A New Plan for Immigration and a new found solidarity
By Martin Nickson
This post is about the UK Government’s consultation on its New Plan for Immigration, my involvement in the consultation, and my reflection on that involvement. I wrote this post in three chunks, in May and June this year, later in the summer and then as autumn drew in. My first draft – written at the end of May 2021 – was pessimistic, in response to the clear direction of travel in Government proposals. Trying to imagine the social landscape of the UK after a further ramping-up of the hostile environment was frightening. I concluded there would be a need for a renewed solidarity among the many organisations who responded to the New Plan for Immigration. I imagined a desperate solidarity. I felt we were experiencing an inexorable and deliberate shift towards a xenophobic society. But, while events since June 2021 (locally and internationally) still bear out the need for solidarity, the experience of real life in the UK in July and August gives cause for optimism, an optimism that arises from two unexpected sources – football and lifeboats.
May /June 2021
UK Government proposals in the New Plan for Immigration maintained a commitment to continuing to resettle ‘genuine’ refugees and family reunion, and claimed that legal aid would be expanded for people who had received priority removal notices (although any increase has been described as ‘meagre’). The plan included a proposal to introduce reception centres to house newly arrived people, rather than in hotels. They also – more heavily – focused on deterrence of what it called ‘illegal entry’ including removal of ‘those who have no right to be here’ and removal of people to ‘another safe country’ where ‘they could have claimed asylum’. The proposals in the New Plan for Immigration are now firm proposals via the Nationality and Borders Bill 2021 although not (yet) law in the UK.
I was involved –as trustee of Migrant English Support Hub (MESH) – in the Government consultation about the New Plan for Immigration. MESH worked collectively to shape a response to Government plans. The collectivity was not just internal to our organization: Asylum Matters and SolidariTee had prepared guidance on how to respond to the Plan which was incredibly helpful. There was on my part – strangely - a happiness to be part of this collective effort because of the generosity, the openness, the willingness to help and the understandings that emerged from working together, in solidarity.
That is where the happiness about the process of consultation ended.
I became frustrated because the consultation was a sham. I was appalled, even as I completed MESH’s response, by the standards on display in the structuring and language of Government documentation. The consultation was skewed, amateurish and politically smug, and the questions were leading.
For example, the claim to ‘fairness’ - supposedly a principle in the consultation’s supporting documentation - is questionable, especially when fairness means forcible deportation. The current situation is one where too many people have little choice other than to rely on dangerous routes – such as crossing the Channel - as they seek asylum in the UK. While the New Plan for Immigration hints at ‘removal’ for such arrivals, there was no detail in the plan of how such removals would be conducted. There was however, for many of us involved in the consultation, an unease because we knew from experience that the plans would be more likely to force desperate people into attempting other dangerous routes of entry than to act as a deterrent. By definition, it is unfair to act in such a way as to increase risk to life. As I responded to the consultation, I did not anticipate quite how far the Government of the UK would be prepared to go in putting at risk the lives of people seeking asylum. But even as I wrote this blog, news emerged that the UK Border Forces have been trained to physically turn round boats carrying migrants in the Channel. This proposed action is contrary to international maritime law but more importantly perhaps, turning a boat round at sea would unquestionably put lives at risk because it is an inherently unsafe thing to do. The intention to turn boats around was not formally described in the ‘New Plan for Immigration’ but it arises from the same deterrence-based approach (to ‘illegal immigration’), focuses on how people arrive, and is entirely consistent with the notion of removal. If turning boats back is an indication of how the New Plan for Immigration will be enacted, questions over its fairness have probably already been answered. Deliberately putting lives at risk and acting illegally under international law is neither fair, nor principled.
Another claim, that ‘illegal immigration’ puts or will put ‘unsustainable pressures’ on public services, was also made. This claim is not backed up by evidence. It is a morally illiterate and oxymoronic position. First, the responsibility for properly supporting public services lies with Government, and Government spending, as with all political decisions, involves choice. Second, there is no point having public services unless they exist to support the most marginalized people in our country and society, whoever they are, and regardless of which category of migrant (according to the government-imposed process of sorting and classification) they happen to be.
The New Plan for Immigration consultation documents also conflated – by association and through the way the consultation was worded - a number of issues. These included associating ‘sovereignty’ with ‘refuge’ and ‘criminality’ via reference to Brexit (Figure 4) a conflation which was a simple crude appeal to nationalism. But the most egregious conflation in the New Plan was where the sleight of hand (in how the consultation was worded) persistently conflated seeking aslyum with 'illegal immigration'. To seek asylum is not an illegal act, it is a human right but the wording here is an attempt to skew discourse on the human right of free movement by establishing discursive associations between illegality, criminality and – from that – danger and threat (to the UK) with asylum seeking.
Because the only way to object to the wording of the consultation and its questions was to refuse to answer, the results provided the response that the Government wanted, establishing a political narrative that could not be questioned.
I was also angry because the consultation’s structure and construction effectively disenfranchised the very people who are at the centre of any new policy on ‘immigration’: the people whose lives are often in real danger as they attempt to seek asylum.
