Reflection on leaders debate a week before UK General Election

Source: JRS

Sophie Cartwright, Senior Policy Officer at Jesuit Refugee Services UK writes:

In this week's election debate, the Prime Minister and leader of the opposition accused each other of pursuing policies that would grant refugees sanctuary, as if this were a great fault. It laid bare just how low our politics has sunk.

Faced with a question about border control, the Prime Minister touted the government's plan to forcibly send people seeking asylum to Rwanda. In response the leader of the opposition attacked the Prime Minister for not processing people's asylum claims because "until they are processed they cannot be returned to where they came from". He noted that the government could, after all, only remove a few hundred people to Rwanda.

Asked whether processing asylum claims would mean giving most people asylum, he responded that currently everyone is effectively "given asylum" because they can't be removed. The Prime Minister responded derisively: "Do you know where they're from? Iran, Syria, Afghanistan", going on to suggest that because it would be impossible to return people to such countries, we should ignore their claims and forcibly send them to Rwanda.

People claiming asylum, the argument went, are from really dangerous places, so processing their claims would mean we were forced to grant them safe haven. Therefore, we shouldn't even consider their cases.

The leader of the opposition might have been expected to respond by saying that yes, processing asylum claims would mean that people who have fled brutal regimes and conflict could be granted asylum here, and that is right. Yes, we should be a country that offers sanctuary to refugees. Instead, he focussed on the impossibility of removing anyone without first processing their claims, and the irrelevance of the Rwanda plan, given the small numbers involved.

Throughout the argument, the Prime Minister and leader of the opposition appeared united in the assumption that forcibly removing people who have fled to the UK in order to escape the Taliban was a commonsense policy goal.

In the conversation, removing refugees was the only thing that mattered. The whole argument hinged on what was the most practicable way to do that at scale. Any sense of humanity towards refugees, or legal justice for them, was absent from this discussion.

The Prime Minister even quipped that it would be impossible to "do a deal" with Iranian Ayatollahs or the Taliban, seeming to imply that the chief barrier to removing people was the lack of dialogue with those regimes, not the fate people would face if removed to them.

We have experienced years of increasingly dehumanising language and hostile policies towards refugees. We have witnessed our asylum system, that denies people the sanctuary they badly need and abuses those it ought to protect, become even worse as politicians across the spectrum demonise desperate people who are trying to reach safety. Much of this discourse tries to deny that people in the asylum system have fled danger. In this discussion, the Prime Minister stared that fact squarely in the face, but treated it as morally irrelevant, a logistical problem, albeit a big one, and this attitude remained unchallenged by his opponent.

This is a new low in our political discourse. The very idea that we have a duty to offer sanctuary to refugees, or that it is wrong to forcibly send people into danger has been abandoned. Immigration control is seen as so fundamentally important that human life is not even just less important - it is irrelevant.

This has not come out of nowhere. It has grown from years of vaunting hostility towards refugees. Successive governments have removed asylum seekers' right to work, consigning them to poverty; expanded and routinised immigration detention, a system of indefinitely incarcerating people purely for immigration purposes; established the hostile environment that weaponises human suffering as a means of immigration control; ghettoised people in containment sites; and banned claiming asylum under the Illegal Migration Act. Throughout, people refused asylum have been intentionally made destitute.

We have seen before the profound dangers of a system that seeks only to remove and control people, without looking at the stories of those involved or considering justice. It led to the marginalisation, detention, and forcible removal of British citizens born in the Commonwealth - the so-called 'Windrush' scandal. This is not the politics we want.

We stand with refugees.

JRS UK is politically independent and does not endorse any party or candidate.

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