Politically Expendable Deaths
There is blame to be apportioned, and it gathers about the steps of Downing Street. Their 11 years in office has seen the Tories grubbing in the linguistic sewer to portray anyone seeking sanctuary in this country as part-scrounger, part-terrorist. Unless they hail from Hong Kong and are politically convenient, of course. Having framed asylum seekers as unpeople, the Tories are effectively in a race to out do the extremism of the right wing press. Patel, herself a daughter of refugees, insults her own parents' suffering by promising to do her best in doing the worst. Her Nationality and Immigration Bill sets up fortress Britain, and will punish anyone deemed to help somebody seek asylum, refuse to provide safe routes into the UK, holds out the fantasy of setting up refugee camps offshore for asylum processing, and promises the multiplication of bureaucracy as successful asylum applications are checked and rechecked - a measure designed to make the system costly, inefficient, and miserable for those on the receiving end of it.
Patel and Johnson are grotesques for redoubling their cruel efforts. But they're aided by oppositions who never contest the substance of demonising refugees, and they dig a pit previously excavated by decades of governments playing politics with the lives of the poorest and most vulnerable. This is a responsibility shared by past Prime Ministers, Leaders of Oppositions, politicians who've lied about immigration and asylum seekers for a few minutes on television, and every single editorial office and hack who've belched the toxins of racism into politics like the four chugging towers of Battersea Power Station during its prime. It's an ugly politics. It's an utterly cowardly politics.
If Johnson and the rest of his gang truly cared about "evil" people smugglers and human traffickers, his government would set up multiple safe routes into the UK, so thousands aren't left at the mercy of criminals, nor have to risk their lives in trying to reach these shores. The gangsters exist, the smuggling across borders exist because Johnson and the Tories are supporting the conditions in which this blackest of markets can thrive. There's the small matter of many fleeing to the UK because of the consequences of what the UK is doing overseas, either directly as was the case in Iraq and Afghanistan and what is happening now in Yemen at the hands of its Saudi allies. Or indirectly by curbing aid, or people living in societies scarred by the broken legacies colonialism left in its wake. As last year's Black Lives Matter/decolonial protests remind us, a proper reckoning with the British empire cannot be entertained.
What truly saddens about those 31 unnecessary deaths is that they won't make a blind bit of difference. The opposition won't contest the premise of Tory asylum policy. No mass circulation title or broadcast media commentator will make the obvious points and defend the right for people to come here. Instead, it's an opportunity for whetting authoritarian appetites and bedding down the hostile environment. An avoidable human tragedy repurposed for more dehumanisation and, inevitably, more deaths.
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