For a New Britain, Equal, Open & Integrated, the only road to Progress
Defeat the Borders Bill – Don’t co-operate with Racist Laws – Build Action Now to make the Bill unworkable
All Out 22 Oct. 2021 – Justice for Nabil Abdulmajid – Drop the Charges Now
- Stop Criminalising Refugees – Seeking Asylum is Not a Crime
- Stop arresting & prosecuting refugees who steered cross-Channel boats – Quash the convictions, free the prisoners – Seeking Asylum is Not a Crime
- No “Pushbacks” in the Channel – Seeking Asylum is Not a Crime
- End the policy of deporting immigrants & refugees with criminal convictions
- Shut Down detention centres, detention hotels & detention camps
- Build Homes for All – refugees, citizens, immigrants – Expand social housing
- Papers for All! Amnesty Now!
Organise community defence against immigration raids – Home Office out of our communities, workplaces, schools, universities and NHS
Open the Borders of Britain and Europe
18/09/2021
The Battle for Our Future
The Movement for Justice by any means necessary (MFJ) is fighting for a New Britain that will be a nation of equality, integration and progress. Britain is already an increasingly multi-racial, multi-national society. It is part of a world whose different peoples are increasingly connected. It can only develop as a truly democratic country if all of us who live here now and who come here in the future have full and equal rights. We must have those rights without any discrimination, wherever we have come from or however long we have lived here. Britain must become a country with Open Borders. It must be a society where we have those rights as the people we are – whatever our culture or religion, whatever the colour of our skins or the colour of our passports, whatever our gender or sexuality.
The British government is moving rapidly in the exact opposite direction. It is establishing authoritarian rule based on racism. Its new Nationality and Borders Bill is a major part of that plan. Its policies are one long attack on democracy, on justice, on human rights, civil rights, immigrant rights and workers’ rights. It is attacking the lives of the poor and oppressed. It is taking away our right to protest against those attacks. It is introducing measures that will prevent many poor people and black and Asian people from voting (just like Donald Trump’s Republican Party in the USA). It is using its majority in Parliament to tear up constraints on government power.
This government’s policies are driven by privilege – and by desperation. It is defending the privileges of the richest and most powerful capitalists. It is desperate because the system that makes them rich and powerful is in a deep historic crisis. Over several decades the ruling class shut down a huge part of its industries, or moved them abroad. That was part of its attack on the working class in Britain. Now the declining economy is dominated by financial speculators and Brexit is making the decline worse.
Britain in Crisis
We are witnessing the dying pains of British imperialism. This so-called ‘great power’ can’t protect the health and safety of its people. Its response to the Covid-19 pandemic is to tell people to get used to ‘living with Covid,’ so that capitalist businesses can keep making a profit. This former ‘world power’ is increasingly isolated and scorned. This government and its Brexit policy have increased the likelihood that we will see the break-up of the ‘United Kingdom’ – destroying the state that the English ruling classes put together by centuries of conquest and bribery. This government is incompetent, corrupt and reckless; those failings reflect a political system in terminal decline.
Racism and the rights of immigrants and refugees are the decisive issue in the battle between two alternative futures – the New Britain MFJ is fighting for, or the crushing, racist future that this government is taking us to.
History has made racism the decisive issue because the peoples of the world are increasingly interconnected and increasingly unequal. The only hope for millions of people is to move. And the British government and its supporters make racism the central issue by blaming immigrants and refugees for the consequences of their own policies: the cuts and privatisation in the public services, low pay and insecure jobs, food poverty, housing shortages etc. They make racism the central issue when they promote the false idea that human rights for immigrants and refugees, and for black and Asian people, are taking something away from white people.
Cross-Channel refugees and the government’s Borders Bill
Racism and hostility to immigrants were the driving force in the campaign that led to the UK leaving the European Union (Brexit). Those policies brought Boris Johnson’s government to power with a majority of MPs, but on the votes of a minority of the people. Its new anti-immigrant law (the Nationality and Borders Bill) is the most brutal, oppressive and unjust immigration law that any British government has ever produced. The aim of this law is to stir up racism and nationalism by treating asylum seekers as criminals. Its immediate target is the most recent generation of refugees – those who have risked everything in the bold attempt to cross the Channel in small boats, because they hoped to build a new life in Britain, in freedom and safety. The government is using attacks on those refugees to slash the rights of ALL immigrants and asylum seekers.
