Robert Stevens
Britain’s Tory government is drawing up proposals to remove migrants and asylum seekers to remote offshore locations—either within other countries or in UK waters—the moment they reach the UK.
Documents seen by the Financial Times, Times and Guardian reveal that the government’s “hostile environment” against immigrants and asylum seekers is to be stepped up with a raft of sadistic proposals. Under one of these, asylum seekers would be sent to the Ascension Islands, a volcanic rock in the Atlantic 4,000 miles away from Britain.
According to the leaks, asylum seeker policy will be closely modelled on the Australian system of “remote detention”, with refugees forcibly sent to offshore islands. The policy—described chillingly as the “Pacific Solution”— has been enforced by successive Labor and Liberal governments since 2001.
Australia’s refugee prison camps have long been condemned by refugee and human rights organisations. In the years from 2010 to January 2019 there were 37 deaths in its detention centres, both the “offshore” facilities on Manus Island and Nauru and “onshore” camps on the mainland and Christmas Island, an Indian Ocean outpost.
Commenting on the UK documents, Rossella Pagliuchi-Lor, the UK representative of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, said “This is the Australian model and I think we have already seen that the Australian model has brought about incredible suffering on people who are guilty of no more than seeking asylum.”
Home Secretary Priti Patel has already announced a post-Brexit Australian points based system aimed at massively restricting immigration post-Brexit.
The new proposals are of a piece with Boris Johnson’s recent decision to appoint former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott as a leading Brexit trade adviser to his government. The Financial Times notes that Abbott, who oversaw Australia’s offshoring policy as prime minister (September 2013-September 2015), recently held discussions with Patel.
The newspaper reported on September 29 that Patel “asked officials to explore the construction of an asylum processing centre on Ascension Island, a British overseas territory more than 4,000 miles from the UK in the south Atlantic, for migrants coming to Britain.”
“The home secretary’s officials also looked at the possibility of building an asylum centre on St Helena, part of the same island group.” St Helena is 800 miles from Britain.
The newspaper said that the idea of using Ascension Island for this purpose had been ruled out, but cited Whitehall “allies” of Patel, one of whom stated, “We have been looking at how other countries have been dealing with this issue… We have been scoping everything. No decisions have been made by ministers.”
The following day, a government spokesman said of the leaked documents, “We are developing plans to reform our illegal migration and asylum policies so we can keep providing protection to those who need it, while preventing abuse of the system and criminality… As part of this work we’ve been looking at what a whole host of other countries do to inform a plan for the United Kingdom. And that work is ongoing.”
For months, the government has been ramping up its anti-immigration agenda, seizing on the arrival of a few thousand desperate people in small boats and dinghies via the Channel between France and the UK. The vast majority of those making the perilous journey are from countries devastated by imperialist wars and proxy wars supported by the UK, including in Afghanistan Iraq, Syria, Libya and Sudan. The government’s rhetoric is backed up by a daily stream of filth vomited up by a venal tabloid press denouncing “illegal” migrants.
The Times published details of other plans under consideration in which “Migrants seeking asylum in Britain would be processed on disused ferries moored off the [UK] coast…” It reported that “One option being considered is to buy retired ferries and convert them into asylum-processing centres.” These could be located in a remote location such as off the Scottish coast. Also being discussed is the “possibility of building a processing centre on a Scottish island.”
Requisitioning ferries that would effectively serve as offshore prison ships is a favoured policy among those drafting proposals. The Times noted, “A disused 40-year-old ferry can be bought from Italy for £6 million. It could house 1,400 people in 141 cabins. A disused cruise ship, at present moored in Barbados, would cost £116 million and could accommodate 2,417 people in 1,000 cabins.”
Literally nothing is off the table in the plans of the British ruling class against defenceless migrants and asylum seekers, with the Times reporting that the “Home Office held discussions about moving migrants to decommissioned oil platforms in the North Sea for processing.”
