‘This should end Ben Habib’s career. It won’t. But in any rational universe it would’
Deputy leader of Reform UK has suggested that migrants should be left to drown in the Channel by the UK in a shocking exchange that has caused widespread outrage.
Ben Habib made the disturbing comments in an interview with Julia Hartley-Brewer on Talk TV when asked how his right-wing party would handle migrants coming to England on small boats.
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He told the presenter: “I said that we could, as an idea, provide them with another dinghy into which to climb and then go back to France. And if they choose to scupper that dinghy, then yes, they have to suffer the consequences of their actions.”
“Then you would leave them to drown?”, asked Hartley-Brewer.
Habib replied: “Absolutely, they cannot be infantilised to the point that we become a hostage to fortune.”
Despite the findings of the Supreme Court, the government is compelling judges to treat Rwanda as a safe country.
The passage of the Rwanda Bill late last night, after a parliamentary showdown ended between the Commons and the Lords, has been met with condemnation and outrage by a number of human rights groups.
Some have described it as a ‘national disgrace’ while others slammed it as cruel and inhumane.
Sunak had made stopping small boat crossings across the channel a major priority, with his Rwanda Bill a key part of his plans in doing so. The Prime Minister says that the first flights removing asylum seekers who arrive illegally to the UK to the east African country are due to take off in 10-12 weeks time.
So why are human rights groups condemning the legislation and why are they concerned?
Rwanda is not a safe country, Supreme Court rules
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Disregarding domestic and international law
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‘Genuine refugees would be at risk of being returned to their home countries, where they could face harm’
Disclosure, calculated on basis of 300 deportations, called ‘staggering’ by chair of home affairs committee
Rishi Sunak’s flagship plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda will cost taxpayers £1.8m for each of the first 300 people the government deports to Kigali, Whitehall’s official spending watchdog has disclosed.
The overall cost of the scheme stands at more than half a billion pounds, according to the figures released to the National Audit Office. Even if the UK sends nobody to the central African state, Sunak has signed up to pay £370m from the public purse over the five-year deal.
The disclosures follow nearly three years of refusals by prime ministers, home secretaries and senior Home Office staff to explain the full costs of the deal, citing “commercial confidentiality”.
So far, no asylum seeker has been sent to Rwanda, because of repeated challenges to the scheme under European and UK laws.
Those who drive boats are often simply the poorest people on board. Those really at fault still walk free
Ibrahima Bah is today facing a possible life sentence for facilitating illegal entry into the UK, and for four counts of manslaughter by gross negligence. But the real culprits here remain off the hook – and this will almost certainly lead to more deaths.
Arrested in December 2022, Bah was steering an unseaworthy dinghy across the English Channel when it collapsed. The floor of the dinghy ripped when it approached the fishing vessel Arcturus and everyone stood up to try and be rescued. According to Utopia 56, a refugee charity that has announced legal action against the British coastguard and French agencies for this case, authorities failed to launch a search and rescue operation despite being alerted by Alarmphone, a hotline for migrants in distress at sea.
Eventually, four people were found dead while four were recorded missing. Some 39 survivors, most from Afghanistan, were rescued and claimed asylum in the UK.
Asylum seekers dying in the English Channel is not something new. In November 2021, 31 people, including a girl aged five and her teenage siblings, died after their dinghy sank in the Channel. And in October 2020, seven people, including five from one Iranian Kurdish family, lost their lives after a small boat carrying 20 migrants capsized off the French coast.
These are only a few examples in the long deadly history of the French-UK border. But Bah’s case marks a historic and troubling milestone: he is the first shipwreck survivor in the UK to face manslaughter charges for the deaths of fellow passengers.
A network called Captain Support that acts in solidarity with those accused of driving boats to Europe has been closely monitoring Bah’s case. Its members are right to point out the conviction marks a violent escalation in the criminalisation of migration by the UK government under its ‘stop the boats’ campaign and measures to cut net migration.
Ironically, this frontal assault on migrant rights comes at a time when polls for the first time since 2016 suggest that most British people hold positive views of immigration, exposing the ‘stop the boats’ battle for its deeply ideological nature. But other aspects of the policy, less routinely covered in the media, have been no less damaging – and these directly relate to Ibrahima Bah’s unjust conviction.
The Nationality and Borders Act came into force in June 2022, expanding the scope of immigration crimes in the UK in response to the so-called ‘small boats crisis’. This act introduced the offence of ‘illegal arrival’ with a maximum penalty of four years in jail. It also expanded the scope of the more serious offence of ‘facilitating arrival’, of which Bah was convicted, and increased the maximum penalty to life imprisonment.
Hundreds of people have since been arrested and imprisoned for simply trying to reach the UK to claim asylum, according to a forthcoming report by Victoria Taylor, published by the Centre for Criminology at the University of Oxford and Border Criminologies.
While the government repeatedly invokes the mantra of favouring ‘safe and legal routes’ when justifying this increasingly draconian legislation, existing laws don’t provide any. As Amnesty International has pointed out: “The UK government does not allow anyone to make a claim for asylum unless they are physically present in the UK… It is impossible to come to the UK for the purpose of seeking asylum in any way permitted by the government’s immigration rules.”
openDemocracy revealed last year that a toddler and a father were among those who had died while waiting vainly for officially sanctioned UN routes to take them to safety; their families remain stranded in Turkey.
Aside from two temporary visa schemes that have been beset with their own problems – for asylum seekers from Ukraine with family or hosts in the UK, and Afghans who are in danger due to having worked with the UK government – anyone wishing to apply for asylum in the UK has no choice but to travel to the UK in an unauthorised manner.
In simple terms, the UK government requires asylum seekers to endanger their lives and break the law in order to exercise their lawful right to claim asylum.
