Last Word: Britain’s Anti-Asylum Politics
| Published date | 01 December 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/20419058231218328 |
| Author | Maya Goodfellow |
| Date | 01 December 2023 |
40POLITICAL INSIGHT•DECEMBER 2023
Last Word
Britain’s Anti-Asylum
Politics
The Conservative government’s hardline approach to asylum is both
political strategy and political ideology, writes Maya Goodfellow.
‘We will do whatever
it takes to stop the
boats and deter
bogus asylum seekers,’
Home Secretary Suella Braverman told
Conservative Party conference this year.
The key word here is ‘bogus’. Whenever
Braverman is making the case for the
government’s new asylum system, she
sows the seeds of doubt. The people who
arrive are not really seeking asylum; they
are migrants, ‘economic’ or ‘illegal’; they are
LGBTQ+ people facing ‘discrimination’ as
opposed to ‘persecution’; they are ‘Albanian
criminals’.
Britain’s country’s ills – your hardships –
are the fault of these interlopers, Braverman
is saying. This warrants barbed fences, navy
boats and a two-tier asylum system.
You can almost see the war room in
Conservative HQ plastered with the graphs
and post-it notes showing how eective
this strategy is, maybe one of the few that
can save the party from defeat. But it is too
sanitised to interpret the government’s
plans as a distraction, a ‘dead cat’ designed
to hoodwink the electorate. To see it in this
way is to cheapen the impacts, ignore the
context and misunderstand the intent.
Braverman’s hardline approach to asylum is
both political strategy and political ideology.
There is a cultural conservatism that informs
the government’s immigration policy, a desire
to protect a long-eulogised Britishness (as
mythical as all other national identities) from
these racialised ‘others’. The inequities of the
asylum system are by design, not accident.
The current British government has created
a situation in which there are no safe routes
of travel into the country for would-be asylum
seekers. The result is that those searching for
safe haven are forced to risk their lives to get
here. The small boats that Braverman and her
colleagues rail against are the very outcome
of government policy – which is then used as
a justication to strip those who arrive of their
right to claim asylum in the UK at all.
In 2022, Braverman’s predecessor Priti Patel
unveiled a plan to send asylum seekers to
Rwanda. At the time of writing, the Home
Oce is ghting a court of appeal ruling
that the plan is unlawful. As a consequence,
more than 24,000 people are living with the
threat of deportation to Rwanda hanging
over them.
Still, all this is not entirely new. Look back
and you will see a British political history
littered with tighter restrictions, harsher
rhetoric and politicians creating populations
that are surplus and exploitable. Braverman
is not departing from a great British tradition
but contributing to a long-standing feature
of British political life.
Conservative immigration policy must
be seen as a distinct part of this broader
whole. This is the latest episode in a very
long history within which those who come
to Britain are measured, counted and held up
as dierent. As the cultural critic Stuart Hall
said in 1979, ‘as soon as you say numbers, it
doesn’t matter how you wrap it up. There is
only one lesson to be drawn: the numbers
are growing, there are too many of them,’
The anti-immigrant narratives of today
are tethered to this history. The supposed
illegitimacy of people seeking asylum
was a recurrent theme of the New Labour
government and a chunk of the current
policy scaolding was built by them (for
example, not allowing people to work while
their applications were processed). We hear
echoes of this now. Still people left destitute.
Still the question mark above their heads.
Still an insistence that the country can’t take
much more.
But what we are seeing now is not merely
a rerun of the past; the Conservatives are
building on this base to create an even
harsher system in a dierent world. There
may be tensions but the two co-exist and
we must accept that they do if we are to
understand what is happening and how to
respond.
When some imply that the Tories ‘need
to rein it in’, we might ask: rein it in to what
exactly? What grounds of exclusion are
acceptable? True, the legal regime could
be less restrictive than it is now – and that
would be no small mercy for so many of
the people impacted – but it would still be
restrictive in some way. Is that the end goal
to aim for? Is there a nice kind of exclusion?
The leader of the opposition would
certainly like to pretend there is. Keir Starmer
is a former human rights lawyer but he often
has little to say about Conservative plans.
Though Labour would scrap the Rwanda
policy, we can also expect more ‘ecient’
deportations and more cooperation with
the EU. This is hardly a fundamental break
with Britain’s anti-asylum politics.
When the premise of the debate is that
a country has a right to control its borders,
there will always be people who are shut
out and there will be a criteria on which
to do this. Perhaps, then, if we are to truly
dissect out what the problem is, this is not
solely a Conservative creation or a British
preoccupation, but one in the very roots of
the nation state.
Maya Goodfellow is an Anniversary
Fellow at the University of Southampton
and she is the author of Hostile
Environment: How Immigrants Became
Scapegoats.
Political Insight December 2023 BU.indd 40Political Insight December 2023 BU.indd 4010/11/2023 11:4010/11/2023 11:40
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