Trashing Asylum: The UK’s Illegal Migration Bill
He was standing before a lectern at Downing Street. The words on the support looked eerily similar to those used by the politicians of another country. According to UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, Stop the Boats was the way to go. It harked back to the same approach used by Australia’s Tony Abbott, who won the 2013 election on precisely that platform.
The UK Illegal Migration Bill is fabulously own-goaled, bankrupt and unprincipled. For one thing, it certainly is a labour of love in terms of the illegal, as the title suggests. In time, the courts may well also find fault with this ghastly bit of proposed legislation, which has already sailed through two readings in the Commons and resting in the Committee stage.
On Good Morning Britain, Home Secretary Suella Braverman had to concede she was running “novel arguments” about dealing with such irregular migration, not making mention of Australia’s own novel experiment which did, and still continues, to besmirch and taint international refugee law.
In her statement on whether the bill would be consistent with the European Convention of Human Rights, enshrined by the UK Human Rights Act, Braverman was brazen to the point of being quixotic: “I am unable to make a statement that, in my view, the provisions of the Illegal Migration Bill are compatible with the Convention rights, but the Government nevertheless wishes the House to proceed with the Bill.”
The long title of the bill does not even bother to conceal its purposes. It makes “provision for and in connection with the removal from the United Kingdom of persons who have entered or arrived in breach of immigration control.” It furnishes a detention regime, deals with unaccompanied children, makes some remarks about “victims of slavery or human trafficking” and, more to the point makes “provision about the inadmissibility of certain protection and certain human rights claims relating to immigration.”
The central purpose of the bill is to destroy the very basis of seeking asylum in Britain, along with the process that accompanies it. Much of this is inspired by the fact that the United Kingdom does not do the business of processing asylums particularly well. Glorious Britannia now receives fewer applications for asylum than Germany, France or Spain. Despite having fewer numbers, its backlog remains heftier than any of those three states.
The proposed instrument essentially declares illegal in advance any unauthorised arrival, an absurd proposition given that most asylum seekers arriving by boat will not, obviously, have the paperwork handy. (This is a nice trick borrowed from Fortress Australia.) Those seeking asylum by boat will be automatically detained for 28 days. During this time, those detained will be unable to make a legal challenge nor seek bail. After the expiration of time, a claim for bail can be made, or the Home Secretary can release them.
In truth, the authorities can refuse to process the claim, thereby deferring responsibility to some other source or agency. Dark, gloomy detention centres are promised, as are third countries such as Rwanda or a return across the English Channel back to France or another European state. Then comes the issue of return to the country of origin, a state of affairs in gross breach of the non-refoulement obligation of international refugee law. It is fantastically crude, a declaration of savage intent.
Even with these provisions, chaos is likely to ensue, given that the options are, as Ian Dunt points out, essentially off the table. The Rwandan solution has so far failed to materialise, bogged down in litigation. Were there to be any sent, these would amount to a few hundred at best and hardly arrest the tide of boat arrivals. The UK has also failed to secure return agreements with other European states. The most likely scenario: a large, incarcerated, miserable population housed in a burgeoning concentration camp system, a nodding acknowledgement to Australia’s own version used in the Pacific on Manus Island and Nauru.
Even some conservative voices have expressed worry about the nature of it. Former Tory PM Theresa May has questioned the breakneck speed with which the Bill is being debated, wondering if Sunak and company are acting in undue haste to supersede fresh and as yet untested legislation. “I am concerned that the government have acted on Albania and the Nationality and Borders Act 2022, when neither has been in place long enough to be able to assess their impact. I do not expect government to introduce legislation to supersede legislation recently made, the impact of which is not yet known.”
Sadly, the entire issue of discussing the critical aspects of the bill were lost in the media firestorm caused by an innocuous tweet from England’s football darling and veteran commentator Gary Lineker. “There is no huge influx,” went the tweet. “We take far fewer refugees than other major European countries. This is just an immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s, and I’m out of order?”
There is no huge influx. We take far fewer refugees than other major European countries. This is just an immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s, and I’m out of order?
— Gary Lineker (@GaryLineker) March 7, 2023
According to the BBC, fast becoming a fiefdom of Tory regulation, he was. Suspension from the Match of the Day followed. Within a few days, a humiliated management had to concede defeat and accept his return to the program. Solidarity for Lineker had been vast and vocal, though much of it seemed to be focused on his shabby treatment rather than the asylum seeker issue. In terms of defeating this bill, such debates will do little to box the demons that are about to be unleashed.
