A group of people thought to be migrants are brought in to Dover, Kent, onboard the RNLI Dungeness Lifeboat following a small boat incident in the Channel, September 3, 2024
AT LEAST 12 people trying to cross into Britain from France have died after their boat sank in the English Channel.
The deaths were confirmed today by the French coastguard after a rescue operation near the coast of Cap Gris-Nez, off Wimereux, took place.
Up to 65 people were rescued and two were still missing as the Morning Star went to print.
According to the mayor of Le Portel – where the surviving refugees were being treated – the bottom of the boat “ripped open.”
The people on board the dinghy ended up in the water and several of them needed emergency medical care, the French coastguard said.
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The International Organisation for Migration, which records Channel crossing deaths as part of its Missing Migrant Project, estimates 226 people including 35 children are missing or have died after attempting the crossing as of January this year.
According to the French coastguard, there have been at least 19 deaths in 2024 prior to Tuesday’s incident, including nine since the start of July.
Last week, France and Britain agreed to deepen co-operation on so-called illegal migration in the Channel.
At least 2,109 people have tried to cross since – the highest number of the year.
Starmer announces plan to stop the boats in May 2024 | Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
The UK immigration system is racist by design. The Border Security Bill will make it worse
Over the past few years of increasingly hostile migration policies, many in the migrant, including refugee, charity sector have looked to the dawn of a new government with eager anticipation. Surely, a Labour government would undo so many of these cruel anti-migration laws and mark a more ‘progressive’ chapter in migrant rights?
While the new government wasted little time in scrapping the infamous Rwanda Plan (and rightly so) it has diverted funds from that scheme into yet another anti-migrant policy in the form of the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill. The announcement of this bill proves our caution was completely justified. It’s simply a continuation of the UK’s track record of enacting immigration policies that disproportionately impact people of colour.
We only have to look at the record of the last Labour government to see that they are no different to the Conservatives in embedding anti-migrant policies and rhetoric. Let’s not forget it was a Labour home secretary who first coined the term ‘hostile environment’ and it was New Labour that brought in the restrictive Immigration and Asylum Act 1999 and Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002, which laid the foundation for the hostile environment policies of the past 14 years.
In the past year itself, now-prime minister, Keir Starmer, has made plenty of not-so-subtle signs indicating what approach his government would take towards people seeking safety, including a promise to treat so-called ‘smugglers’ like “terrorists”.
Fast forward one year and these ideas have materialised in the form of the new Border Security Bill. The bill was announced as part of the King’s Speech and is part of a turn towards approaching migration through counter-terror, making space for even greater surveillance of and denial of rights for migrants, including refugees.
This dangerous bill would introduce powers previously been confined to alleged terror offenders, including travel bans and restrictions in the UK and abroad, restrictions on access to the internet and banking, and the ability to apply these measures before someone is even convicted of smuggling offences.
UK’s immigration policy has always been racist
Successive UK governments have essentially tried to ‘outdo’ each other when it comes to making the lives of migrants, including refugees, and racialised communities unbearable. In fact, these rafts of policies stem from a long history of targeting ‘unwelcome’ groups based on colonial constructions of the ‘threat’ and who are considered to be of ‘good character’.
In the Migrants’ Rights Network’s new Hostile Office report, we demonstrate that from the 1905 Aliens Act to the inhumane Migration Act 2023 (Illegal Migration Act), as well as the suffering of the Windrush victims and the government’s ability to deprive people of their citizenship, it should be evident to all of us that immigration laws are underpinned by a desire to limit the presence and freedom of racialised people in the UK.
Proposed powers in the new Border Security Bill would enable border force officers to search people and examine and seize their belongings, including copying data from and retaining people’s mobile phones, without a requirement for reasonable suspicion. It mirrors Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000, where someone can be arrested and convicted for refusing to hand over sensitive and personal information, including passcodes to devices, in addition to failing to answer all questions or refusing to provide biometric data – all without the need for reasonable suspicion.
However, implementing counter-terrorism policies into immigration is hardly surprising or new. It marks just another chapter of an increasingly cruel, racist and Islamophobic trajectory in the immigration system.
Take citizenship laws, for example. Deprivation of citizenship and counter-terror laws are linked: most cases of deprivation on ‘public good’ grounds have been justified using counter-terror legislation. We have been campaigning against the expansion of deprivation of citizenship powers and highlighting the racist, Islamophobic nature of them.
Since the 2003 ‘Hamza amendment’ to the British Nationality Act 1981 (an amendment that was passed specifically to deport one man, Abu Hamza, a naturalised British citizen), of those who have had their citizenship revoked since 2002, the majority of people affected have been British Muslims.