Johnson’s main advantage is not the strength of racism in British society. That is often exaggerated by politicians and journalists. His main strength is the wretched weakness of the ‘opposition’ parties and the organisations that believe change can only come from the rich and powerful and their political system
Now more than ever, we must build independent ACTION by the oppressed and exploited in order to defeat the government’s racist policies and win progressive change in British society. That action has to be led and initiated by those who are under direct racist attack from the government. It must be principally led by refugees and immigrants.
Mass migration is a rebellion against global inequality
The rich and powerful regard free movement as their exclusive privilege: free movement for themselves and their money & investments. They deny the right of free movement to the poor and oppressed – the people who they exploit, impoverish and dispossess. There is a global labour market for bosses looking for cheap labour, but not for people looking for work, safety and freedom. Mass migration is a rebellion against that injustice.
In an increasingly unequal world the free movement of people is the most basic human right. It is fundamental to workers’ rights, women’s rights, LGBT rights, the right of asylum and the right to life itself. The ruling classes use their border controls, detention centres and anti-immigration laws to deny us the right of free movement. However, those same imperialist ruling classes are forcing millions of people to move: people are moving to escape the poverty caused by imperialist exploitation, the tyranny of dictators and elites who are backed by the imperialists, the endless wars caused by the imperialists and their rivalries, and the climate crisis (global heating) that imperialist corporations have created by their drive for profit.
Refugees are opening borders by any means necessary because they need to solve crushing material problems in their lives. MFJ demands Open the Borders of Britain & Europe, because that is what hundreds of thousands of people are doing. The alternative to Open Borders is a world of barbarism and tyranny. The ruling classes condemn millions of people to death, drowning, torture and starvation, and they know what they are doing. That is barbarism.
MFJ welcomes the refugees who risk everything when they cross the Channel. We welcome them as new members and allies in the fight for equality, justice & immigrant rights. Those who we welcome, Boris Johnson’s government fears, because their bold action is a direct challenge to its racist ideology of ‘taking back control of our borders.’
The Government’s racist build-up to the Borders Bill
Since spring 2020, Home Secretary Priti Patel has used the arrival of cross-Channel refugees to build racist support for the policy of criminalising asylum seekers. The attack on people who have crossed the Channel shows clearly that anti-immigrant policies are not about numbers. The number of people immigrating to Britain or claiming asylum here is falling, despite the 22000+ who have (at the time of writing) crossed the Channel in the last two years.
The Home Office has used dubious legal grounds to prosecute many cross-Channel refugees. The government’s UK Border Force arrested refugees who were steering the boats, sometimes using a photo from a drone as evidence. Then they were charged as though they were ‘people traffickers.’ In addition, the government ran an ugly racist campaign of mass deportations during summer this year. Charter flights were arranged to Vietnam, Zimbabwe, Nigeria & Ghana, and to Jamaica. These were ‘celebrated’ in articles by Patel in the Daily Mail and Daily Express – two papers with a shameful history of promoting racism.
The Home Office is acting as though its new Borders Bill has already become the law, but this summer festival of racism has not been a success for the government.
The number of people who were deported on those charter flights has been small. Only seven men were deported to Jamaica, out of a total list of 90. MFJ and Jamaican detainees organised inside Colnbrook detention centre and told the real stories of the men who Patel called dangerous criminals. The Home Office had to take many of them off the list; one group resisted successfully by blockading themselves in a room in the detention centre. There were only a few people deported on the flight to Nigeria & Ghana in July. It was the same on the flight to Zimbabwe. A later flight to Nigeria was cancelled.
