Grim future for Ukrainian refugees
The Financial Times recently painted a grim picture for the future of Ukrainian refugees in Britain. Their three year ’emergency visa schemes’ are set to run out in the coming months.
Back in 2022 the media was singing and dancing about the droves of Ukrainians that Britons were ‘rescuing’. And many workers, it is true, offered up their homes to help refugees from a healthy, class-based internationalist instinct.
But the tune of the establishment politicians and papers stank with hypocrisy.
For Ukraine – when the ruling class was whipping up support for an unnecessary war they helped to start – anything seemed permissible. Against the rest of the world ravaged by imperialist war and oppression, the borders were to remain shut.
But all this is revealed now as it always has been: a pale mockery of the Ukrainian people, who on the front lines have spilled every drop of their blood for western interests, and on the British ‘home front’ were cynically used by point-scoring Westminster politicians .
The FT portrays one, “like many other Ukrainian refugees…holding down several jobs to rent an apartment for herself and her seven-year-old daughter”.
Waiting times on visas have ballooned from a couple days to a month and a half. Funding for refugee hosts has dropped. Eligibility criteria have tightened.
All this on the backdrop of a war that is reaching its denouement. Turns out, the purse strings are too tight for Ukrainian refugees after all!
The British establishment never gave a toss about Ukraine.
Nick Oung, Brixton
Labour’s anti-immigration gimmick
Despite criticising the Tories for their anti-immigration gimmicks, Labour have continued to fund a social media campaign started under the Conservative government where unappealing photos of British cities are shared on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok.
Designed to discourage people migrating to the UK from Albania, these pictures are accompanied by first hand accounts from Albanian migrants about just how terrible it is to live in the UK – largely due to the high cost of living, the difficulty of finding a house, and the struggle to find work.
The impact of these posts in Starmer’s anti-immigration campaign is yet to be seen.
But it’s certainly hit a little too close to home for Clive Lewis, Labour MP for Norwich South. He publicly denounced the campaign as “disparaging” after the city was featured as a prime example of run-down Britain in several posts!
Maria Follan, Tottenham
Deaths under Home Office care
Last year, 51 asylum seekers died while under Home Office care – the highest on record, and a 12-fold increase over 2019 where four died. In the same period, asylum applications doubled.
Reports reveal shocking levels of negligence and mismanagement on the part of the Home Office: from initially misreporting the number as 30 and then being forced to correct this; to the fact that many of the dates of death were listed as unknown. One asylum seeker, an Iranian man, was not found until he had been dead for over a month.
Perhaps most concerning is the fact that almost a third of the initial 30 were attributed to suspected suicide, while many others were simply listed as unknown causes.
This callous lack of concern for the lives of these already marginalised people should come as no surprise – the terminal crisis of the entire system is leading to a complete degeneration in the provision of the necessary housing and healthcare.
Starmer, the hired flunky of capitalism that he is, will never break with this decrepit system, and is instead echoing the divisive and dehumanising language of the Tories and Reform.
Only a revolutionary programme for the socialist transformation of society can end this problem once and for all.
Christopher Snyders, Leicester
Immigration: the communist position
Establishment politicians from all of the main parties have been whipping up a culture war over the question of immigration, in order to divide and distract the working class.
In this episode of Communist Radio, Ben and Khaled sit down to outline how Marxists approach the question of immigration from an internationalist class perspective.
