How Brexit Gave Us Vile, Broken Politicians Who Despise Human Rights and Seek to Criminalise Refugees: Part One

18.3.23

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British tabloid newspapers attacking human rights on their front pages, in a collaged image from 2017 put together by Adam Wagner.

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As the UK government tries to pass its ‘Illegal Migration Bill’, which, in defiance of international law, seeks to criminalise the very existence of refugees, and which follows up on another recent policy whereby the government is intent on sending refugees to Rwanda rather than allowing them to stay here, I thought it would be useful to look at how we got into this shameful situation; specifically, by examining the key role that the Brexit vote — and Tory animosity towards human rights legislation — have played in transforming the UK into a marginalised outlier state, led by a government representing a minority of the British people, that is committed to erasing the rights of refugees, and our obligations towards them, and is also intent on gutting the UK of any legally enforceable human rights.

It’s nearly seven years since, in a criminally negligent referendum called by David Cameron, 37.4% of the registered electorate of the UK voted to leave the EU.

It was the start of a downward spiral of isolation that is ruining the British economy, cutting countless small- and medium-sized businesses off from their hugely important markets in the EU, and also making the UK into a pariah state when it comes to inwards investment, because, let’s face it, why would anyone want to invest in a country that has not only turned its back on frictionless trade within one of the world’s largest trading blocs, but has also sent a defiantly idiotic message to the rest of the world that we are proud of our isolation, metaphorically standing on the White Cliffs of Dover flicking V-signs at the rest of the planet.

While Brexit’s impact on trade is economically suicidal, my White Cliffs of Dover analogy hopefully also helps to convey an even more disturbing aspect of Brexit’s isolationism: the perception, among Brexit voters, that foreigners aren’t welcome here anymore; not just the EU nationals who formerly contributed so much to the workforce, and are now so sorely missed, in the NHS, in care homes, in transport and warehousing, and in the hospitality and entertainment sectors, but any and all immigrants, including refugees and economic migrants — those coming to the UK in search of work — from anywhere on earth.

Related to this — and of even greater impact — has been Brexit’s corrosive effect on the calibre of politicians that represent us. Bad though they were before Brexit, with Cameron and George Osborne cynically decimating Britain’s poorer citizens through a widespread austerity programme that used the global financial crash of 2008 as an excuse for slashing public services, what we have had to put up with since has scraped the very bottom of the political barrel.

First, the hapless Theresa May tried and failed to deliver a functional Brexit, because such a thing is impossible — although no one should feel sorry for her, as she was, in her previous incarnation, a disgraceful and authoritarian home secretary who, from 2010 to 2016, paved the way for much of the racism, xenophobia and Little Englander isolationism that has become so much more prevalent since the Brexit vote.

The ‘hostile environment’

in 2012, two years into her job as home secretary, Theresa May told the Daily Telegraph that her aim “was to create here in Britain a really hostile environment for illegal migration.”

As the Guardian explained in an article in 2018, ”Only May can say whether she knew then the ‘hostile environment’ strategy — essentially empowering figures across society to become immigration enforcement officers — would evolve into to a catch-all brand for her approach to migrants, illegal or otherwise. Because ‘the hostile environment’ came to encapsulate not just her approach to illegal immigration but to reflect a broader rancour towards migrants in the UK.”

The Guardian added that her goal “was effectively to make life as difficult as possible for any illegal migrant in the UK to continue living in the country”, and proceeded to explain:

The policies, which May started to unveil in 2012, effectively made immigration enforcement officers out of a range of citizens — from landlords being required to conduct right-to-rent checks to doctors assessing the immigration statuses of the sick before they were treated. Bank checks, driving licence checks, employment checks were demanded. Immigration controls were introduced in all walks of life.

Then there was Operation Vaken. An immigration enforcement campaign in the summer of 2013 that involved billboard vans being branded with the warning “go home or face arrest” hit the streets of London. Immigration enforcement vehicles were branded like police cars. Adverts were placed in eight minority ethnic newspapers, postcards appeared in shop windows and leaflets and posters were put up advertising immigration surgeries in buildings used by faith and charity groups.

