In yet another attempt to woo the far right, prime minister Keir Starmer has announced his government is “in talks with a number of countries about return hubs”. He called this a “really important innovation”, but even right-wingers can see it’s just a rehashing of the Conservatives’ failed Rwanda scheme.

Rwanda failure (Starmer remix)

As is now his routine, Starmer is boosting the far right by echoing their talking points, while offering no meaningful steps to address the immigration question.

Let’s remember that the Tories’ Rwanda plan failed because: it threatened to violate international law and Britain’s human rights obligations; there were serious domestic legal concerns; it was expensive and wasteful; and because dodgy assessments meant the UK would send people in a vulnerable situation to a country with its own poor human rights record and defective asylum system (risking their return to home countries where they might be in significant danger), and with which they had no connection.

Let’s also remember that this type of plan does absolutely nothing to deal with the fact that Britain desperately needs immigration, or with the actual root causes of people making the difficult choice to leave their countries behind.

Racism and state propaganda

Britain quickly welcomed reasonably well-off Ukrainians with open arms. Poor people from elsewhere who’ve risked their lives on long, tortuous trips to end their journey in a small, dangerously fragile boats – not so much.

Why?

Because the British state wanted people to sympathise more with Ukraine (to justify fanning the flames of war with Russia), so the mass media suddenly developed empathy they’d never shown to immigrants of colour. Racism and xenophobia against the latter, meanwhile, have long been an effective tool to distract people in Britain from the super-rich and their lackeys who are actually responsible for the country’s problems.

Want to stop immigration? Try addressing these issues

People in vulnerable situations around the world know that there’s significant demand for immigrant workers in Britain, though. So that’s a big pull factor. And the push factor away from their own countries is the poverty, war, and/or human rights abuses that the Global North – including the UK – has played a key role in fostering. Britain has faithfully backed the global campaign of death and destruction led by Washington for decades, fueling abuses abroad for economic benefit. The most common countries people on the small refugee boats came from last year were Afghanistan, Vietnam, and Iran – all of which have a long history of brutal Western meddling. Just this week, for example, we heard about the cover-up of British war crimes in Afghanistan.

If British governments took responsibility for their global actions, they would welcome in civilians who suffer as a result. But they consistently hide from that responsibility.

If they truly wanted to stop people seeking asylum in Britain, meanwhile, they could simply stop destructive meddling abroad and focus on investing at home instead. They could also stop blocking a global crackdown on tax avoidance and actually stand up to the small number of obscenely wealthy people (many in Britain) who accumulate extreme levels of wealth as a direct or indirect result of the poverty or suffering of ordinary people around the world.

Featured image via the Canary

By Ed Sykes

This post was originally published on Canary.