Everyone on the Home Office lists for the charter flights to Jamaica and Vietnam had the de-humanising label ‘Foreign National Offender’ (FNO). That means they have been convicted of a crime and they don’t have British citizenship. All those ‘FNOs’ had served their sentences, so deporting them was a double punishment. Most of the Jamaicans the Home Office tried to deport have families, partners or children in Britain. Many came to Britain as children and don’t know anyone in Jamaica. Most of them have suffered the racism of Britain’s police and ‘justice’ systems. Many of them experienced racism in education or from social services. Many of those on the charter flight to Vietnam were victims of trafficking.
They are all likely to be in danger if they are deported. The Home Office was prepared to sacrifice them in order to reinforce white racist prejudices and racist stereotypes. The unjust and racist deportation of ‘FNOs’ must stop.
Stop the Channel “Pushbacks!”
This summer’s charter flight plan was a failure, and the Home Office also suffered set-backs in its attempts to prosecute cross-Channel refugees. A Court of Appeal decision in April forced the Home Office to drop a good many of those cases. However, there are still people who steered boats serving prison sentences for their convictions, and the Border Force is still arresting refugees who have steered a boat; MFJ demands all convictions are quashed, the prisoners are released and the arrests are stopped.
The setbacks for the Home Office, especially the failure of Patel’s charter flight plans, are victories for refugee and immigrant rights, so they have created a crisis for the government. The Home Secretary has been criticised by her own racist supporters. She has responded by increasing her racist attacks on refugees. She has announced that the UK Border Force will start to push refugee boats back into French waters, and Boris Johnson is supporting her. The Border Force has already started training exercises in the Channel. Patel is following the dangerous example of the Greek and Italian governments in the Mediterranean. The government is prepared to defy maritime law and the anger of the French government.
Border Force officers have insisted that every single ‘pushback’ is personally authorised by Patel – they don’t want to take responsibility themselves. That is a clear sign of how dangerous and legally dubious this plan is.
However, the government has decided to make a public show of being ‘tough’ on refugees, whatever damage it causes. Join the demonstration called by MFJ to demand that Channel pushbacks are stopped. (See box for details).
Justice for Nabil Abdulmajid! Seeking Asylum is Not a Crime – Drop the Charges Now
The Home Office wants to reverse the impact of the setbacks to its prosecution of cross-Channel refugees. That is why it is pushing ahead with the prosecution of Nabil Abdulmajid. Nabil is a cross-Channel refugee from Sudan and a member of MFJ.
The attempt to criminalise Nabil is entirely political. All four people in the boat with Nabil were Sudanese refugees like him. Nabil was a victim of persecution in Sudan because of his ethnicity. Like many other refugees, he was enslaved and tortured in Libya. He travelled through Italy to France, but was deported back to Italy under the EU’s Dublin Agreement. He was destitute there and crossed more borders to reach Germany and claim asylum. His claim was refused, however, and the German authorities planned to send him back to persecution in Sudan.
Faced with that threat Nabil made the choice to save his life and join the people crossing the Channel to Britain. He contributed to buying a boat and was doing his best to steer it and keep them all safe until they were rescued. They were crossing in the night in rough, dangerous waters. They battled for hours in the dark to keep the boat afloat while the waves crashed around them. By the time they were rescued they were soaking wet and traumatised.
Months later Nabil was arrested and charged because he was steering the boat. The decision to prosecute Nabil is an attack on all cross-Channel refugees. It is part of the government’s propaganda for the Borders Bill, and so it is a threat to the right of all asylum seekers and to every immigrant without papers. That is why MFJ says We Are All Nabil.
We demand that the charges against him are dropped. That will be the issue at the next hearing in his case, in Canterbury Crown Court. Join MFJ’s demonstration at the court to support Nabil. (See Box for details).
“Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow”
MFJ exists to build the independent leadership of and for the poor and oppressed. The method MFJ applies to this struggle was summed up a long while ago, in a speech by an escaped black slave, Frederick Douglass, who was the greatest leader of the struggle against slavery in the USA. Speaking clearly and forcibly he set out these principles for the struggle of the oppressed and exploited:
“A man who will not fight for himself, when he has the means of doing so, is not worth being fought for by others…. a man who does not value freedom for himself will never value it for others.”
