Death in the Channel

Why Last Week's Tragedy Won't Be the Last

The horrific drowning of 27 men, women and children in the Channel last week is not the first time migrants have died trying to cross the UK’s borders.   In terms of lives lost, this latest tragedy is eclipsed by the  39 Chinese nationals who suffocated to death in a lorry in Essex in 2019, and the 58 Chinese who suffered a similar fate at Dover in 2000. 

In all these cases the response of politicians and the media has been broadly similar.  First government ministers express their shock and horror, then they proceed with the ritual denunciations of the ‘evil’ human smugglers who ‘exploit’ the ‘desperate’ mmen and women who undertake these journeys.  Inevitably, they reject or ignore  calls to soften the restrictive ‘paper walls’ that the UK’s physical borders are intended to reinforce, by creating safer routes through which refugees might appeal for asylum, that might eliminate or reduce the need to undertake these dangerous crossings.  

The reason for this reluctance is quite simple: successive governments – both Labour and Tory – see the physical barriers that migrants seek to cross as a de facto deterrent to others, even though politicians prefer not to say this out loud, and even though there is no evidence that these barriers actually deter anyone.  Nor are they prepared to extend refugee protection beyond the modest numbers they believe the public is willing to accept, and they have no interest in convincing the public to accept any more than we already do.  

Nor do they see any political advantage in challenging and unpicking the racist attitudes and assumptions that course through social media and much of the popular press: that migrants only come to the UK to go on benefits, jump the housing queue or get housed in luxury hotels; that they aren’t ‘genuine’ refugees because they pass through ‘safe countries’ on their way to the UK; that the UK is uniquely generous towards refugees and is therefore a ‘soft touch’ for these parasitical and predatory migrants.

When I say racist, I mean the kind of racism that  never refers to biology or skin colour, but routinely dehumanises and objectifies migrants, to the point when ‘migrant’ barely connotes anything human anymore, and people can seriously argue that men and women would pay £3,000 or more to naviagte the 21st century’s dangerous clandestine migratory routes and cross the Channel without even a lifejacket, so that they can sit around on benefits in the English El Dorado for the rest of their lives.

Those who make these arguments tend to insist that we should be looking after our ‘own people’ first, even if few of them ever do that.  These are the ‘patriots’ with British flags on their Twitter profiles, who post pictures of black and brown men on Twitter and denounce the migrant ‘invasion’, and point out that most migrants are young men of ‘military age’ . 

These are the ones who  insist that we are at ‘breaking point’, as Nigel Farage told us in 2016; the ones who openly celebrated the deaths of 27 men, women and children on social media during these last dreadful few days. And no, I won’t share their hateful and disgusting messages.

One of these migrants was a 24-year-old Kurdish woman from Iraqi Kurdistan called Maryam Nuri Hamdamin, who drowned while talking to her fiancé – a resident in the UK - on her cellphone.  There is no evidence that Maryam  came in search of our benefits.  Her family say that she was a ‘romantic’ who wanted to marry the man she loved. 

In a normal country, that had not been corrupted by years of anti-migrant hysteria and invasion narratives, this awful outcome ought to raise other questions; why couldn’t she do that?  If her fiancé was already in the UK why couldn’t she join him?  Was it because she didn’t meet the UK’s infamous income threshold, designed to limit spousal reunions?   Why wouldn’t an Iraqi Kurd be allowed to marry her fiancé? Wasn’t the protection of Iraq’s Kurds one of the reasons why we joined in the invasion of Iraq in 2003?

A toxic debate

Why might wonder what other stories could be told of the other 26 people who drowned in the Channel,  and the people they loved and who loved them, but these are not questions that British politicians like to ask.  Far better – particularly for a Vote Leave government that used immigration so cynically to win the referendum and ‘get Brexit done’, and distract attention from its manifold failings afterwards - to allow all the lies and fantasies that feed the public’s famous ‘concerns’ about immigration to fester unchecked and unchallenged.  Isn’t that democracy in action?

So no to safer routes, and yes to a moral crusade against the ‘traffickers’, as the man who pretends to be Prime Minister inaccurately described them in his tweeted letter to Macron, with all the dishonesty and laziness that we have come to expect from him.

