The UK government is actively compounding the human suffering that intrinsically racist immigration laws inflict on people seeking asylum.
In fact, our participatory action research over the last 15 months about what is happening to the displaced people who have been placed in ‘contingency hotels’ simply reinforces our certainty that, from the government’s perspective, the more demonising and suffering inflicted on people seeking refuge here, the more the public hears about that suffering, and the more that government’s contractual cronies, such as Migrant Help, get away with not only doing nothing to stop it but actually heaping injury on top, the better.
It is essential, in fact, that the demonising – and coverage of it – continues.
In this way, all ‘British subjects’ can be continuously invited to believe that the reason the UK in general, and every working-class person in particular, is experiencing what the Government describes as a ‘cost of living’ crisis, and what we call a ‘cost of corporate greed’ crisis, is because of all these people who have come here ‘illegally’, we are told, to take advantage of Britain’s hospitality and generosity. Displaced people conveniently become the scapegoats for everyone’s suffering, and never more so than now when the public imagination has been invited to consider the plight of the ‘great British people’ compared to the affordances given to migrants living in ‘luxury hotels’.
We have uncovered time and again inhumane and substandard conditions in these ‘luxury hotels’ run by global corporations, where rooms are dirty, food is inedible, and ‘residents’ are harassed by staff. But in broader terms, the truth is that the ‘[l]ack of affordable social housing, the failure to build houses, the failure to invest in health services and invest in schools… are not the responsibility of the people who have ended up in hotels, but the way the Government pronounces policy makes a clear invitation to the wider public to bracket the people living in hotels with the issues to do with lack of public services for the population in general’.
This contemporary state of affairs, and the attempt to pit the British public against people seeking refuge, rises out of the bureaucratic detail that has taken hold in the last 25 years since the (new) Labour government introduced forced dispersal, removed the right to work legally and then, through Home Secretary Jack Straw, declared interest in EU member states’ supporting an overhaul of 1951 UN Convention on Human Rights to agree a clearer definition of genuine refugees and economic migrants. These early changes set the path for the UK’s Home Office to become an ‘explicitly racist’ anti-migrant government force designed in every way to act against the interests, and deny the rights, of people seeking asylum in the UK: ‘The racism of the UK’s immigration system couldn’t be more clear, with this government drawing policies affecting people seeking safety along stark racial lines. At the same time, ministers are using unashamedly inflammatory and far-right language, whipping up hatred towards black and brown migrants.’
Migrants have become government scapegoats for anything from increases in crime rates to the depletion of precious NHS resources, the shortage of available employment and, more recently, the driving up of living costs and the lack of housing, a view propagated for its usefulness by a greedy and corrupt UK Government. This pernicious development alone provides a considerable site of resistance, however. If we accept as well that, in these proto-fascist times, the asylum-seeking population has been used as the Government’s test-bed of choice before roll-out of increasingly totalitarian measures directed towards the wider population in general and the poorest among us in particular, then we can likely target our resistance more effectively.
Part of what makes the UK Government’s ‘hostile environment’ policies so successful – for their ends – is the relentlessness with which it spews them out. There is, in addition, every indication that the top of the hierarchy, oligarchs, government ministers and those who occupy both positions simultaneously intend to continue on their path to ‘stop the boats’ for example, with all that entails. Here: absolute greed breeds absolute cruelty. The UK Government is banking on our becoming exhausted and infuriated into paralysis but, instead, our outrage is converting into a life-long battery, energising all the nitty gritty, bottom-up, grounded resistance work that is essential for carving out and growing shared space between multiple sites of exploitation and oppression that, together, will drive forward collective resistance.
It is up to us.
Let’s not waste another iota of energy in upset or shock from their cruelty, whatever its hue. Let’s focus instead on the overcoming the one per cent, and galvanising our commitment to organising, with our ‘comrades in adversity’, to stop the suffering and fight the injustice.
Rhetta Moran is a praxivist, a writer, a mother of three and a life long learner. Rhetta is most interested in continuing to participate in the growth of an international socialist movement from below through which we realise our human capacities as fundamentally social inter-actors who, at this historical juncture and in the overwhelming majority, have nothing to lose but our chains.
Dr Gráinne McMahon is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Huddersfield, the Research Lead and a Trustee for RAPAR, a human rights organisation based in Manchester, UK, working with displaced people, Convenor of the British Sociological Association’s Gender and Feminism Study Group, and co-founder of the feminist network, Feminist Spaces. Gráinne researches feminism and feminist activism, anti-racism and human rights activism, social movements, and young people’s social, political, cultural, and civic participation, utilising ethnographic, co-produced and participatory methods.
Where does the buck stop? UK Home Office and other statutory body responses to allegations of human rights violations in two Serco-run hotels housing people seeking asylum by Rhetta Ann Moran and Gráinne McMahon for the Journal of Poverty and Social Justice is available on the Bristol University Press website here.
Follow Transforming Society so we can let you know when new articles publish.
The views and opinions expressed on this blog site are solely those of the original blog post authors and other contributors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of Bristol University Press and/or any/all contributors to this site.
Image João Daniel Pereira via Alamy