THE TORIES kicked off their ‘stop the boats week’ yesterday with the announcement that the first 50 asylum seekers will be forced onto the Bibby Stockholm barge moored off Portland Port in Dorset, with the promise that by the end of the week this floating prison barge will accommodate 500.
The Bibby Stockholm was converted into an accommodation vessel designed for 222 people, but the Tories have more than doubled this capacity by putting bunk beds in cabins and converting communal rooms into dormitories for four to six men.
Calculations by the Independent newspaper show that each of the 500 asylum seekers will have less living space than an average car parking bay even when shared spaces and outside areas are taken into account.
The Tories have even ensured that TV screens hanging on walls have been disconnected to ‘encourage’ migrants to ‘socialise’!
This is the barbarism of 19th century prison ships reenacted today by a Tory government that sees refugees fleeing war and torture in their homeland as vermin fit only to be treated as less than human.
The rush to get asylum seekers onto what is nothing more than a prison hulk follows delays in the Tory plans over safety issues of cramming 500 vulnerable people into this vessel.
Last week, Fire Brigades Union deputy general secretary Ben Selby condemned the hulk as a deathtrap for asylum seekers saying the doubling of occupancy ‘raises significant fire safety concerns, and also that, if a fire was to break out on the Bibby, could firefighters make the adequate rescues and access where necessary.’
Referring to the Grenfell Tower blaze that cost the lives of 72 people after similar warnings about fire safety were ignored, Selby said: ‘We feel we are looking down the barrel of another possible disaster. We believe it to be a death trap and we believe it’s another accident waiting to happen.’
The FBU warnings were dismissed as politically inspired, with Tory deputy prime minister Oliver Dowden claiming that they were the result of the FBU’s link to the Labour Party.
This is beyond ironic, given that at the weekend Labour’s shadow immigration minister Stephen Kinnock said Labour would maintain keeping asylum seekers on barges and that any future Labour government would continue to use military camps to incarcerate them.
Kinnock bleated that he was ‘deeply unhappy’ and this was the last thing Labour wanted to do but they ‘have no choice’ to deal with the ‘mess we inherit’ from the Tories.
In the same way, the right-wing Labour Party leadership of Keir Starmer has ‘no choice’ but to keep all the Tory legislation outlawing strikes and demanding workers accept poverty level wages in order to save British capitalism.
Along with the Bibby Stokholm prison barge, the Tories once again floated a plan to deport refugees to the southern Atlantic Ascension Island if the Court of Appeal upholds its earlier ruling that sending them on a one-way trip to Rwanda was unlawful.
The Ascension Island, a remote volcanic island over 4,000 miles from Britian and with no hospital and only basic amenities available to islanders, makes it an attractive alternative for the Tories to dump asylum seekers.
The Tories, with the full support of Starmer’s right-wing Labourites, are determined to dehumanise asylum seekers who have fled persecution and imperialist wars around the globe, and portray them as the enemy.
Workers, however, see clearly that the real enemy is at home – the Tory government and the barbaric capitalist system that can only survive through wars against the people of the world and war against the working class at home to dump the capitalist crisis on the backs of workers.
The way forward is to unite the entire working class by forcing the TUC to call a general strike to kick out the Tories and go forward to a workers government that will expropriate the bosses and bankers and welcome every worker from any country to join in building a socialist society.
This is the only way forward for workers and people of the world – to put an end to capitalism and imperialist wars with the victory of the world socialist
revolution.