“The poet was true… [who] said, Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow.”
“The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions… have been born of earnest struggle…. If there is no struggle there is no progress.”
“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will….”
Douglass made that speech to a black audience in 1857. It was a tense and difficult time for the black anti-slavery struggle, just four years before the Civil War that ended slavery in the US. In the speech he refers directly to white leaders who opposed slavery but looked down on black people: “We may fight, but we must fight… under white officers…. They don’t like any demonstrations whatever in which coloured men take a leading part.”
This is a tense and difficult time for refugees and immigrants in Britain – and more generally for the black, Asian and Muslim communities. We have too many politicians, charities and ‘sympathisers’ who have the privilege of UK citizenship and who don’t want refugees to ‘take a leading part.’ They want to preserve their ‘peaceful co-existence’ with the established political system. They don’t want refugees taking action that might disrupt that relationship.
Refugees and immigrants, especially cross-Channel refugees, are the front-line of the fight for human rights. They are in a fight against the most racist and dangerous government in the modern history of Britain. The front-line is an exposed position. We can’t afford the luxury of peaceful co-existence with those enemies.
Changing the Balance of Power
The task facing our movement is to change the balance of power in society. We need to change the balance of power in favour of the poor, exploited and oppressed, and we need to weaken the power of the rich and powerful who control the machinery of the state (detention centres, border guards, police etc).
In practice, that means we must change the balance of power in favour of those sections of the poor and oppressed who are most conscious of their oppression, who are most aware of their conflict with the state and who feel the urgent need for change. In today’s British society that means immigrants and asylum seekers, and black, Asian and Muslim communities – especially the youth of those communities. Action by those groups is the necessary force that will undermine the government’s efforts to crush them.
This has been the consistent method of MFJ’s organising in Yarl’s Wood and other detention centres and in our struggles for asylum rights. Similar action has also occurred ‘spontaneously’ (though resistance is never truly spontaneous).
When a Kenyan detainee died as a result of neglect in the former Oakington detention centre, fellow detainees prevented a cover-up by stopping the removal of his body, taking control of the building and contacting the media. When the BBC arrived detainees broke down the doors and went outside to demonstrate. Oakington was shut down within months. Similar uprisings and exposures occurred after deaths in the former Morton Hall detention centre.
In May/June 2014 hundreds of asylum seekers in Harmondsworth and Colnbrook detention centres took part in a series of mass protests to demand that they be taken off the notorious Detained Fast Track (DFT) asylum process and released. (DFT was a system that isolated asylum seekers and rushed them through interviews and appeals in a few days or weeks.) In the 12 months after the protests a series of court decisions said DFT was illegal and it was stopped.
These actions and many others shifted the balance of power in the detention centres and between the detainees and the Home Office. Cumulatively, they led to the government’s decision to reduce the use of detention. Seven detention centres were shut down between 2015 and 2020. The number of people held in the detention system is now at the lowest level since it began.
The Movement we need to build – The Action we need to take
The current stage of our struggle is marked by that shift away from using detention centres. The policy in those that remain is for a quick turn-over of detainees and rapid deportation. Since the arrival of cross-Channel refugees the Home Office has moved to using hotels and camps as places to hold asylum seekers – especially those who came in small boats. The Home Office says the refugees are free to come and go, but without money they are not really free. Some of the places are too isolated for them to go anywhere.
Each hotel needs to become a centre of organisation and resistance. Cross-Channel refugees in MFJ have already organised successful collective struggles against restrictions and bullying by managers who are appointed by Home Office contractors. Some of these refugees have spoken to journalists and got media coverage for their action. There needs to be more action inside more detention hotels. That will undermine the authority of the management companies and the Home Office. The networks of contacts between refugees in different hotels should be expanded and used to co-ordinate action.
Such action can take many forms: collective action to get attention and treatment for people who are ill and being neglected; calling an ambulance if management doesn’t respond; going as a group to reception or a manager’s office to protest over any injustice, abuse or complaint, and refusing to leave until you get a satisfactory answer. None of this should be left to the individual.