Another aspect of May’s ‘hostile environment’, which was largely hidden until 2018, was what became known as the Windrush scandal (named after the ship that brought some of the first immigrants from the Caribbean to the UK in 1948), in which those who had come to the UK when their countries were part of Commonwealth, and who had “a legal right to come to the UK”, and “neither needed nor were given any documents upon entry to the UK”, as Wikipedia explains, were assessed as living here illegally, and “were wrongly detained, denied legal rights, threatened with deportation, and in at least 83 cases, wrongly deported from the UK.”

UKIP and the road to Brexit

It’s uncertain to this day whether May’s policies were inspired by her own particular hatred of migrants, or simply through a desperate desire to cling to power, but on the latter point it was clear that the government was responding to increasing anti-immigrant sentiment in the UK, in which the country’s dominant right-wing media had been getting ever more vocal about the perceived threats from the eastern European countries who had joined the EU in 2004 and 2007; in particular, Poland in 2004 and Romania and Bulgaria in 2007.

A significant threat to the Tories came from UKIP (the UK Independence Party), whose reptilian leader, Nigel Farage, ramped up the anti-immigration rhetoric (duly amplified by the mainstream media) to such an extent that UKIP started to establish itself as a significant presence, with the support of 10-12% of the electorate, who, sadly, lapped up Farage’s claims that “five million economic migrants” would be coming to the UK, and that many of them were members of “foreign criminal gangs.”

In the elections for the European Parliament in May 2014, UKIP’s rise was so marked that they secured the largest number of seats (24 out of 73), driving the Tories into third place, and for the General Election the following year, David Cameron was so rattled by UKIP’s rise — and by pressure from the far right of his own Party — that he promised that, if the Tories won, they would hold a referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU.

It was a key capitulation, and, as I’m sure we all remember, it was followed by what now appears to be a slow-motion train wreck, as, lied to on two fronts — by the Tories’ Leave campaign, which promised untold riches if we were to leave the EU, and, more alarmingly, by Farage, who resorted to lying that Turkey was about to join the EU, and that we would be overrun with Turkish migrants — the country inched inexorably towards the shameful situation in which we have found ourselves for the last six years and nine months: an isolated, racist, xenophobic pariah state whose leaders and right-wing media still cling desperately to risible notions that Brexit has been a success.

The Tories’ war on human rights

In addition to creating the ‘hostile environment’, Theresa May was also responsible for promoting another shameful proposal that has become central to the policies put forward by the increasingly hysterical, far-right ministers who have followed her into the Home Office; namely, the notion that the UK should withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).

Anyone aware of the purpose of, and the impact of the Convention ought to have been profoundly shocked at this suggestion. Inspired by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which the newly-formed United Nations had adopted via its General Assembly on December 10,1948, and which, for the first time, sought to enshrine the fundamental rights and freedoms of all human beings, the Convention on Human Rights, which sought to protect fundamental human rights and political freedoms in Europe, was drafted in 1950 by another newly created body, the Council of Europe (CoE).

Founded in 1949 to uphold human rights, democracy and the rule of law in Europe, the CoE’s ten original member states included the UK, and, as the Chair of its Committee on Legal and Administrative Questions, the British Conservative MP and lawyer Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe, a prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials, was responsible for guiding the drafting of the Convention.

The Convention’s 18 Articles include a guarantee of the right to a fair trial, a prohibition on torture, and guarantees regarding freedom of thought, conscience and religion, freedom of expression and freedom of assembly and association, and they were made enforceable though the simultaneous creation by the CoE of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), based in Strasbourg, which is empowered to rule on any alleged infringements of the Convention by member states, and which, for fairness and balance, comprises one judge from each of the member states.

The Council of Europe now has 46 member states, who are all required to ratify the Convention, and, although some members of the CoE are not members of the EU, membership of the CoE, ratification of the Convention and an acceptance of the role of the ECtHR are also required to be member of the EU.

In 1998, following the Labour Party’s victory in the 1997 General Election, the Labour government fulfilled a manifesto promise to pass the Human Rights Act (HRA), which incorporated into UK law the rights contained in the European Convention on Human Rights, thereby enabling the UK courts to provide a remedy for any breach of the Convention, without having to go to the ECtHR — although the Act did not prevent appeals to the European court.