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9 comments
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Andrew Smith -
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K -
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Andrew Smith
Return to home pageInteresting read, they really picked the wrong target in Lineker (suppose management more public school rugby followers vs. football plebs?), but by some accounts the UK government even acknowledges that the bill may be illegal, which suggests it’s more about electoral agitprop, or is it?
Meanwhile BBC’s behaviour and management could well be the ABC, remember Emma Alberici being thrown under the bus for daring to claim that there was no evidence for the ‘trickle down effect’ in economics as claimed by the LNP government?
In fact one would and can go further in showing that not only was Lineker correct on the rhetoric, but there is evidence of modern day Anglo and European migrant policies being informed or influenced by eugenics of 1930s Germany (originally UK origins via Malthus, Galton & UCL).
A decade ago the ‘Cafe con leche Republicans’ (linked to centre right GOP never Trumpers e.g. The Bulwark) warned the GOP of immigration restriction efforts through lobbying & media agitprop of (deceased) white nationalist John ‘passive eugenics Tanton, described by SPLC as ‘the racist architect of the modern anti-immigration movement’ and his ‘network’ owned Trump policies; not just electoral tactics but also deep seated eugenics.
However, his influence can also be seen in Australia (Tanton admired our white Oz policy) i.e. -ve bipartisanship on refugees, NOM net overseas migration obsessions (& ignorance), ‘immigration’ and ‘sustainable population’, same in the UK,coincidence?
Described by US KPBS journalist Binkowski as ‘Tanton Network’ that shares donors in US with ‘Koch (Atlas) Network’ in ‘Eugenics, Border Wars & Population Control: The Tanton Network’ (22 Aug ’22):
‘line of false and nakedly racist rhetoric, comparing immigrants and refugees to attackers and diseases, is no accident…. increasingly blatant bigotry in immigration discourse is the culmination of decades of targeted influence by an assortment of largely unknown groups known as the Tanton network.’
https://unicornriot.ninja/2022/eugenics-border-wars-population-control-the-tanton-network/
One assumes a Tanton linked NGO in UK has helped influence migration policy in the past and now the same direct lobbying of MPs, Ministers and accessing media, especially (K)GB News, tabloids etc.. The same can be linked to the ‘Pioneer Fund’ according to SPLC which has supported Tanton’s Network:
‘Today, it still funds studies of race and intelligence, as well as eugenics, the “science” of breeding superior human beings that was discredited by various Nazi atrocities….. Many of those involved with the fund early on, including its first president Harry H. Laughlin, had “contacts with many of the Nazi scientists whose work provided the conceptual template for Hitler’s aspiration toward ‘racial hygiene’ in Germany,” according to an article in the Albany Law Review.’
https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/pioneer-fund
Laughlin’s contact with Nazi scientists was apparently through the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes in pre WWII Germany (renamed post WWII as Max Planck Institutes & archives were disappeared), with research funding from a US fossil fueled oligarch’s foundation that continued to do business during & with WWII Germany then years later in 70s supported ZPG Zero Population Growth with population control, immigration restrictions and border control as an environmental hygiene ‘solution’ (with much rebranding, greenwashing & astroturfing, of eugenics).
To think that the humiliating defeat of filthy nazi and fascist fraud hordes by 1945 was so incomplete, so taken for granted, for the cerebral shit of unscientific self infatuation fraud filth lingers like a brontosauruses’ fart in its bed. Fascism still emerges and seems to thrive wherever stupid, loudmouthed egofrisking mental masturbating misfits seek to be noticed and influence the weak minded. Australia has some extreme public defectives in such as Palmer, Hanson, the right wing fringe fools, all sorts of Merde Dog indoctrinated duds, Regiments of ratbags, Battalions of boofheads, Brigades of bastards and then Barnaby Pokem-Pisspot. Our world class low scoring media of utter inept and ignorant loudmouths sets it up. Seig Heil and Kiss the Duce’s Date!!
The irony of British colonialism is strong with this one… I seem to recall a certain decision which overturned Terra Nullis and the neutered version of NTA 1993 in existence over the decades since 1993… Fast forward to today, and with the referendum in sight on recognition, the Mad Monk’s networking seems to be in overdrive… Now the UK has a milk chocolate PM, and there’s a rebuttal in there somewhere! Perhaps I’m just being cynical…
Just as it was in Australia, “Stop the Boats” is a bait and switch from unreasonably high levels of immigration by other means.
UK recorded 500,000 net migration in 2021-22, a huge increase on the previous high. So much for the Brexit promise of regaining control of the borders.