I have already said that the New Plan for Immigration consultation was politically smug. Political smugness is based not only on the certitude that one will inevitably get one’s own way, but also on a belief that an agenda will be popular and widely supported. I thought that Government plans would, unfortunately, find wide support across the UK. My belief now is that the smugness was misplaced. I see a solidarity in the UK which transcends the Government’s political agenda on immigration, nationalism and race. What I didn’t expect was that the source of that renewed hope of solidarity would be found in football and lifeboats.
July/August 2021
The Government’s response to the public consultation, published on 22nd July, 2021 was predictable.
“The consultation has shown that there is some support for these broad ambitions [better support for ‘genuine’ asylum seekers, deterrence of ‘illegal entry, removal of ‘those with no right to be here’], more so from members of the public. However, the responses sent into the Government consultation also show that around three quarters of those who responded said they opposed many of the policies set out in the New Plan for Immigration. A similar view was also taken by those with direct experience of the asylum system. Having considered the findings from the consultation, the Government recognises that building a system that is fair but firm will require tough decisions, some of which may be unpopular with certain individuals and/or groups.”
In short the Government’s response was ‘although every expert group has informed us of the inadvisability, impracticality and danger of our plans we’re going ahead anyway.’
The brazenness of the Government’s response is a shocking failure of Governance. This is particularly galling in the context of migration - and hence ESOL - because (as anyone who has ever taught a ‘Life in the UK’ class knows), the message ESOL practitioners are supposed to convey includes positive – almost triumphant – lessons about how fantastic the UK is as a liberal democracy. The UK is fantastic in many respects but if this consultation is anything to go by, its Government is not a liberal democracy. The is no liberalism in a plan (or Government) which will put people in danger and there is no democracy in consultations that are a sham. This matters for ESOL because in ESOL we don’t (or maybe shouldn’t) teach idealized abstractions of how the UK works. Instead we teach – or should teach – the actuality and the lived experience of all of us.
I’d say that the actuality of the wider us (the majority of people in the UK) is that we have a sense of solidarity with people forced to seek refuge or asylum. I’m aware this statement bucks a narrative trend about the UK population’s relationship with (and feeling about) immigration. But it is just a narrative and I question whether it really is a convincing one, even while the Government feels confident in pursuing a nationalist and anti-immigration agenda. My view is that there’s good reason for believing that confidence may be misplaced.
It starts with football. The events around the UK national men’s football team in the 2021 European Cup are well known, so I’ll avoid a detailed account. It’s worth remembering though that prior to the European Championships Priti Patel felt comfortable enough to sneer about the England soccer team’s decision to ‘take the knee’. Patel also had the confidence to claim that the distinctly unpatriotic act of booing the national team (for their taking the knee) was acceptable to her as Home Secretary. Subsequent events, particularly the level and intensity of support for Rashford,Sancho and Saka demonstrated what an own goal the Government’s approach was. Indeed the closest the Government came to a political crisis at the time was due to its handling of the issues around racism that arose from the European Cup.
Taken in isolation, the public’s response to the Euros could be just a reaction to the context – a momentary act around a popular sport. But there are signs that the public mood has undergone a more profound shift. Shaista Aziz’s ‘Three Hijabis’ tweet showing her and two friends watching football not only went viral, but was part of a process that has forced the distinctly ‘apolitical’ Football Association to act. Shaista’s petition to get the FA to address racism has been signed by over a million people and the FA has now endorsed players at English clubs taking the knee before matches. Further – and beyond irony – Nigel Farage appears to have helped, albeit unwittingly, through his typically thuggish comments on immigration. The public response to Farage’s crass remarks about the plight of people attempting to cross the Channel has been an increase in donations to the RNLI of over 3000%. This cannot be taken as anything other than an act of solidarity with both the migrants who undertake the horrific journey across the Channel and the humanitarian ethos of the RNLI. There is solidarity around the belief that actively rescuing people – no matter who they are or where they are from or why they are in danger – IS what we should be doing as a fundamental principle, and as a first act, without question.
There’s plenty of reason to be pessimistic about immigration, ESOL and the future for people seeking refuge. As I finished writing this post, events in Afghanistan once again came to the fore, highlighting the inadequacy of Government responses to the crises that cause people to seek sanctuary. But I am optimistic about the future because I think that despite Government’s self-confidence in its own petty nationalism there is an appetite in the UK for solidarity. I think it exists in what politicians would call ‘the real world’. It emerges in the face of real events and is largely disconnected from political rhetoric. This is where football and lifeboats connect to ESOL. It’s easy to suppose, particularly in our own fragmented sector, that we and our learners are an isolated group in the minority. We see the effects of the hostile environment and we see the dangers to people seeking refuge and asylum every day. ESOL is brilliant but can feel positioned at odds with the mainstream. But the lessons of this year suggest that the decency, humanity, values and principles that underpin the ESOL sector in the UK may be more widely experienced than we imagine. We aren’t alone. We can draw strength from the solidarity between us and from the underlying solidarity that exists in the UK.