Why Labour is giving us the hostile environment – just with a human face

Labour’s return to power brought a glimmer of hope for a progressive government agenda after 14 years of increasingly dysfunctional Tory rule. But the same story is playing out in the UK as elsewhere: hard-right governments may lose power, but their most reactionary policies can stick.

While the Rwanda plan was repealed on day one – not due to humanitarian concerns, but because it was an “expensive gimmick” – the Labour manifesto still endorsed third country processing of asylum claims. At a recent summit of European leaders, Keir Starmer suggested that third country would be Albania, (a nation that 16% of UK asylum seekers fled from due to violent blood feuds,) with plans for a “rapid returns unit” with 1,000 new Home Office recruits. 

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Meanwhile, Labour home secretary Yvette Cooper seeks to implement mass immigration raids this summer on businesses believed to be exploiting irregular migrant labour and fuelling the trade of smuggling gangs, with fast-tracked deportations. But raids and deportations often make trafficking victims less safe and do little to stop traffickers.

Essentially, the new Labour government promises the hostile environment with a human face.

This shouldn’t come as a shock. Before the hostile environment was a twinkle in Theresa May’s eye, the phrase was first used in 2007 by Liam Byrne, then-immigration minister for Labour, while announcing new policies to flush out “illegal migrants”. The two main parties have competed to position themselves as addressing the “legitimate concerns” of “ordinary working people” on immigration. 

This ignores how many working-class people are themselves migrants and how border controls weaken workers’ ability to challenge workplace exploitation by coupling dismissal with the risk of deportation. Linking immigration to jobs and benefits obscures the real causes of poor pay and conditions.

While the Rwanda plan’s been scrapped, other countries have looked at it fondly. The European Parliament elections in June saw major gains for hard-right, anti-immigration parties, including Alternative for Germany and Brothers of Italy. Zoomers, especially young men, are increasingly drawn to a politics that blames the housing crisis on immigration. 

The UK and France seem to have headed off the far-right at the polls, but even when more liberal governments succeed hard-right ones, a more progressive immigration policy follows only rarely. In the US, president Joe Biden has issued an executive order to ban migrants who cross the border irregularly from claiming asylum, making them easier to deport. This is almost identical to a ban Trump sought to introduce in 2018.

In Poland, prime minister Donald Tusk promises to expand the infrastructure that the previous, ultraconservative Law and Justice government built along the border with Belarus. Pushbacks by Polish border guards have caused at least 55 deaths since 2021. Now the Polish parliament has voted to give state forces at the border a “licence to kill”.

Closer to home, the current far-right riots after the Southport tragedy, fuelled by misinformation spread online and paid lip-service to by Nigel Farage, show that racism can’t be quelled by adopting anti-migrant policies and rhetoric. In Rotherham, a mob set fire to a hotel housing asylum seekers. Despite Cooper’s tough-on-immigration posturing, online conspiracy theories frame her as a “friend to terrorists”. 

If anti-migrant politics aren’t challenged head-on, the far-right will keep growing and the ideological frames they set will keep shaping policy even when they aren’t in power. Labour should come out strongly for migrants’ rights, including safe and legal routes for asylum seekers and an end to immigration raids, detentions and deportations. But this can only happen if the left builds a fightback. 

In Glasgow, Lewisham and elsewhere, activists and migrants have taken direct action to stop deportation vans. These heroic actions can feed into sustained, grassroots migrants’ rights campaigning, linking up with groups working directly with refugees and asylum seekers. Crucially, such campaigning can also connect with trade unions.

Many unions have strongly pro-migrant policies on paper, but need pushing to put these into action. PCS workers involved in Border Force and the Home Office could follow the example of German aviation workers, who have stopped hundreds of deportation flights, by refusing to comply with anti-migrant policies.

Such action could expand to workers on planes and in airports; drivers of vans, taxis, and minibuses that transport migrants; and workers in hotels that house migrants. Protesters stopping vans at reporting and detention centres could tell workers about these union efforts, and remind them of their rights under the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 to stop working if the protest makes their job risky.

This requires a level of militant working-class mobilisation not seen in a long time, plus breaking the UK’s restrictive anti-union laws. However, the left can only revive itself and undermine the new far right by reinvigorating a politics that recognises working-class people’s common, material interests across national lines.

Dan Davison and Sacha Marten are scholars and activists in the Labour Campaign for Free Movement. They are currently researching the contemporary far right. 

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