THE head of Eurotunnel is demanding that Britain forks out £4.6 million to finance a massive wall enclosing 600 metres of track at the French end of the tunnel.
The idea is that this 6 metre high wall would then be roofed over providing a barrier against any attempt by refuges to take the highly risky chance of entering the UK via the tunnel.
Jacques Gounon, chief executive of Eurotunnel, made his demands while presenting the company’s annual results, results which showed they had made a pre-tax profit up by 25% over last year to $115 million.
Despite this jump in profits Gounon is not a happy man – Eurotunnel are claiming 29 million euros in compensation from both the French and British governments for loss of revenue it claims it suffered last summer because of disruption to services caused by refugees fleeing the imperialist wars in the Middle East.
Such humanitarian issues do not figure at all in the thinking of the capitalist class and the bosses who place profit above every other consideration. Calling for the creation of an armed fortress, guarded by British and French forces, along with their own security guards, to protect the company’s profits, Gounon conjured up the reactionary scenario that is being used by the bourgeoisie across Europe saying: ‘There are perhaps one million to two million migrants who could overwhelm Europe coming from Turkey or other countries.’
Gounon’s call for the erection of yet more barriers against refugees is just the latest in a line of vicious, racist moves by the ruling classes of Europe. Last month, the civil liberties group, Statewatch, released a confidential EU Commission report that outlined proposed plans to remove the exemption for charities, volunteer groups and others who provide ‘humanitarian assistance’ to refugees from being considered ‘smugglers’.
Under the new rules saving the life of refugees in sinking boats will be a criminal offence. Along with the criminalisation of rescuers, the imperialist war machine, NATO, has been drafted in to help create a fortress Europe.
According to the secretary general of NATO, a squadron of warships based in Cyprus will be sent into the Aegean Sea in order to ‘help Greece, Turkey and the EU with stemming the flow of migrants and refugees’.
Under the guise of a war on the people smugglers, these NATO forces will be used to deploy military measures to prevent people escaping from the slaughter of imperialist wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria.
At the same time, the Greek Syriza government has declared Turkey a ‘safe third country’, providing the legal framework for refugees to be turned back, and those who have arrived to be deported back across the Mediterranean.
This is clearly designed to try and avoid the EU plan to put Greece, along with Italy, outside the European free movement agreement and erect barrier controls around both these countries turning them into little more than prison camps for refugees, while walling off the rest of Europe from the millions seeking nothing more than safety from the carnage wrought by imperialism across the region.
Barbed wire, borders patrolled by armed forces, and men, women and children forced back into war zones and certain death – this is the future that capitalism holds for humanity today.
It is a system that in its historic crisis can only seek salvation, and profit, through wars to re-conquer the world and seize the mineral wealth of nations in the Middle East, while at the same time conducting war against the working class at home through its increasingly vicious austerity cuts.
The whole of this ‘refugee crisis’ has exposed once and for all the reactionary essence of the EU with its hollow boast of creating a ‘free and peaceful’ Europe with open borders.
The only way forward for the working class of Britain and Europe is to join with their allies, the refugees, in the fight to put an end to capitalism once and for all through the victory of the socialist revolution and the creation of a Socialist United States of Europe, a giant step towards a world socialist republic where borders are a thing of the past.