Our findings show that between 2002 and 2022, 85% of those stripped of their citizenship had, or were deemed to have, nationalities of countries in Africa, South Asia or West Asia (the Middle East) and 83% were from former British colonies. Of this, 41% were South Asian, all being Pakistani or Bangladeshi.
It is, therefore, not a huge leap to understand that the presence of counter-terror measures serves to limit the freedom, security and sense of belonging for racialised people in the UK, particularly those from a Muslim background.
Meanwhile, in December 2023, the Home Office published an Independent Review of Prevent’s report and the government’s response by William Shawcross (Independent Reviewer of Prevent) in which he recommended the Government explore extending Prevent into the immigration and asylum system. Make no mistake, linking the racist criminal (in)justice and counter-terror systems will further the harm and punishment to people seeking safety and a new life. It will do nothing to target the true roots of why people migrate and are forced to make dangerous border crossings.
The answer to a lack of safe routes is not further criminalisation through the introduction of counter-terror powers, which are often opaque and almost impossible to challenge. This lack of safe routes is why brokers exist, to capitalise on people’s desperation.
The Border Security Bill, and the counter-terrorism approach as part of a package deal, will just continue a long tradition of punishing people of colour at the UK border.
Jeremy Corbyn MP, former leader of the Labour Party
Migrants and refugees are not responsible for Britain’s ills – a message we must make absolutely clear, says JEREMY CORBYN MP
LAST week, a horrendous murder took place in Southport as three children were brutally hacked to death in a violent knife attack. What followed showed both the best and worst of society.
The best was the outpouring of support for the grieving families of the children. The worst was the far-right forces who attacked the mosque in Southport, a hotel housing refugees in Rotherham, and Muslim-run businesses across the country.
These far-right attacks on the Muslim community echo the tactics of the Nazis against Jewish people, shops and businesses in Germany in the 1930s. In both scenarios, the far right use violence against minorities and blame them for poverty, housing shortages and pressures on health and education services.
The emboldening of the racist right has come from the growing use of anti-migrant language by supposedly mainstream politicians, claiming that desperate people crossing the Channel in flimsy boats are an “invading force.”
The same voices seem unable or unwilling to acknowledge that wars cause refugee flows, and that the migrants who have made their homes in Britain work tirelessly to try and make underfunded services work at all.
At the same time, we are witnessing an economic strategy inherited from the Tories which increases the huge wealth gap in our society, perpetuates austerity and ignores the desperate poverty of so many children.
The response of the left must be to stand with the victims of far-right terror, challenge the far-right racism and call for the government to address the common issues facing all communities: the housing crisis, crumbling education and the collapse of our NHS.
Police officers with protesters as trouble flares during an anti-immigration demonstration outside the Holiday Inn Express in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, August 4, 2024
RIOTERS stormed a Holiday Inn housing asylum-seekers in Rotherham today and attempted to set it ablaze, marking the latest in a series of horrific far-right attacks.
Violence has escalated across the country after fascists seized on the fatal stabbing of three young girls in Southport to whip up hatred and incite riots.
Over 35 rallies supported by the far right took place across Britain and Northern Ireland at the weekend, with anti-fascists mobilising in opposition.
On Friday gangs burnt a Citizens’ Advice bureau to the ground and attacked a mosque in Sunderland after a rally held under the slogan “Enough is Enough.”
Unrest spread to Hull the following day where another hotel housing asylum-seekers was attacked while mobs looted shops on the high street.
In Liverpool, a library that serves one of the country’s most deprived communities was torched by youths in Walton.
Home Secretary and Defence Secretary – as well as their boss Keir Starmer and ousted colleagues – validate anti-refugee bigotry
Labour government figures have spoken against the far-right’s racist violence and destruction – but the red Tory faction running the government and party have an appalling record of pandering to and inciting the anti-immigrant bigotry now running rampant on our streets.
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper was behind Labour’s infamous racist ‘controls on immigration’ mug – and was rightly lambasted for it by thousands of respondents after she went through the motions of condemning the fascist violence:
Cut the nonsense you care.
You and people in your Party like Jonathan Ashworth whipped up hate during the GE campaign espeically against Bangladeshi people to get support for Reform-Voters
And arson attempt now in Tamworth. It's also appalling that during GE @UKLabour was demonising migrants to win racist votes. Eg both Starmer and loser Ashworth talking on the same day about sending Bangladeshis back. Still got your anti-immigrant mug?
‘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.”