Countering this means more than debunking the myths of ‘safe and legal’ routes. It’s also about addressing the criminalisation of ‘facilitating arrival’ – often presented as a necessary measure to uproot the ‘criminal gangs’ exploiting vulnerable individuals.
In fact, human rights organisations and academic researchers have time and again shown that counter-smuggling policies and targeting of boat drivers harms migrant communities the most. These policies overlook the reality that, in many instances, those piloting boats are the poorest and least resourced among asylum seekers, agreeing to steer these vessels and take on significant legal risks in exchange for free passage.
And indeed, Ibrahima, who is from Senegal – a country still grappling with the effects of colonialism and with 40% of its population living below the poverty line – asserted that this was precisely why he agreed to pilot the boat.
Having journeyed from Senegal to Mali, then Algeria and Libya, before taking a boat from Libya to Italy with the aid of smugglers, Bah decided to pilot the vessel in exchange for free passage. During his trial, Bah said when he realised the boat was unseaworthy, he refused to drive it, but he was then assaulted by those that organised the trip who coerced him into complying. The jury not only dismissed Bah’s claims but also the testimonies of the survivors themselves, who portrayed Ibrahima as an “angel” trying to save lives.
As detailed in Captain Support’s court report, a witness statement from the captain of the Arcturus presented Bah as “mouthy” and ungrateful, both racial stereotypes. The all-white jury concluded that Bah, a Black teenager, had failed in his duty of care towards his fellow passengers. By convicting Bah of manslaughter, the jury effectively exonerated the UK of responsibility for its lethal border policies.
Britain’s emulation of these policies is both predictable and deeply alarming. British prime minister Rishi Sunak recently teamed up with Italy’s far-right leader Giorgia Meloni in her attempts to crack down on ‘illegal migration’. And in November 2023, Suella Braverman – then the UK home secretary and the architect of the ‘stop the boats’ campaign – lauded Greece’s “tough but fair migration policy” following her tour of one of Europe’s most harrowing borders. This dangerous coalition, which wields death and scapegoating as tools of deterrence, must be dismantled immediately.
Ibrahima Bah’s sentencing hearing is scheduled for Friday 23 February.Solidarity actionshave been called in response, including a call for support at 2pm at Canterbury Crown and a demonstration at 6pm at the Home Office.
Water price hikes: we need a mass movement for public ownership
UNITE’S Sharon Graham calls the water industry “a symbol of the failure of privatisation writ large.”
She is right. The only reaction to water bosses’ announcement that they will raise prices above inflation from April should be a mass campaign for renationalisation now.
Water suppliers claim they need to raise bills because they are planning big investments to cut down on leaks. How dare they?
Since privatisation these crooks have paid out over £70 billion in dividends to shareholders, loaded the sector — debt-free when privatised — with over £50bn in debt and raised bills by over 40 per cent.
While milking the system for everything it’s worth they have neglected basic maintenance and repairs. In London and the south-east alone, water regulator Ofwat calculated last year that 600 million litres, equivalent to 270 Olympic swimming pools, are leaked from pipes every single day.
They have behaved with utter contempt for the environment, discharging untreated sewage into our waterways thousands of times. They have continued to pay executives millions even when fined for their illegal ecological vandalism.
THE director of public prosecutions is appealing to the Supreme Court to overturn the acquittal of two peaceful protesters for insulting Iain Duncan Smith.
Ruth Wood and Radical Haslam were charged over an incident in Manchester during the October 2021 Conservative Party conference at which both called the former work and pensions secretary “Tory scum” and Ms Wood added “F*** off out of Manchester.”
That their case even reached the High Court should have set alarm bells ringing over the creeping restriction of free speech in Britain. That court’s not guilty verdict was welcome, though its consideration of their motives for insulting Mr Duncan Smith was surely unnecessary: rudeness to a politician should not be considered criminal, end of.
THE tragic human cost of the Bibby Stockholm barge was revealed by MPs today as the Tories’ overspend on asylum accommodation landed taxpayers with an extra £2.6 billion bill.
Dame Diana Johnson said asylum-seekers were facing “claustrophobic” conditions that could amount to a breach of human rights after the home affairs select committee visited the Portland vessel.
The committee chairwoman wrote to illegal migration minister Michael Tomlinson to set out serious concerns about the wellbeing of asylum-seekers on the barge.
She said it was “disheartened to see some of the living conditions on the Bibby Stockholm” after finding “many individuals having to share small, cramped cabins (originally designed for one person), often with people (up to six) they do not know (some of whom spoke a different language to them).”
“These crowded conditions were clearly contributing to a decline in mental health for some of the residents, and they could amount to violations of the human rights of asylum-seekers,” she added.
The committee complained of “discrepancies” between the accounts of officials and asylum-seekers themselves, noting MPs received “inconsistent” information regarding access to GP services for those on board.
AN ELECTED Labour mayor who was barred by the party from standing in May’s mayoral election has launched his election campaign standing as an independent.
North of Tyne Mayor Jamie Driscoll attacked Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer in a packed community hall in Sunderland on Thursday night asking: “What if – it’s a general election year – Keir Starmer says, ‘here’s my 10 pledges’ – would you trust him to keep them?”
He criticised Labour MPs and other politicians who changed their positions each time a policy was altered by the leadership.
“The day I left the Labour Party was the day Labour said they would adopt the Conservative policy of the two-child benefit cap — a policy that plunged 250,000 kids into poverty at a stroke,” he said.
“And all those Labour frontbenchers – and Labour mayoral candidates – who’d said that policy was ‘heinous’ and ‘cruel’ changed their tune, and said, ‘ah, well, you know, public finances,’ and meekly swallowed the party line that it’s OK to keep children in poverty.