Refugees in hotels need to build links and support in the communities where they are located. We need to take to the streets with marches and rallies in local communities, especially in integrated communities with large black, Asian and immigrant populations. There are many detention hotels in such neighbourhoods. We need more demonstrations and rallies like the one MFJ organised in Lewisham with refugees from a local hostel. We need to show the strength of our movement and involve local communities.
We need to speak to students in schools, colleges and universities now the new term has started. If you are in an English class, speak to the other students about this struggle. If you are in a student society, (for example, an anti-racist or refugee support group, a black or Muslim students society, or a law society) invite speakers from MFJ. We will win their active support because the policies and actions of this government are a real threat to the future of all young people.
The more we build these connections and unite Britain’s different refugee ‘generations’ in action, the more we will shift the balance of forces and be able to defend our communities from the Home Office. The most effective way to stop deportations is to stop immigration raids. We can build on what is happening already in many communities and establish community-based defence organisations everywhere, to watch out for raids, give warnings and take collective action to block raids and chase out Immigration Enforcement vans.
The more we build these forms of action the easier it will be to get workers, students and teachers to enforce a policy of non-cooperation with the Home Office. We need people refusing to ask questions about immigration status or pass information to the Home Office. We need that happening in every school, college, hospital, doctors’ surgery, local council office, university and every workplace where immigrants, with or without papers, are employed. The more we shift the balance of power the more inspired and confident people will be to defy the government.
This is a struggle we can win
Most white people in Britain are not as racist as the government needs them to be, and British society (especially in the major cities and among the younger generation) is too integrated for the racist plans of the Home Office to be fully effective. From the Home Office point of view, too many white people who know a refugee or an immigrant without papers personally are likely to recognise their humanity. They are likely to sympathise with them and support them against the Home Office.
In the run-up to the Borders Bill we are seeing an example of this. The Royal National Lifeboat Institute (RNLI) has said publicly that it will continue to save the life of anyone who is in danger at sea. The RNLI is the charity that organises the lifeboat rescue service round the coasts of the UK. The rescue crews are all volunteers from the coastal communities, which are mainly white. They are rescuing desperate men, women and children who are in the cross-Channel boats; they see their humanity and they carry on, even in the face of abuse from anti-refugee racists. Under the Borders Bill those lifeboat crews will be liable for prosecution – but they have declared they will continue to save anyone who needs rescuing.
That is part of a wider problem for the government. British society is now too integrated to make things easy for the Home Office, especially in the major cities where most people live, and among the younger generation. We recently saw that demonstrated in Glasgow, when an integrated working class community turned out, occupied the streets for eight hours, and successfully stopped the deportation of two Indian Sikh ‘over-stayers.’
If refugees and immigrants take the lead we can inspire a whole movement of such resistance. There are many people of all races who are angry, bitter about this government’s cynical approach to the Covid pandemic and alarmed by its racism. They are frustrated. They need to see an organised movement of the people who have been through the harshest struggles, who have the greatest need to fight and have the greatest need to win – they need to see a movement of refugee and immigrant leaders.
This government is neither strong nor stable. It is making-up policies as it goes along. It does not have the undivided confidence of the ruling class. Many of the rich and powerful are alarmed by the chaos it is creating, or they are unhappy with the damage that Brexit has done to their trade with Europe.
If our refugee and immigrant led movement continues to grow and wins more battles, we will inspire wider sections of the population to join their struggles with ours. That will change the balance of power and widen the divisions among the rich and powerful. It will create a situation of flux in which we can derail and defeat the racist agenda of Johnson and Patel. We can defeat the Borders Bill in action even if it is passed by Parliament.
That will be a big step forward in the fight for a New Britain, Equal, Open and Integrated.
contact@movementforjustice.co.uk
facebook.com/movementforjustice
@followmfj
Movement for Justice By Any Means Necessary (MFJ/BAMN) is the sister organization based in London, Britain, of the US organization the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration & Immigrant Rights and Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary (BAMN)