YESTERDAY the Tories unveiled their ‘Illegal Migration Bill’ along with the admission that the bill itself is illegal under international law, not that this is any deterrent to a Tory government prepared to not just criminalise asylum seekers but the entire trade union movement.
Tory Home Secretary Suella Braverman – who proudly stated last year that sending asylum seekers to Rwanda is her ‘dream’ and ‘obsession’ – admitted that this bill would ‘push the boundaries of international law’.
The bill declares that anyone arriving in the UK by ‘irregular’ channels will be immediately locked up and denied any right to legally challenge or claim asylum. Instead, they will be imprisoned in virtual concentration camps to await deportation to a ‘safe’ third country or returned to their home country.
With the majority of asylum seekers fleeing persecution and the horrors of imperialist wars, very few will find any safety back in the countries they have fled from. This means that they face immediate deportation to any third country that the UK government can bribe to take them in, being sold off to the lowest bidder like chattels that can be used and exploited by any country eager for the money being offered.
This is nothing more than a return to the days of the British Empire which considered the people of the world as nothing more than slaves to be sold for the greater benefit of Empire and the ruling class.
Rwanda was paid over £140 million to ‘process’ 1,000 asylum seekers, but to the fury of the Tories not one flight has left due to legal arguments and court injunctions.
Now the Tories are prepared to tear up any rights under law to the extent that they are making this bill retrospective, meaning from the moment it was proposed in Parliament yesterday, any asylum seeker arriving would be seized and detained even before the bill passes into law.
This is a massive wake-up call to all those who talk about using the law and bourgeois courts to challenge and defeat the Tories’ drive to lock up all asylum seekers, transport them across the country to camps before sending them on military planes thousands of miles away without any rights and with no chance of return.
Similarly, the working class will recognise that when the Tories can rip up international law and human rights legislation to achieve their ‘dream’ of deporting every refugee and asylum seeker to remote parts of the world then they are also preparing to realise their dream of smashing the trade unions and ending the right to strike with their anti-union laws.
These anti-union laws will never be defeated by appeals to the law and human rights that supposedly protect the fundamental right of workers to organise in trade unions and withdraw their labour.
Driven by the economic crisis engulfing British capitalism, the Tories are coming for the working class and its organisations in an attempt to turn workers into helpless individuals with no rights and little more than slaves forced to work for poverty level wages.
Asylum seekers and workers are to be treated exactly the same by the Tories – nothing more than human trash to be exploited and jailed in the interests of a bankrupt British capitalist system.
The recent statement coordinated by the Fire Brigades Union and signed by the leaders of 14 major unions defending refugees against the attacks by the Tories insisted on the unity that exists between them and workers when it stated: ‘Anti-migrant policies are an attempt to divide working class people against each other.’
Workers and migrants stand in the same trench against a common enemy.
Now is the time for the powerful working class to assert its strength and demand that the leaders of the trade union movement step up and take action against the enemy of workers and migrants by calling an emergency Congress of the TUC to immediately organise a general strike to smash the anti-union laws by bringing down the Tories and bringing in a workers’ government.
A workers’ government will welcome every worker and young person from any country to join in building a socialist society.
