ON WEDNESDAY it was revealed that the Tory government is considering building an ‘asylum processing centre’ in the South Atlantic on Ascension Island.
The Foreign Office was reported to have carried out an assessment of transferring asylum seekers 5,000 miles and dumping them on this remote overseas UK territory. It now turns out that both Ascension and St Helena were not the only sites under active consideration by the Tories.
According to documents seen by The Guardian newspaper, Downing Street has also instructed officials to consider a wide range of options including sending asylum seekers to Moldova, Morocco or Papua New Guinea (PNG).
These documents reveal that for weeks the Tories have been working on ‘detailed plans’, including costing estimates for building detention centres in all three of these countries as well as Ascension and St Helena.
Indeed the documents suggest that the idea of setting up such centres came directly from the office of the prime minister, Boris Johnson.
In addition to these proposals, newspapers have reported that serious consideration is being given to the plan to create floating asylum centres in disused ferries moored off the UK coast.
It is clear from these documents that the UK government are searching the world for a home for asylum seekers detention centres where they can be left to rot as far away from Britain as possible.
The model that the Tories are adopting is that pioneered by the Australian ruling class which set up detention camps for asylum seekers offshore on the PNG’s Manus Island.
For over eight years the Australian government sent all asylum seekers arriving by boat to camps in the Pacific nations of PNG and Nauru where they suffered prolonged and indefinite detention. The atrocious conditions in these camps forced the UN to condemn them for breaching international law.
Inhuman conditions are precisely what the Tories are aiming for according to a government source who said it was part of a push by the government to ‘radically beef-up the hostile environment’ to ‘discourage’ and ‘deter’ migrants from attempting to enter the country.
Along with these camps, the Tories are also intent on copying the Australian tactic of physically blocking boats containing refugees from entering British waters in a ‘push back’ strategy.
Lawyers have warned that pushing tiny vessels back to sea is illegal under international law but this of course is irrelevant to the Tories, who don’t care about drowning refugees or sending them thousands of miles across the ocean to be locked up indefinitely in a camp with little medical provision and subject to inhuman conditions.
Around 4,000 desperate men, women and children have risked their lives crossing the Channel in small boats this year. They risked their lives fleeing from countries devastated by imperialist war.
This month the US Brown University’s ‘Costs of War Project’ released a report that revealed that ‘at least 37 million people have fled their homes as the result of the eight most violent wars the US military has launched or participated in.’
37 million people have been driven from their homes by imperialist wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and all the other military adventures conducted by the US with the support of British imperialism.
Capitalism in its final imperialist stage is the enemy of workers and the poor throughout the world with endless wars for profit abroad and war against the working class at home.
The same Tory government that wants to lock up asylum seekers or condemn them to drowning is the same government that is determined to inflict mass unemployment on workers in the UK.
The future for the working class is to join with the peoples of the world in the struggle to end war and poverty by smashing imperialism by socialist revolution.
This means building the WRP to lead the fight to bring down this Tory government and go forward to a workers’ government that will expropriate the capitalist class and welcome every worker from any country to join in building a socialist society.
This is the only way forward for workers and the people of the world.
