Beyond law and order on riots

Don Flynn says the response to far-right rioting must also challenge  the narrative on immigration 

[Original print publication Sep 2024]

The view that most mainstream politicians have of immigration doesn’t seem to have moved on since the then German interior minister, Horst Seehofer, described it in 2018 as being “the mother of all problems.”

Since that date the number of governments who have attempted solutions which involve attacks on the rights available to migrant and refugee people has multiplied.  Among these are the examples of Greece and other south-east European states which have marshalled exceptional police and military resources to impede the movement across their region. The Greek coastguard is being investigated for allegations of actions which led to the death of over 40 refugees in 15 separate incidents in the Mediterranean Sea, according to the BBC.

Across Central Europe obstacles are thrown up to impede the movement of non-EU nationals, with razor wire and the mobilisation of militias ready to confront people with baton charges, gas grenades and gunfire. 

Far right, anti-immigrant parties now hold government positions in six EU counties –  Italy, Finland, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia and the Czech Republic, whilst in Sweden a party with historic roots in neo-nazism, the Sweden Democrats, is the second largest force in the country’s parliament.  Perhaps most notoriously, the strident Islamophobe, Geert Wilders, is in a four party coalition government in the Netherlands,

The UK also figures in the list of immigrant hostile countries along with Austria and Denmark. Although the commitment to the unworkable Rwanda Plan has been ditched by the new Labour government, the commitment to reduce immigration remains as strong as it was under Conservative predecessors, with prime minister Sir Keir Starmer being prepared to embrace the ”post-fascist” Brothers of Italy government, headed by Giorgia Meloni, at a meeting of the European Political Community in Oxfordshire in the summer.  Starmer’s call for closer cooperation between European leaders to curb immigration seems to be heavily dependent on the actions of hardliners like Meloni and Orban in Hungary to play their role in policing the internal frontiers.

The antipathy of the world’s industrial states to migration has deep and contradictory roots, fraught with tensions which arise from nationalistic and xenophobic prejudice against foreigners and also in the critically important role that migrant labour plays in maintaining the overall prosperity of the Global North nations.  The UK provides a casebook example of this, with anti-immigrant attitudes proving decisive in securing the country’s shambolic exit from the EU because of opposition to its free movement policies, only to find that the need for foreigner workers is integral to the functioning of its labour market. To the apparent surprise of people who thought that Brexit would mean less immigration, all this has led to the straightforward replacement of European migrants with nationals of third countries sourced from even further afield.

The UK is not unique in manufacturing this paradoxical outcome for itself.  The Italian government is having to confront drastic shortages of workers – arising from its rapidly ageing demographic profile – with a set of policies that envisages the recruitment of 425,000 workers from outside the EU over a two year period from 2023 until the end of 2025.  The same is true even with the similarly xenophobic Victor Orban, who has rubber-stamped a programme allowing the recruitment of so-called guest workers from 15 non-EU countries to stay in the country for up to three years, with citizens of Mongolia, Vietnam, Brazil, Kazakhstan, the Philippines, Venezuela and Colombia being included in the list.   

But this mixture of quietly acknowledged dependency on migrant labour in European countries clashes with the far-right populist rhetoric offered up to the electorates of the various nations.  In an age of severe distrust of politicians of all stripes there is the danger that it simply shifts the rhetoric to challenger parties even further to the right.

We are getting a taste of what these might look like in the UK, with the mobilisation of disaffected individuals engaging with fake news on social media, propelling them into acts of violence against people perceived to be migrants. This was seen most sharply in the riots in the aftermath of the tragic attack on a group of children in Southport at the end of July.  The slogans carried forward at these events – Stop the Boats, Deport Refugees, England for the English – were either taken directly from official government policies or at least echoed their content.  

Many will have hoped that the reaction of communities in counter-mobilisations which proclaimed solidarity with refugees would give government pause for thought about the direction it has been moving in.  What became clear in these reactions, to what can properly be described as race riots, has shown that there is a large constituency of people who are looking for leadership from their politicians which will move immigration policy in very different directions.

What we saw in those days was an echo of actions taking place in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, and all the other countries of Europe.  However, the lack of a consistent response to calls from communities showing responsibility towards the migrants and refugees they live with should cause concern.  They/we want respect for the human, social, political and economic rights of the people who are moving across borders. 

This is not how things stand at present.  Europe’s hallmark immigration policy, the Pact on Migration and Asylum, aims at little more than a coordination of the deterrence and expulsion policies of the most immigration-hostile states.  The plan is to achieve harmonisation across the EU by appeasing the lowest common denominator of anti-migrant prejudice.

The challenges to the ideologies which underpin xenophobic anti-immigrantism are being worked out across networks like the Transnational Institute, a think tank and hub for human rights activism, which promotes the campaigning work of Transnational Migrant Platform – Europe (TMP-E).  It’s a good start, constantly refreshed by the practical experience of rights activists in countries like Spain, France, the Netherlands, and the UK.  

TMP-E’s rights caravans roll across the region and work to communicate the case for solidarity with migrants and refugees to trade unions, anti-poverty campaigners, and municipalities.  The sense that an alternative approach to migration is possible is becoming stronger as the irrationality of current policies is confronted in the different countries. We’ll know real progress is being made when we start to see the case for solidarity being put in left and social democratic parties, and a generation of politicians emerge who are willing to make it the cause they are committed to taking forwards.