Sunak’s murderous government: their anti-asylum policy is killing refugees

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Workers' Fight workplace bulletin editorials
23 April 2024

Within hours of winning the ping-pong match with the House of Lords and passing the "Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill" into law, Sunak's policy had caused the death of 5 more refugees.

    The sea was extra-calm on Tuesday morning, so there were lots of attempted launches. The BBC and other media had sent reporters specially to report on "small boat crossings", to show that the threat of deportation to Rwanda is no deterrent. And so the desperate scramble for a place on the over-crowded and unseaworthy rubber dinghy which capsized, was actually shown on our screens. Other Afghan (the majority), Iranian, Eritrean and Somalian refugees were nevertheless undeterred - consciously risking their lives to undertake this last dangerous stage of their precarious journey

    In fact the latest installment of this anti-asylum Rwanda bill saga, was yet more of the Tory "theatre of diversion", which has been so popular ever since Cameron's 2010-2016 government got out-flanked on its political right. It's hard to forget: first, there was the "hostile environment for immigrants" and then came Brexit, with Cameron and his successors, all the way to Sunak, pointing at foreigners and migrants as a "problem", if not the cause of all ills. As if the rest of us hadn't clicked long since, that the enemy was with us already and thoroughly British from top to bottom: Cameron's gentlemanly class and its degenerate profit system, based on the ever- increasing exploitation of the rest of us.

A lie foretold

Sunak's government knows very well that Rwanda is not a "safe" place. That's why it had to pass its very own law to claim that it was.

    It also knows that threatening to deport people to Rwanda won't deter the few who try to get here "illegally". Because it is only a few: last year the number of asylum applicants was 67,337. It's not even enough, potentially, to cover a third of the vacant jobs in the NHS or social care, which are causing quite another sort of crisis, and one which is conveniently obscured by this Rwanda diversion...

    In 2023, the UNHCR estimated that the number of people forcibly displaced, globally, was over 110 million, with over 36.4 million of them refugees. But while it sounds like a lot, it's only 1.2% of the world's population - and would be easy to accommodate; and even vita/to accommodate in the rich countries, especially given the declining birth fates of "old" imperialist Europe and the USA.

    However the rule in this society, which is based on fairy tales and magical thinking, rather than science, is to be illogical and irrational. So government policy targets the most vulnerable victims of the crisis - refugees - since it cannot tackle the cause.

    Yes, because tackling the cause would require it to point a finger back at itself - and at its fellow governments around the rich world. It would also require the admission of a colonial legacy imposed by national capitalism and its degenerate warmongering child, imperialism, which has given itself a new lease of life in this latest period of global crisis.

    Moreover, following that logic, Sunak and his ministers would have to deport themselves to Kigali, into the warm and welcoming arms of the assassins of President Paul Kagame's "safe" regime..! But sadly they won't, just as they won't introduce free passage (on a safe boat) for all asylum seekers, as the only way to get rid of the "evil people smugglers", they claim to detest so much!

    As forlabour's "opposition", led by former Blairite,

    Yvette Cooper, she only objects to the Rwanda policy on the grounds of its expense and unworkability. She would prefer a much cheaper Mr Kagame...

The solution is international socialism

Also this Tuesday morning, on the other side of Africa off the coast of Djibouti, 21 migrants drowned and another 23 went missing, after a boat carrying 77 Somalis and Eritreans, bound for the Arabian Gulf, capsized. Just 2 weeks previously, on almost the same spot, 38 were drowned. Refugees are dying daily, all over the world. Thousands die every year trying to make it through the Central American jungle in order to cross the Mexico border into the US...

    In other words, the "refugee problem" can hardly be reduced, as it has been, to a "national" problem, and in Britain's case; to be "solved" - utterly implausibly - by bribing a murderous (and greedy) regime in Rwanda.

    It says everything about Sunak and his cohorts that they present this to the British public as credible in the first place. It would be a relief if the whole lot of them could be despatched on a flight to somewhere else. But certainly, at some point the working class is going to have to despatch Tory and Labour, and the rest, and replace them with a workers' government, based on internationalism and full freedom of movement for all, in a shared world, without borders...