The Guardian said the leaked documents were marked “official” and “sensitive” and were produced last month. They included advice to Downing Street by the Foreign Office which had been asked to “offer advice on possible options for negotiating an offshore asylum processing facility similar to the Australian model in Papua New Guinea and Nauru”. The documents, the Guardian states, “suggest the government has for weeks been working on ‘detailed plans’ that include cost estimates of building asylum detention camps on the south Atlantic islands, as well as other proposals to build such facilities in Moldova, Morocco and Papua New Guinea.”
The Johnson government is already pushing through legislation under which government ministers and the repressive agencies of the state will operate outside the rule of law. The asylum documents make clear how far they are prepared to go in this direction. Were such camps to be set up in other countries they would go further even than the Australian system in denying migrants and asylum seekers rights they are guaranteed under international law.
One document outlines that Australia’s system is “based on migrants being intercepted outside Australian waters”, allowing Australia to claim no immigration obligations to individuals under international law. But Britain’s proposals would mean relocating asylum seekers who “have arrived in the UK and are firmly within the jurisdiction of the UK for the purposes of the ECHR and Human Rights Act 1998”. Johnson himself is involved in framing the proposals, with the newspaper reporting, “One document says the request for advice on third country options for detention facilities came from ‘the PM’.”
A major problem, according to the documents, is that setting up camps in far flung locations such as Ascension Island or St Helena would be “extremely expensive and logistically complicated”. The Guardian reported that it would cost £220 million to build a camp with 1,000 beds, with running costs of £200 million. One document notes the “significant” legal, diplomatic and practical obstacles involved in building a camp on Ascension, including the existence there of “sensitive military installations”.
Regarding St Helena, the Foreign Office proposals amount to jackboot diplomacy and criminality being plotted at the highest levels of the state. The authors of one document write, “In relation to St Helena we will need to consider if we are willing to impose the plan if the local government object” [emphasis added].
Locating detention centres in other countries, not British overseas territories, is not “favoured” by the government, one document notes, but it may “wish to explore [the option] in case it presents easier pathways to an offshore facility”.
Proposals to repeal legislation in order to “discourage” and “deter” migrants from entering the UK—and to kick them out as soon as they enter—are also revealed in the documents. Home Office legal advice to Downing Street would require “disapplying sections 77 and 78 of the Nationality Immigration and Asylum Act 2002 so that asylum seekers can be removed from the UK while their claim or appeal is pending.”
In what is described as a “likely legislative change” by the Guardian, another document reveals Home Office advice that a new law would require “defining what we mean by a clandestine arrival (and potentially a late claim) and create powers allowing us to send them offshore for the purposes of determining their asylum claims”.
The discussions underway on the necessity to drive back migrants was conveniently “leaked” to the media just before the Tories annual conference was to begin, with Patel’s speech Sunday—titled “Fixing our broken asylum system”—made a centrepiece of the event. Patel referred to “illegal” migrants no less than eight times in her speech to the Tory faithful, with the FT noting that the Tories’ right-wing base supported sending asylum seekers 4,000 miles away by a nearly two-thirds majority.
Repressive anti-immigration policies, in Britain and Australia alike, have been built up over decades by all the political representatives of the ruling class.
The Tories are building on a reactionary framework already established by the European Union. According to the FT, “Patel’s team looked at the idea, considered by the EU, of creating a centre for processing asylum claims in north Africa so that migrants could be screened before making the hazardous trip to Britain.”
Also being considered, according another document leaked to the Financial Times, is the construction of “floating walls in the English Channel to block asylum seekers in small boats.” The Home Office has consulted “Maritime UK, a trade group, to discuss erecting temporary ‘marine fencing’ in one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world.” Similar fencing is being considered by Greece’s government, which already has in place a series of concentration camps on its mainland and islands--in agreement with Turkey and the UK—in which tens of thousands of refugees and asylum seekers are detained in horrific conditions.
The FT drew attention to the fact that the first British government to consider sending asylum seekers to foreign countries for “processing” was Blair’s 1997 Labour government. “Tony Blair’s government considered a similar idea—including a potential processing centre in Tanzania—in the early 2000s, but quickly concluded it was unfeasible.”
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