As others have noted, one of the disturbing ironies of this discriminative narrative demonising people seeking refugee status in Britain is that it is headed up by a pair of privileged brownskin babies in Sunak & Braverman, both of whom are first generation descendants of immigrants to that county and both of whom have lived lives of startling privilege as a consequence of their respective parent’s decisions to leave their own places of birth and seek a better life in the country of their former colonial masters.
That they both appear to have chosen to ignore that aspect of their backgrounds is itself a key clue to the motivation behind their determination to knuckle down and get tough on prospective migrants and refugees to the country which gave their parents the opportunity to live a better life than the ones they experienced in the countries of their birth. Cruelty born of privilege and adopted snobbery amid the crusty realms of the British elite does neither of them any favour and one would hope that come the next election they get the result that they both so sorely deserve; into the dumpster and off to the tip.
K, “Perhaps I’m just being cynical…”
Perhaps, or perhaps not. A cynic recognises that no one can seriously claim that land, created over millions of years upon which they live for just a brief moment of eternity, in actual fact belongs to anyone. A cynic recognises the truth of the term Terra Nullius which means ‘nobody’s land’ – land belonging to no one, which suits the cynic just fine as cynics find happiness in possessing as little as they possibly can yet still exist. Cancel culture, even at a legislative level, can decieve but it cannot alter the truth. Cynics always choose the simplicity of truth over the complex tangled web of deceit. If they did otherwise, they could not be considered cynical.
Did you know that Alexander Downer was appointed to a UK government panel to oversee its plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda ? Seriously, I’m not joking.
The committee provides “independent” oversight of the five-year deal between the UK and Rwanda under which asylum seekers who arrive in the UK would be sent to Rwanda on a one-way ticket – a plan wholly supported if not concocted by Mr Downer.
Priti Patel appointed this committee and Downer in one of her final acts as home secretary. Some say that Alexander Downer’s name was dropped into the conversation as a joke over a few drinks in Whitehall but somebody actually took it seriously.
Priti Patel! Glurg..hack, arrk, cough cough! Another of the aformentioned brownskin babies now fully enmeshed within bespoke faux-velvet rabid attack dog clothing, complete with wagging tails; she, along with Rish! and Braverwoman all fully dosed up on clysters and in full ‘We’re better than any of you Pommy bastards’ mode as they race to the finish line in the ‘Let’s see who can be the cruellest arsehole’ stakes; their dimwittery on full display as not one of them displays the least iota of a scintilla of a quantum of reasonable and rational intelligence in respect of how these displays of disturbing vulgarity and inhumanity might just play out in future perceptions after their inevitable tipping into the dumpster bin and burial on the trash heap following the next general British election.
That ol’ fishnets has been deemed worthy to join this ghastly charade is of no surprise; a man whose daddy and grandpapa made it their life’s work to represent the colonial masters to their best extent guaranteed that Plum-mouth would follow in their footsteps, particularly following the family’s decision that young Alex would be educated back in the home country, and again it’s no surprise that he’s spent his post-political Australian career after doing The Rodent’s bidding for 11 years swanning around London chasing cushy sinecures and encouraging his daughter Georgina to act in the best ways possible per Liberal Party traditions, i.e, irresponsibly, unethically, potentially illegally and so on.
To learn that the Great Pretender would be on board to exile asylum seekers to a fetid jungle destination in the heart of dark Africa seems entirely consonant with a man who wouldn’t have been out of place amid a certain 1930’s central European government.
Stephen S: ‘UK recorded 500,000 net migration in 2021-22, a huge increase on the previous high’.
What is the issue with that, and do you understand what ‘(NOM) net migration’ is vs. permanent migration?
NOM is ‘temporary churn over’ of ‘net financial (budget) contributors’* measured by the (UNPD defined) NOM net overseas migration ‘barometer’ especially international students, temp workers etc. border movements; expanded in 2006 to 12/16+ months, conflated more temporary residents with permanent migrants, for inflated media headlines (you cannot compare with other nations ex. Oz and only post 2006 on NOM ‘Statistics 101’).
Temp churn over or net migration have become important to support budgets for more non tax paying retirees tugging on pensions, NHS and services eg. NHS and old age dependency ratios are on a long term increase vs. fewer working age taxpayers; what’s the ‘solution’?
Presuming you are informed by Sustainable Population Australia, how do they keep misunderstanding demographic data i.e. who does their demographic research? Or, heaven forbid, they couldn’t possibly be promoting US Tanton Network agitprop inc. ‘Stop the Boats’?