Instead our sordid gang of chancers prefers to blame France, while simultaneously calling for joint patrols on French beaches and demanding that France accept ‘returned’ asylum seekers – don’t call them refugees! – even though we have withdrawn from the agreement that made even that dubious arrangement possible.  

And let’s not leave disreputability and political cowardice to the Tories.  On Sky News Keir Starmer could be heard expressing his heartfelt concern for the ‘desperate’ migrants, and conflating smuggling and traffickers once again. This slippage is even more reprehensible coming from a former public prosecutor than it is from Bertie Booster. 

So Starmer is tacking firmly to the right here, with an eye to those Red Wall votes, in criticising the government on legal/technical grounds, with just the faint, plaintive hint that safer routes might be possible ‘when appropriate.’

Until then, Starmer is as insistent as his Tory and Labour predecessors that migrants should not get anywhere near the Channel, and that countries a long way from ours should take responsibility for stopping them ‘upstream.’ Marvellous.

Elsewhere the debate was equally arid. In the Times, (paywalled) Matthew Parris – the great liberal Tory scourge of Johnsonian corruption – could be found calling for us to ‘re-examine’ our ‘obligation to refugees’.  Why?  Because the 1951 Geneva Convention ‘sets up a false moral framework by suggesting we have a duty to care equally for all.’

It’s true that  the Geneva Convention was as a response to a very particular historical moment, in which the movement of millions of refugees threatened the stability of Europe, but it also embodies a more universal and enduring aspiration – coupled with the UN Declaration of Human Rights – that human beings should be able to access certain rights, such as the right to safety and refugee protection  - which do not necessarily derive from membership of a particular national territory.

In this sense, the Convention was indeed intended to pave the way for a better future and ensure that we ‘care equally for all’, and  it’s not clear why this duty should have to be ‘re-examined’ just because most refugees in the 21st century happen to be people of colour, and the English, according to Parris, have some kind of innate aversion to ‘foreigners’.

To be fair to Parris, he has been saying much the same thing since 2015, and you aren’t going to get much from a Tory on this issue, liberal or not. Elsewhere, in a column written for the Mail, before last week’s tragedy, Tom Tugendhat, the frowning conscience of the Tory party during the Afghan evacuation, could be found blaming France for failing to stop migrant crossings, while also condemning ‘ the mercenary and malicious forces that exploit them’.

Damn those mercenary forces.  If only they weren’t there, what a wonderful world it would be, wouldn’t it?  Tugendhat also took time to rail against Lukashenko – fair enough.  But with a stunning shallowness and frivolity that  Johnson would surely envy, he also argued that that ‘ By turning failing national economies into prospering societies, we have the power to establish new trading partners and thus create conditions where people don’t feel the need to migrate.’

This is an old argument, and not entirely without foundation, even though Tugendhat’s suggestion that clueless and floundering post-Brexit Britain can turn any national economies into ‘prospering societies’ certainly provides a new twist.   

There’s a lot more where this came from, and none of it is really concerned with the men, women, and children who died last week.  Our government’s main concern, as always, is to stop migrants from coming and demonstrate its power to do this through the theatre of border enforcement, even when it can’t.  

Its primary constituency is the rancid underbelly of the Tory/Ukip/Labour rightwing vote, who it fears have been incited by the beast of Thanet.  Last week Farage was at it again, patrolling Dover like some Spartan sentinel at Thermopylae, condemning the RNLI and Priti Patel, while also congratulating David Blunkett for warning that the creation of safe routes will ‘put Farage in Downing Street.’

This is the deadly dynamic of cowardice, opportunism, and cynicism that is turning the UK into a mean-spirited, frightened little country that seeks to use wave machines and offshore detention centres to deter migration, and punish ;lefty lawyers’ and the people who try to save migrant lives.   

So let us condemn the smugglers who loaded Maryam Nuri Hamdamin and her companions into an overloaded dinghy in one of the most dangerous seas in the world, but let’s also remember that this would not have happened had we not made it impossible for them to get here through any other means.

In other words, we also bear some of the responsibility for these deaths, and until we recognise that, there will be more. 

And in a century that is likely to be dominated by migration, we need to ask ourselves whether we want to be the increasingly fascistic country that Farage, Matthew Parris, and so many others are pushing us towards, or whether we can reach into our better traditions and show that we have we still have the capacity to be something better than that.