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Editorial: Patel's scaremongering over refugees feeds the politics of hate

A BUNCH of far-right thugs carrying out “migrant patrols” in a sailing boat off Dover is a predictable escalation given Priti Patel’s inflammatory, xenophobic rhetoric in recent days.

Condemning the arrival of a few boatloads of vulnerable refugees as “appalling” and appointing an ex-marine as a “Channel threat commander” is a deliberate misrepresentation.

Patel is presumably less interested in presenting an accurate picture of Channel crossings than in bolstering her reputation among the Tory faithful as tough on migration — after all, the Home Secretary didn’t shy from wrongly informing MPs last month that the French authorities do not intercept boats at sea and return asylum-seekers to their territory (this is routine practice).

When challenged over this inaccurate statement, the Home Office demurred that Patel was not talking about “search-and-rescue” operations but “law enforcement.” That is, France should not merely be preventing refugees from trying to reach Britain, but should be punishing them for doing so.

The same brutish approach is clear from Immigration Minister Chris Philps’s demand that those who make it to our shores should be fingerprinted and face “real consequences.”

This aggression will set the tone for his meeting this week with French officials, who will no doubt welcome his offer of British crews to teach them “how boats can be intercepted and returned safely.”

The posturing is pathetic and would be laughable if the victims were not desperate individuals seeking safety.

Would Kent County Council be complaining of the “enormous pressure” it faces as a result of taking 400 unaccompanied child refugees into its care if the British government not done everything it could to limit its obligations under the Dubs Amendment, restricting the number of children it was prepared to protect to 480 and declaring admissions closed in May?

Had the scheme been continued — and it should have been open to far larger numbers from the beginning, given that EU criminal intelligence agency Europol warned four years ago that thousands of child refugees have gone missing and many are sold into modern slavery or prostitution — then central government would be negotiating with councils on how many children to take and assisting with necessary resources.

As asylum NGO Safe Passage’s Beth Gardiner-Smith warned at the time, ending the legal offer of protection meant that “more children will be pushed into the hands of smugglers or risk their lives in dangerous crossings.”

The government has chosen to ignore its responsibility for helping to create the refugee crisis — which Britain’s role in destabilising the Middle East through participation in the US-led destruction of Iraq and Libya and providing arms and funds to Syrian jihadists makes clear.

It has abandoned much pretence of seeking to address the causes that create refugees by merging the international aid department with the Foreign Office and admitting that it is reallocating aid away from poverty reduction and towards promoting Britain’s strategic priorities (by which Boris Johnson appeared to mean the US’s strategic priorities, since they mostly concerned increasing aid to countries antagonistic to Russia).

It then seeks to justify its callous attitude by monstering asylum-seekers as a threat and making grandiose threats to “send in the navy” against unarmed people in dinghies.

Small wonder fascist outfits like Britain First feel emboldened to mimic this militarist showboating.

Anti-fascists gathered today to protect one of our most important monuments, the Cable Street mural commemorating the Jews, Irish and Communists who forced back Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts in 1936, from far-right vandals.

Cable Street where the police attacked locals trying to protect their neighbourhood from uniformed fascist marchers, reminds us that we cannot look to the British state to oppose racism or protect people from it.

We must build anti-racist consciousness in workplaces and communities and build a movement that can take on and see off racists — and the forces of the state itself.

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