PM Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron recently met in Downing Street. If the press release is anything to go by, they mostly pontificated on their countries’ imagined status as world powers.
Given all their platitudes about Britain and France’s important global role, it is surprising to see that they do not even seem to have the English Channel under control!
Is it Russian warships passing through with impunity that interests these imperialist politicians? No – it is a very different type of boat that catches their attention.
Continuing the British government’s manufactured hysteria around migration, Starmer has launched a new attack on asylum-seekers.
Labour has announced a ‘one-in, one-out’ trial scheme, in which those who cross the Channel on small boats will be deported. An equal number of migrants will then be taken from France directly, with priority given to those with family here.
Reportedly, the UK will initially send around fifty people a week back to French shores – about 5 percent of those arriving in Britain on small boats.
This is nothing but a performative attempt to whip up anti-immigrant sentiment, in a futile bid to reverse the Starmer government’s collapse in the polls.
The demonisation of refugees, begun by the Tories and continuing apace under Starmer, is an effort to distract from the crisis of British capitalism, by pitting different sections of the exploited and oppressed against each other.
Desperate souls – fleeing lands ravaged by imperialism – are presented as an inconvenience to be thrust onto some other country. The only migrants tolerated are those who can immediately be put to work for the bosses’ profits, without any government support.
In essence, Keir Starmer is simply copying Rishi Sunak’s Rwanda deportation plan, but changing the destination of exile.
Far from Labour being a ‘lesser evil’ to the Tories and Farage’s Reform, all three are competing to be the most reactionary.
Capitalist politicians across Europe are all singing from the same hymn sheet. Starmer is pitching this pilot scheme as a potential ‘solution’ to the ‘problem’ of migration. Macron, meanwhile, talks about a symbolic gesture that will deter people from making the precarious crossing.
In reality, like the Rwanda policy before it, the Starmer-Macron plan will likely have little actual effect – other than to further fan the flames of xenophobia, leading to more violence against migrants, as seen on Britain’s streets last summer.
The only genuine solution to our problems is to unite along class lines against the real enemy: the capitalists who try to divide us; those responsible for the austerity and war that hurts native and migrant workers alike.
