THE ABANDONMENT of over 1,000 children in tin containers at the squalid Calais “Jungle” refugee camp is the culmination of 13 years of inhuman and criminal efforts by the French and British governments to escape responsibility for the refugee crisis.
After the French government used riot police and bulldozers to clear up to 10,000 refugees, up to 1,000 children and teenagers remained behind. The charity Help Refugees reported that amid the fires, confusion and chaos, around 100 minors remained inside the camp. It said it knew of at least 49 children under the age of 13, eligible to come to the UK, who remain stranded.
The UK is able to shirk its international treaty obligations on refugee rights thanks to Tony Blair and former French president Jacques Chirac. Following a vitriolic campaign against asylum seekers in 2003, the two governments negotiated the Le Touquet agreement which effectively shifted the UK border to Calais.
By refusing to register refugees’ claims for UK asylum in Calais, thousands of people with a legal right to claim asylum have been abandoned to limbo in the French port, subjected to harassment by police and fascist groups.
Now Theresa May and the Tory ministers arrogantly tell the French to register all refugees in France but they will graciously allow maybe as many as 200 children in. But even this was too much for the rabid Tory press. When a handful arrived they set up a shameful hue and cry that they were not children at all.
This is the Britain that prides itself on admitting Jewish refugee children from Nazi Germany in the 1930s (the Kindertransport). However even here the boasting needs to be put in context. Courageous British Jews, Labour and Communist organisations, churches and charities campaigned for this. But Jewish organisations calculate that for the 10,000 children actually admitted, half a million applications by Jews were rejected.
Then as now the press stoked fears of a flood of refugees. A 1938 clipping from the Daily Mail read: “‘The way stateless Jews and Germans are pouring in from every port of this country is becoming an outrage. I intend to enforce the law to the fullest.’” In these words, Mr Herbert Metcalde, the Old Street Magistrate yesterday referred to the number of aliens entering this country through the ‘back door’ — a problem to which the Daily Mail has repeatedly pointed.”
Last year the same papers ran articles denouncing the fact that some refugees are given three cooked meals a day, £35 in cash each week and put up in hotels when dedicated centres are full. Tory MP Alec Shelbrooke told journalists: “It is outrageous that asylum seekers are being put up in hotel rooms at public expense. It’s this sort of soft touch that makes this country so attractive to migrants.”
Under a headline in the Daily Express (31 October) “How dare the French lecture us about EU migrants”, regular columnist Leo McKinstry incites hatred against refugee children, claiming they are “hulking young men rather than vulnerable children”.
But he has a more general political message: “… Tragically parts of the French capital have been transformed into a sprawling squalid migrant camps. Many central Paris streets are lined with rows of filthy tents, put up by young men from Africa and Asia who think that Europe owes them a living. This mess is a symbol of the deepening immigration disaster inflicted on the continent by treacherous, unpatriotic politicians. The EU has made a fetish of open borders and multiculturalism. Now in Paris we can glimpse the destructive consequences of that ideology.”
The racist assumptions glare out from every nasty word and phrase.
The Labour Party and the trade unions need to counterattack this racist onslaught. We must demand that Britain – as an immediate measure at least – opens its doors to all the refugees in Calais or dispersed to temporary accomodation. We need to ensure that Labour councils (as some have already done) take the initiative in welcoming them, providing decent housing, food, clothing, access to schools and healthcare.
The anxieties about refugees and migrant workers, where they are not simply a product of the relentless racism of the press, have roots in decaying social services, social housing, underpaid jobs – issues that are directly related to the years of cuts imposed on all of these. Working people here have far more in common with workers from all countries and with refugees from wars caused by our own rulers, than we do with the bosses and bankers – the real parasites on our labour.
In Britain today only the labour movement can address these challenges, and by winning power both locally and nationally redress them. Meanwhile, trade unions and local Labour parties need to take the fight against racism into the schools, workplaces and housing estates – educating those seduced by the racist lies and slurs, and isolating and shaming the hardened bigots.
