YET ANOTHER attempt by the Tory government to deport over 50 people to Jamaica on Wednesday came unstuck with the Home Office forced to admit that out of the over 50 earmarked for the flight on Wednesday they only managed to force four onto the plane.
The plane, an Airbus A350-900, can take up to 350 passengers making the cost of the deportation £50,000 a person.
Bella Sankey, the director of Detention Action, said: ‘All those removed from this flight were removed because either a court or the Home Office decided their removal would be unlawful.’
This was latest example of the Tory policy of creating a ‘hostile environment’ for the Windrush Generation – the thousands of men, women and children that came over from the Caribbean to help rebuild the UK after the war – follows a similar attempt at mass deportation last August.
Then a charter flight was due to take 90 deportees to Jamaica despite numerous legal challenges and the opposition of the Jamaican government which complained that the deportation orders had been issued to people arriving in Britain as young children, in breach of a previous policy that this would never happen.
In the event this flight left with only seven on board – the rest spared by last-minute legal interventions.
Both these cases were characterised by those facing deportation being denied their right to adequate legal representation along with an inhuman disregard for any health considerations or any aspect of human rights legislation by the Tory Home Secretary Priti Patel.
These temporary set backs for Patel will not stop the Tory onslaught. Patel is currently attempting to ram through Parliament her immigration bill which has come under fire this week from the government’s own legal advisers over its central plan to drive migrant boats back across the channel into French waters.
Government lawyers are reported as telling Patel that she has ‘less than a 30%’ chance of successfully defending the policy if it was challenged in the courts.
The lawyers were concerned with the legality of a ‘turnaround’ policy that clearly breaks international maritime law, to say nothing of putting the lives of thousands of refugees at risk of drowning as their small boats are forcibly shoved back in the dangerous waters of the Channel by the UK Border Force.
They were also worried about the ‘reputational damage’ any court case could have to the Tory government, especially after PM Boris Johnson enthusiastically promoted Patel’s bill at the last Tory Party conference, and Patel herself is still insisting: ‘There is a legal basis for it.’
The Tories are not really concerned about ‘reputational damage’ or flouting and breaking international maritime and human rights laws. Any law the Tories don’t like they will try and abolish.
The only reputation they care about is the reputation of being determined to wage war on refugees fleeing imperialist slaughter in their homelands and kicking out the generation of workers from the Caribbean whose labour is now surplus to the profit-making requirements of capitalism.
Refugees and the Windrush Generation are treated as the enemy and completely disposable as far as the Tories are concerned and the same applies to the whole working class.
As British capitalism collapses under the weight of its massive debts and inflation driving the working class into poverty, the only way out for the Tories is to pauperise the working class and make them pay for the capitalist crisis.
Workers, refugees and all those being subjected to racist deportation by this Tory government face the same enemy.
What is clear is that the working class cannot rely on the law to protect them from this crisis just as refugees and immigrant workers cannot rely on the law to give them the safety they need.
There is only one way to end all racist deportations and the Tory drive to inflict poverty on the working class.
This is for the working class to force the trade unions to call a general strike to kick out the Tories and bring in a workers’ government and socialism.
Then the bosses will be deported, and all immigrants welcomed!