Despite the fact that the HRA predominantly replicated the Articles of the ECHR, to which the UK was legally bound (and had, let’s not forget, been instrumental in drafting in the first place), the Tories made it a target of their first troubling assaults on fundamental human rights, with their then-leader Michael Howard promising, prior to the 2005 General Election, “to ‘liberate’ the nation from the avalanche of political correctness, costly litigation, feeble justice, and culture of compensation ‘running riot’ in Britain today”, by reviewing the HRA, and, “if it can’t be improved it will be scrapped.”

In 2006, when David Cameron took over from Michael Howard, he proposed scrapping the HRA and replacing it with a British ‘Bill of Rights’ instead, but it remained an empty threat, and it was not until 2012, when Theresa May was the home secretary, that Britain’s human rights obligations came under particular scrutiny when May was thwarted in her illegal efforts to deport Abu Qatada, a cleric and a Jordanian national accused of promoting terrorism, back to his home country.

Theresa May’s obsession with Abu Qatada

Theresa May never explained why she was so obsessed with sending Qatada back to Jordan, when, if he had committed a crime, be could have been prosecuted on British soil, but she was absolutely livid when the European Court of Human Rights refused to allow his return to Jordan, ruling that it would be in violation of Article 6 of the ECHR (the right to a fair trial), because of “a real risk” that he would be tried on “evidence obtained by torture of third persons”, following Qatada’s own insistence that, having been tried and found guilty in absentia in Jordan on two occasions, in 1999 and 2000, the only evidence against him came from statements made by his co-defendants who had been tortured while in Jordanian custody.

In July 2013, Qatada returned to Jordan willingly following assurances that information obtained through torture would not be used against him in any future trial, but May remained implacably angry, telling MPs, as the Guardian described it, that “[a]ll options to deal with the ‘crazy interpretation of our human rights laws’, including withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights, need to remain on the table to prevent any repeat of the Abu Qatada affair.”

May must have known that it was not possible to withdraw from the ECHR while remaining a member of the EU, although it seems pretty clear to me that, in the right-wing hysteria regarding the EU in the run-up to the referendum in June 2016, the widespread anti-immigration sentiment that was tapped into, and actively fanned by politicians and the right-wing media was also accompanied by insinuations that the EU was soft on terrorism, and was preventing the UK from dealing robustly with terrorist threats, with no effort made to educate people that the ECHR and the ECtHR are nothing to do with the EU, and that we wouldn’t be able to withdraw from the Convention without also leaving the Council of Europe, which, lest we forget, we helped to found explicitly to protect fundamental human rights and political freedoms across the whole of Europe.

In April 2016, just two months before the EU referendum, May, a Remainer, muddied the waters further by suggesting, during a speech in London, that, as the Guardian described it, “Britain should withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights regardless of the EU referendum result.”

Again, she must have known that it was impossible to withdraw from the ECHR while remaining a member of the EU, but her intervention kept alive the notion that the ECHR was the enemy of British sovereignty, and, as result, when May’s subsequent Premiership came to an end, and Boris Johnson took over, another home secretary, the appallingly bigoted Priti Patel, was able to revive hostility towards the ECHR not in the obsessive pursuit of a solitary terrorist suspect, but in relation to the whole of the UK’s immigration system.

To be concluded in Part Two.

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.50).

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the struggle for housing justice — and against environmental destruction — continues.

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13 Responses

  1. Andy Worthington says...

    When I posted this on Facebook, I wrote:

    Here’s my latest article, the first of two articles in which I examine how the Tory government’s vile anti-immigration policies, pursued with such vigour by Priti Patel and Suella Braverman, have their origins in the dangerous isolationism of Brexit, and its unleashing of false and disturbing notions that, post-Brexit, the UK should no longer be constrained by international law.

    In this first article, I look at how Brexit happened, how Theresa May paved the way for the shoddy and cruel lawlessness of Patel and Braverman, and how the Tories, even before Brexit, have consistently sought to undermine the European Convention on Human Rights, with a particular focus on Theresa May’s obsessive pursuit of the Jordanian cleric Abu Qatada.

