“Demonising asylum-seekers is an attack on the most vulnerable. It is the opposite of Labour values. Criminalising their right to claim asylum is a complete negation of our own history and our moral responsibilities.”
Bell Ribeiro-Addy wrote a piece for the Socialist Campaign Group’s 2026 pamphlet ‘The Socialist Policies We Need’. You can read the pamphlet in full below.
Every government that has implemented austerity has also ramped up racism. This is inevitable as whipping up racism is a classic method of distraction and divide-and-rule. Every government since 2010 has used it, beginning when austerity was first imposed on us.
The cutting edge of this relentless campaign is directed against asylum-seekers in general, but is not limited to them. It leads directly to open hostility to all migrants. It also spills over into a hostility to Black and Asian people in general.
This has become explicit with parties on the right trying to outdo each other in their draconian proposals for deportation, even of people born here and with every right to be here.
Again, this is explicitly linked to skin colour and to religion. It is toxic, pure racism. Instead of opposing it, Labour under Starmer’s leadership pandered to it.
This is the context for all the sloganeering and posturing we have seen, from ‘deport first, appeal later’ and ‘stop the boats’ to ‘smash the gangs’.
They have all been miserable failures in their stated objective of reducing the number of people crossing the Channel in precarious boats.
But the rhetoric has succeeded in creating a hostile environment of racism for all Black and Asian people in this country, wherever they were born and whatever their religion, or none.
We have fallen back so far that the kind of deportation policies once advocated by Enoch Powell, and that led to his dismissal from the Conservative front bench, are now becoming ever more mainstream.
It does not have to be this way.
If we are really going to have a radical reorientation of economic policy, the cynical motivation for a reactionary and inhumane immigration policy falls away. A programme for increasing shared prosperity has no need for divide-and-rule or reactionary distractions.
Instead, we can have an entirely new approach. For the left, it should be based on recognisably socialist principles. But the new approach should also be able to command broad appeal.
It is a much-neglected fact that a majority of people in this country recognise that racism does exist in this country and are opposed to it (as shown by YouGov polling and data from the British Social Attitudes Survey). We can do what is right and swim with the tide.
Our alternative immigration policy should be based on three principles:
- Decency and fairness
- Legality
- Wider prosperity
Demonising asylum-seekers is an attack on the most vulnerable. It is the opposite of Labour values. Criminalising their right to claim asylum is a complete negation of both our own history and our current moral responsibilities. Placing enormous financial burdens on people who have come here to take up job offers is cruel and counter-productive.
Splitting up families, extending the already excessive periods before people can claim rights and retrospectively changing the rules are also grossly unfair and are in breach of United Nations fundamental human rights.
At the same time, it is blatantly unfair to dump asylum-seekers in remote areas and prevent them from working. Throughout history, migrants have settled where the jobs are. Cities are generally better placed to accommodate newcomers than small communities with limited resources.
As a result, we can abolish immigration detention, or reduce it to a bare minimum. We can return to the system of detention only being used prior to a reasonable basis for immediate deportation. This should generally be reserved for people who have no right to be here and have committed a serious crime.
There should be no question of deporting anyone to unsafe countries like Rwanda, or to circumstances where they will be in significant danger.
Secondly, the question of legality is extremely important, although routinely ignored in most of the discussion about immigration. We must defend international law, including the UN Refugee Convention and the European Convention on Human Rights, which enshrine in law principles we have always upheld.
One of Labour’s proudest historical achievements was the part we played in defeating the Nazis. The architecture of international human rights legislation was born out of that victory. Lord Alf Dubs, one of the Kindertransport refugees, is right to remind us of our international obligations. These are simply the obverse of our international rights as human beings. We reject all attempts to ignore international law, or to tear down its architecture.
We have long argued for the establishment of safe and legal routes so that claims of refugee status can be safely and speedily dealt with. That undercuts the need for dangerous small boats to cross the Channel, provides a safe and legal route for genuine claimants and will draw away anyone tempted into the arms of the people traffickers.
Thirdly, we need to reject the mythology around the economic impact of net migration. Immigration to this country has enriched it economically and culturally throughout our history. Currently, migrants make a decisive contribution to our NHS and social care and a key contribution to many other economic sectors.
The idea that migrants in work displace a local person from that job is based on a fallacy. No one argues that the far greater proportion of women entering the workforce from the 1950s onwards led to the mass displacement of men. That would be nonsense.
In reality, it is the people we represent, the working class and its allies, who create the wealth of society. The growth in our numbers, wherever people are from, adds to our collective capacity to create wealth.
But successive governments have failed to harness that potential. Economic policy has stunted growth, and social policy has made life harsher, particularly in pay, housing and healthcare.
We can and should change all that and, alongside those changes, have a fair and decent immigration policy that replaces racism and division with cohesion and prosperity.
- Bell Ribeiro-Addy is the Member of Parliament for Clapham & Brixton Hill – you can follow her on Facebook, Twitter/X and Instagram.
- You can read the SCG pamphlet ‘The Socialist Policies We Need’ in full here. The foreword says that “We hope this contributes to a debate across the Labour Party, trade unions and the wider movement about the political programme needed to deliver the change people voted for, to build a better future for our communities and to prevent the rise of a Trump-style government here in Britain.“
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