A step on the road to fascism?

Karen Doyle speaks at protest outside Yarl’s Wood Detention Centre

JVL Introduction

It is rapidly becoming evident that the UK government intends to strip away crucial legal protections for many of the rights and liberties taken for granted in this country since the middle of the last century.  Threats to the right to protest posed by the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill have hit the headlines following debate in the House of Lords, and campaigners have also highlighted government attempts to augment its power to strip people of their British citizenship. There are growing signs that the UK could sleep-walk into fascism if there is not concerted resistance to these and other measures on the government’s agenda.

In the piece below, Karen Doyle draws on years of experience as a campaigner for the Movement for Justice to explain the full range of threats posed by the Nationality and Borders Bill. “It is,” she says, “a wholesale attack on all sections of the immigrant community, those who’ve been here for decades, the second generation and those who’ve newly arrived.” She argues for a movement based around the principle of resistance, of making such legislation unworkable in practice.

Movement for Justice has called a protest at the office of the Crown Prosecution Service against prosecutions of cross channel refugees. 1pm on Wednesday January 26 at 102 Petty France, London, SW1H 9EA. Do sign and share their petition.

Here is a handy guide to the government’s various planned legal attacks on human rights written by Moya Lothian-Mclean on gal-dem.com.

For an exhaustive study of the proliferation of government measures and proposals put forward over the past year, check a new five-part resource, Impunity Entrenched, authored by Institute for Race Relations Vice-Chair Frances Webber.


Karen Doyle writes

The truth about the Nationality and Borders Bill – racist, discriminatory and draconian

The Nationality and Borders Bill is the most racist, discriminatory and draconian immigration legislation in modern British history. It is a wholesale attack on all sections of the immigrant community – those who’ve been here for decades, the second generation and those who’ve newly arrived.

What does the bill propose?

  1. The Bill effectively ends the right of asylum in the UK. Anyone who travels to the UK through any third country will have their asylum claim ruled inadmissible. This is the vast majority of asylum seekers who reach our shores. The Bill allows the Home Office to remove asylum seekers not just to their home country or a country they travelled through, but to any country the government deems ‘safe’. Asylum seekers arriving without visas – the majority –  will never get full refugee status.
  2. The Bill allows for the creation of offshore detention camps to process asylum claims. These camps will be little more than prison camps with zero oversight or access to support for those held there. We can see the inhumanity of these offshore camps in action in Australia.
  3. Reintroducing fast track appeals for asylum seekers. This is a policy that has already proven inhuman and was overturned by the court in 2015. It led to thousands of asylum seekers wrongly removed from the UK because they were denied the time and advice to properly have their claims heard.
  4. Criminalising asylum seekers. The Bill will change the law from “unlawful entry” to “unlawful arrival”, making anyone who arrives in the UK and immediately claims asylum liable for criminal prosecution. This is not currently unlawful, in fact a number of convictions of cross channel refugees who steered boats have been quashed. The Bill proposes sentences of up to life in prison for anyone assisting unlawful arrival. The Crown Prosecution Service is acting as if this law is already in place, hence the action Movement For Justice has called for Wednesday 26 Jan outside the CPS office.
  5. Expands citizenship deprivation powers. Clause 9 of the Bill extends pre-existing racist powers, allowing the Home Secretary to strip people of their citizenship at his or her discretion and without notice. This sends a message to millions of UK citizens in the black, Asian, Muslim and immigrant communities that they are not equal, that their position in British society is not secure. Both clause 9, and the substantive citizenship legislation in s40 of the British Nationality Act 1981, must be opposed.
  6. Denies support and redress to victims of trafficking. The Bill proposes that anyone who has committed a crime with a sentence of 12 months or more can no longer be recognised as a victim of trafficking. This effectively does away with any support for victims of trafficking, very many of whom have been forced into criminal activity. It is particularly devastating for the victims of county lines grooming, given an institutionally racist system that rarely recognises them as victims of trafficking, and the disproportionate sentencing of young black men for drug offences.
  7. Introduces visa sanctions on countries that do not co-operate with unjust deportations. There are many countries that refuse to accept mass deportation charter flights because it is recognised that they are a vehicle for unjust removals and deportations. The Bill will give the government power to punish whole countries by introducing visa sanctions against those who refuse.
  8. Gives powers to implement murderous pushbacks of refugees in the Channel. Border force officials will be given powers to use multiple means to push back small boats in the Channel. The Bill clearly recognises the dangers of this as it seeks to indemnify all border force officials from deaths or injuries that will result. Pushbacks are already proven to have caused deaths in the Mediterranean.

The Nationality and Borders Bill comes at a time of desperation for a government pulling out all the stops to divert attention away from it failures, presiding over one of the proportionally highest COVID death rates in the world and never-ending corruption against the backdrop of looming economic and climate catastrophe. It is accompanied by a raft of proposed legislation which, taken as a whole, set out a road map towards fascism; voter suppression, suppression of the right to protest, limitations on the right to challenge government and cutting of human rights protections.

Our response to this unprecedented assault cannot be business as usual campaigning.

The government’s propaganda machine has focused its racist scare-mongering almost entirely on two groups – cross channel refugees and so-called ‘Foreign National Offenders’ (FNOs). These are often people who’ve lived in the UK since childhood with Indefinite Leave to Remain but who face deportation because of receiving a prison sentence of 12 months or more. (Automatic deportation is a law brought in by the previous Labour government). Both groups have been vilified by this government as invaders, dangerous criminals, possible terrorists.