    In the second article tomorrow, I’ll examine the Tory government’s increasingly lawless and heartless approach to immigration — and in particular the small boats crossing the Channel, which refugees are obliged to use because no safe routes exist whereby they can claim asylum — as demonstrated by Priti Patel’s Rwanda plan, and Suella Braverman’s ‘Illegal Migration Bill’, which seeks to criminalise refugees entirely, and which is currently making its way through Parliament.

  2. Andy Worthington says...

    Hanann Abu Brase wrote:

    Thanks for sharing & tagging Andy 👍💯

  3. Andy Worthington says...

    You’re welcome, Hanann. Thanks for your interest!

  4. Andy Worthington says...

    Brigid Mary Oates wrote:

    I’m still in a quandary as to how we’ve got here xx thank you for this xx

  5. Andy Worthington says...

    I know, it’s so depressing, isn’t it, Brigid, but it was Brexit that opened the doors to all this racism and xenophobia, and brought it back out into the open. I don’t think I recall meeting anyone from the EU in the months after the referendum who hadn’t been shouted at in the street and told to go home after the referendum result. We so desperately need leaders prepared to stand up up the dark forces within humanity who blame everything on “others”, whether based on race or geography, and yet right now we’ve got the very opposite in the vile Suella Braverman, stepping off a plane smiling in Rwanda like it was a red carpet.
    https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10161071636878804&set=p.10161071636878804&type=3

  6. Andy Worthington says...

    Damien Morrison wrote:

    we have become the clown pariah of the world … but people love it.

  7. Andy Worthington says...

    People are so easily manipulated, Damien. It’s so dispiriting.

  8. Andy Worthington says...

    Brigid Mary Oates wrote:

    Andy, it all breaks my heart … I’m not able to be active at the moment … but I will be, hopefully soon xx
    We appear more divided than I’ve ever known x
    Thank you for all your work xx

  9. Andy Worthington says...

    Thanks, Brigid. People are confused and in denial about so much right now, and with good reason, but it’s supremely important that we don’t let Braverman and Sunak get away with encouraging the most confused and angry to blame it all on the most desperate and vulnerable people, because that really is what happened in Germany in the 1930s.

  10. Andy Worthington says...

    Damien Morrison wrote:

    the Brexit mentality is like an unstoppable untreatable virus

  11. Andy Worthington says...

    It’s depressing how easily the media and the Tories can encourage millions of people to become as alarmed about the ‘small boats’ as the persistent rump of hardcore Brexiteers. Damien. Polling shows that it had become a minority concern until this latest wave of orchestrated hysteria began.

  12. Andy Worthington says...

    Kevin Hester wrote:

    It doesn’t surprise me for a second that the brutal Tories have yet again played the race card in their perpetual divide and rule strategy.
    There would be no refugees if colonialism and imperialism hadn’t raped and pillaged the exploited nations in the first place.
    Africa isn’t poor, it’s incredibly rich. It like the Sub-continent are victims of plunder.
    Here’s just one example.
    Imagine how wealthy India would be and how poor Britain would be without this larceny.
    https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2018/12/19/how-britain-stole-45-trillion-from-india/

  13. Andy Worthington says...

    An astonishing story of theft on an almost unimaginable scale, Kevin. And yet, as Jason Hickel explains, most Brits maintain a rosy delusion about the British Empire, with “50 percent of people in Britain believ[ing] that colonialism was beneficial to the colonies.”

    Most people wouldn’t want to know the truth, of course, and would probably get very angry if confronted by it, because, as I’ve been coming to appreciate more and more lately, what makes people angrier more than almost anything else is losing face.

    I also find this recognition particularly relevant to the greatest crisis any of us will ever face – the climate crisis. The present wave of climate change denial, currently resurgent as the post-Covid conspiracy theorists are played by dark forces in the pay of the fossil fuel companies and other great polluters and exploiters, cynically exploits the fact that people can’t accept losing face and recognising that everything they’ve been told is a lie, and so will become angry, and quite possibly violent, when confronted with the truth.

    I think we need to start pushing out positive messages about how it’s OK to be wrong and to change your mind.

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Andy Worthington

Investigative journalist, author, campaigner, commentator and public speaker. Recognized as an authority on Guantánamo and the “war on terror.” Co-founder, Close Guantánamo and We Stand With Shaker, singer/songwriter (The Four Fathers).
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