Actions have consequences. Britain’s political elite has for a long time decided to pander to – or deliberately stoke – bigotry against migrants and refugees. This is a joint enterprise with rightwing media outlets that have sought to portray some of the world’s most vulnerable people as a marauding mob, undeserving drains on resources and incompatible with British culture. It has reaped rich political dividends: justified public anger at a lack of affordable housing and secure work, declining living standards and austerity has been redirected, crudely, at the caricatured foreigner. To achieve this aim, it has been necessary to strip migrants and refugees of their humanity: after all, most human beings do not tolerate harm being committed against those we see as “people like us”.
This brings us to the Manston migrant processing centre, in Kent, and the petrol bombs that were lobbed on Sunday at a Dover Border Force immigration centre. Most people would find the conditions at Manston intolerable if it were housing cats and dogs, let alone people. Around 4,000 people seeking asylum – way more than double the official maximum capacity – sleep on blankets on floors. It is supposed to be a short-term holding facility, where checks are conducted before the people there are moved on to detention centres or accommodation. But these human beings are being effectively imprisoned for up to four weeks. In these bleak overcrowded conditions, there has been an outbreak of diphtheria, while scabies is said to run rampant.
You may ask yourselves whether this can possibly be legal. The answer is no, it isn’t. The home secretary, Suella Braverman, stands accused of ignoring advice that it is against the law to detain asylum seekers for so long in these abhorrent conditions. (The Home Office claims Braverman “has taken urgent decisions to alleviate issues at Manston and source alternative accommodation”.) She accordingly faces being taken to court by refugee charities.
That this pantomime rightwinger is farcically unsuitable to hold one of the great offices of state should now be clear to all but those afflicted with ultra-partisan bad faith. We now know that she sent official documents six times to her personal emails – a wanton violation of the ministerial code. Civil servants tell me they would be sacked for such egregious behaviour, but different standards apply to our senior politicians. Rishi Sunak put her there for two reasons: first, because her endorsement helped keep Boris Johnson from standing for party leader again; and second, because a government intent on renewed unpopular austerity measures will seek to deflect public anger by pressing a big red button labelled “culture war”.
But however much justified condemnation Braverman receives for her email misconduct, it is her treatment of human beings that deserves most ire.
Indeed, Sir Roger Gale, the Tory MP who represents the constituency in which Manston is situated, has condemned the government’s policy. He has suggested that a deliberate decision had been taken not to book space in local hotels, leading to disastrous overcrowding and inhumane conditions. (A Home Office spokesperson later told the BBC: “Claims advice was deliberately ignored are completely baseless.”) A local refugee campaigner, Bridget Chapman, puts to me that the authorities learned cynical lessons from another holding centre, the Napier barracks in Folkestone, where campaigners and journalists were able to talk to asylum seekers and learn about the conditions there. I myself visited: people who had fled violence and persecution in countries such as Iran and Afghanistan were living in conditions that violated basic sanitary and hygiene requirements. But such access has been largely denied in Manston, where conditions are accordingly even worse.
Manston is shrouded in other myths, too. “Lots of establishment media outlets are pushing the idea that everyone is from Albania and largely adult men who are economic migrants,” says another local refugee campaigner, Benny Hunter. “I wouldn’t want to pander to the idea that men aren’t vulnerable or [that] Albanians aren’t potentially refugees, but when we went, we saw families with young children, who shouted over the fence that they were from Syria, Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq – places with war, conflict and despotism.”
While the circumstances behind the Dover petrol bomb are yet to be uncovered, there are some things of which we can be certain. Public hostility to desperate people fleeing to our shores has been systematically ramped up by politicians, newspapers and broadcasters. With legal routes closed off, asylum seekers arriving on small boats are portrayed as a sinister invading force. Local citizens languishing on social housing waiting lists (because of politicians’ refusal to build council homes) or stuck waiting weeks for GP appointments (because of an underfunded health service) are led to believe that the problem lies with desperate newcomers. The likes of Braverman are there to shield the political elite from their failure to provide the citizens of a wealthy nation with a comfortable standard of living and adequate public provision, refocusing resentment on all the wrong targets. In the process, they have inflicted cruelty on often already traumatised people. That there is finally, at least, some outcry at this travesty is to be welcomed. But until we stop allowing politicians and their media allies to scapegoat asylum seekers for problems caused by the powerful, these scandals will happen again and again.
Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
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