Well-worn racist stereotypes are spewed with abandon by the Home Office every time one of their deportation charter flights takes off. The spectre of ‘invasion’ is conjured up by politicians and right-wing media in relation to those who succeed in making the perilous channel crossing, weaving it into the Tories’ desperate damage limitation exercise dubbed “operation red meat“. Adding wider powers to revoke citizenship rights has awoken the anger of millions of black and Asian British citizens, many of whom had not been aware that their citizenship could be stripped at the whim of the Home Office.

The government’s concerted attack at this time is an attempt to make up for earlier defeats and to secure a failing government. Their previous attempt at a fast-track asylum process was defeated after mass uprisings of detainees and multiple successful legal challenges. Their plans to deport 1000 cross channel refugees ahead of Brexit failed. Their attempts to bolster racism through increased use of deportation flights have been defeated time after time, especially in the case of the Jamaica charter flights over the last four years, where successful resistance led by detainees and MFJ has seen ever decreasing numbers deported (most recently just four out of 50). Mass action on every front, in the detention centres, the courts and in the streets, has also seen a decrease in the overall numbers being detained.

Dropping clause 9 in the Nationality and Borders Bill will not overturn citizenship deprivation, an abhorrent racist power that has been used to target overwhelmingly the Muslim community. It must be fought, and that means fighting to overturn the substantive law, not just this expansion of it. It would be quite possible for the government to agree to drop clause 9 without giving up its citizenship deprivation powers. Focusing exclusively on that clause has the potential to divide the movement between those with citizenship and without – a disastrous prospect given that the central target of the Bill is refugees and FNOs.

The racism inherent in the asylum system means that many of those who cross the channel will never have their asylum claims granted and will therefore never be recognised as refugees. People with indefinite or limited leave to remain, or who are undocumented, will also be affected by this bill. The entire asylum process is brutal, racist and stacked against those who are claiming asylum.

It is tempting to try and win public sympathy and parliamentary support by focusing on refugees, or on citizenship deprivation because of the numbers potentially affected. But the battle does not lie in parliament. Success cannot be seen to depend on how many tears we can wring from politicians before they make some miserly changes to an overall despicable Bill. We are up against a government that is shedding no tears. We need to show them that they should be fearful – of a mass movement, an unprecedented alliance of the working class and oppressed who are willing to stand up against them. Show them that their unjust laws, like so many before them, will be made unworkable by practical resistance and non-cooperation.

It’s tragic that the Labour Party, which claims to be the voice of ordinary people across the UK, has a leadership which has turned its back on Black, Asian and immigrant communities, that welcomes into its midst unrepentant racist Tory MPs and whose main criticism of the borders bill is that they “would do it better”. The fight against this bill will not be won in parliament but in our communities, our workplaces, faith communities, schools and unions. The RNLI was the first organisation to say “if you criminalise our work, we will break the law because human lives are more important”. The PCS union has declared that they will strike if forced to carry out pushbacks, which even the Navy has opposed.

This is the sort of resistance our movement needs to promote, so that even if the bill passes it will be a dead letter because it cannot be implemented.

Comments (10)

  • Mark H Findlay says:

    The article fails to mention the massive attack upon travelling and Roma people, making it almost impossible for them to stop anywhere outside the inadequate stopping places that they have, under threat of confiscation of their vehicles, criminal prosecution, with the threat of removal of their children etc.

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  • John Noble says:

    How long before they come for me?

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  • Stephen Richards says:

    Is there a difference between asylum seekers & economic refugees?

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    • Leah Levane says:

      legally there certainly is – but all surely need to be treated humanely, people are people and this country was built on migration from the earliest days – movement of people has been fundamental to trading, the exchange of ideas and much more….bur asylum seekers are a special case as they are seeking refuge from wars, persecution or other unbearable or intolerable circumstances and, not least under the Geneva Conventions, we have a duty to protect them. So much of the relevant aspects of International Law were written precisely in the aftermath of the Holocaust and the experience of Nazi Occupation in so many countries, to ensure that what happened under the Nazis could not happen again (eg just because it may be more popular or convenient to ignore this)

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  • Kath Shaw says:

    A clear and comprehensive report on this heinous government’s intentions. Very useful.

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  • Jack T says:

    One of the intentions of the Bill is to close down protests such as those being carried out by Palestine Action to shut down UK sites producing arms for Israel. In particular, the drones which Israel uses to deliver lethal force.
    https://www.palestineaction.org/raid-shenstone/

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  • Graeme Atkinson says:

    The title of this otherwise useful article shows how loosely and frivolously the term “fascism” is bandied about to the point of being almost bereft of meaning.

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  • Kate Adams says:

    This is a really excellent response to the Borders Bill. The whole bill should be scrapped because it’s racist and builds on a hostile environment that has existed well before it was named. What happens to migrants always has implications for the rest so we must protest these attacks in solidarity. This is our struggle too and not a separate issue. This is the way we will win.

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  • Kate Adams says:

    People come both because of war and persecution and also extreme economic deprivation. If you are starving you move to feed your family. Not everyone’s case fits the refugee convention. Rich countries exploit migrant labour and erect borders to shut them out. Racism keeps Capitalism in place. Now there are labour shortages due to Brexit the Govt wants to allow asylum seekers the right to work, currently denied. The hypocrisy is shameful.

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