2022
HOME OFFICE RESISTS EMPIRE RACISM LESSONS
NOVEMBER
FRENCH INTERIOR MINISTER GERALD DARMANIAN CONDEMNS TWO-FACED BRITISH PRIVATE/PUBLIC WORDS
In private ministers are apparently cordial and professional with their French counterparts, but in public the language is condemnatory of France. The Interior Minister insists this must stop - and Macron withdrawing the UK invite to the emergency EU summit on immigration in this area, after the recent deaths, is a firm indication that patience is wearing thin.
He also insisted that British labour laws, enabling employment and housing without showing papers, were to blame (the UK says this isn't true) and that the £67m UK payment covered only part of the annual £250m cost. 'French police tear up makeshift refugee camps, destroying tents and bussing people elsewhere in France where they are encouraged to apply for asylum in France. Within weeks, the majority return to the Calais area.'
"It’s better that the British ask themselves why so many migrants want to go to the UK. This is first because the labour market of your country works in part with clandestine immigrants because in your country you can work and even pay taxes without having any identity papers or be in any kind of regular situation."
PATEL FACES COURT CASE AND REFUSAL TO ENACT PUSHBACK POLICY
Borderforce staff's trade union has joined with several charities to seek an injunction (legal block) against the policy to push boats back towards France - and are judged as likely to win. Guardian.
There is indeed talk of mimicking Australia's controversial hard-line 'offshore processing' of UK asylum applications ... in Albania. Thus despite the charity MSF advising the government 'the Australian model of “offshore processing” on the island of Nauru, on which Priti Patel’s idea seems to be based, caused “some of the worst mental health suffering we have seen in our 50 years of existence”, with a third of MSF patients attempting suicide, including children as young as nine. The letter also pointed out that the policy was recently revealed to cost more than £2.3m for each individual refugee, every year. MSF did not even get the courtesy of an acknowledgement that the letter had been received.' (Guardian long read on life inside the Dunkirk refugee camps)
Unsurprisingly, the debate around the issue is fuelled by right-wing media hostility and politicians' ... alternative reality. 'Analysis, partly based on Home Office data, shows that nearly two-thirds of people who cross the Channel in small boats are judged to be genuine refugees and allowed to remain – contradicting claims by Patel that 70% of small boats arrivals “are not genuine asylum seekers”.' (Guardian report on the UK government refusing a Freedom of Information request for its internal report on the 'pull' factors of immigration)
HOME SECRETARY PATEL TAKES RIGHT TO STRIP CITIZENSHIP WITHOUT NOTICE
Guardian opinion piece: 'It ... sends a message to a group of Britons, especially non-white citizens and particularly Muslim ones, that despite being born and brought up in the UK and having no other home, their citizenship is far from secure. It seems the lessons from the Windrush scandal have not been learned. Citizens with links to other nations are being told they could be at risk of being deprived of their British nationality without warning and for reasons deemed so security sensitive that they may never be made public.'
PRITI PATEL BLAMES OPEN BORDERS FOR GATHERING OF MIGRANTS AT FRANCE SEEKING UK ENTRY
UK FRANCE DEAL TO HALT RECORD IMMIGRATION ACROSS ENGLISH CHANNEL
Guardian. Some on the French side say this is down to the UK's unregulated labour system.
'For a century at least, and not just since we joined the European Union, the UK has depended on importing foreign labour to do its low-skilled jobs; and for the last 70 years immigration has been managed by successive governments through a series of schemes. According to Prof John Salt of University College London’s Migration Research Unit, there are few if any cases anywhere in the world where jobs that have come to be dominated by low-paid migrant labour have been transformed to better-paid work for the domestic population.
...
Poverty wages are not caused by immigration in itself, but by a failure to ensure wages and conditions for the local workforce are not forced down by exploiting migrants. The two ways to prevent a race to the bottom are by organising labour so that unions can bargain for decent pay, and by enforcing labour law. The Conservatives, with their anti-union policies and constant bonfires of regulations, brought this low-wage economy into being, however much Johnson would like to disown responsibility.
Through most of the 1960s and 1970s the share of UK national income paid out as wages was between 58% and 61%, but in the Thatcher years it declined rapidly and hit a low in the late 1990s of 52%. The share paid out in profits to private companies increased correspondingly.'
IMPACT OF UK SLASHING UN PALESTINE AID BY 50%
See Guardian.
New bill... Guardian.
