are very worried by Gary Lineker’s justified criticisms of their asylum policy. Lineker has 8.6 million followers on Twitter.
The BBC succumbed to the pressures and prevented Gary from presenting the popular March of the Day program on Saturday night. As a result of a lot of other sports pundits’ solidarity with Lineker, most of the weekend sports programs were cancelled. Match pf the Day was shown without punditry and commentary. The cowardly actions of the BBC were condemned by many influential people. Most people thought it was laughable for the BBC to censure Lineker, while its chairman had donated £400k to the Tories, and facilitated a loan for his friend, the former Tory PM Boris.
It is natural for governments to control their boundaries. However, in doing so they cannot ignore their international obligations. The UN Universal Human Rights Declaration gives people suffering persecution in their countries to seek refuge in another country. No one wishes to leave the country where they were born without good reason.
If the UK does not provide safe routes to enable people to apply for asylum, asylum seekers will continue to risk their lives in order to create conditions to seek refuge here.
In 2022, 1,185 refugees were resettled to the UK – 75% fewer than in 2019. Only 22 refugees came to the UK on the Afghan citizens resettlement scheme. There were also 4,473 refugee family reunion visas issued, down 40% on pre-Covid levels.
In comparison, in the last year more than 210,000 visas have been issued to people from Ukraine to travel to the UK. There are no Ukrainians recorded as having crossed the channel in a small boat. The Guardian.
As I was about to send this article to Euro Genc, I learnt that the BBC has backed down and re-instated Gary Lineker as presenter.