Starmer’s Labour enables fascism

When the race baiting far right criminal Stephen Yaxley-Lennon and the hard right Reform UK are praising Labour’s policies, you know that something has gone profoundly wrong in a party which purports to be on the centre-left. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has announced a set of measures which are aimed at making the lives of some of the poorest, most desperate and miserable people in the UK even poorer, more desperate and more miserable, all with the goal of pandering to far right politicians and media who can never be placated for the simple reason that so called ‘illegal immigration’ is not the emergency that the right claims it to be. Asylum seekers and refugees are simply convenient scapegoats to distract from the real reasons that so many people are struggling to make ends meet, to find secure employment, and affordable housing – the greed and avarice of the wealthy and of big corporations who evade paying taxes and leech billions of pounds from the public sector. Reform UK’s Richard Tice welcomed the plan and wondered if Mahmood was considering joining his party.

Because asylum seekers and migrants are not the real cause of societal discontent, no measures which are taken to make their lives harder will never satisfy the far right politicians and their media allies who scaremonger and rage-bait against some of the poorest and most vulnerable people in society. The far right needs asylum seekers as a bogeyman in order to continue to distract public anger from the real cause of modern society’s problems, those super wealthy individuals and corporations which pump millions of pounds into supporting right wing politicians and the right wing media ecosystem which sustains them.

Pandering to these vile and greedy individuals never satisfies them. It only tells them that their scare tactics are working and encourages them to turn the performative cruelty dial up to eleven. A party which still claims, despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary, that it’s a party of the centre-left, should not be in the business of normalising and enabling fascism, it should be combating the extreme right, not becoming it. All that Shabana Mahmood has achieved with these ill considered measures is to embolden Farage and Yaxley-Lennon and encourage them to push for something even more extreme. If this government had an iota of moral fibre it would push back on the lies of the far right, not legitimise them.

Mahmood claimed, echoing Farage and “Tommeh”: “We have become the destination of choice in Europe, clearly visible to every people smuggler and would-be illegal migrant across the world.” This is categorically untrue. Four other European states, Germany, France, Italy and Spain, all get more asylum applications than the UK. Germany gets over twice as many. The UK gets 10% of asylum applications made in Europe, Germany gets 20%, Spain and France 15% each and Italy gets 14%. Home Office data, which Mahmood as Home Secretary will have been aware of states: “Compared with other European countries, the UK received the fifth largest number of asylum seekers in the year ending March 2025, and the seventeenth largest intake when measured per head of population.” Mahmood lied and knew she was lying.

All that happens when the likes of Shabana Mahmood announces that the government will not allow asylum seekers to apply for permanent residency for 20 years instead of the current five, they will also be granted temporary asylum for just 30 months and be subject to removal to their country of origin should the Home Office deem it safe. Applicants will only be allowed one appeal if their application is turned down. After 30 months their case will be reviewed. This review process will go on for twenty years. The new plan means that people who have been living in the UK for two decades could face deportation and destroy any chance of settled refugees building safe and secure lives for themselves.

But one of the nastiest policies unveiled is the plan to strip those arriving in the UK through irregular means of anything valuable on their possession, jewellery or watches, family heirlooms that they may have managed to take with them on their perilous journey. What’s next? Shaving their heads and extracting gold fillings? Piles of shoes on Dover docks?Stealing from the poor to benefit the rich has never been more blatant. Vote Labour to rob from the poor.

These plans will do nothing but harm. They won’t stop desperate people from fleeing warfare, destitution and climate breakdown, they’ll just make their already difficult lives more difficult. They won’t lift a single child in the UK out of poverty, they won’t help a single British citizen to put food on the table or heat their home. They won’t make a single greedy CEO offer better wages and working conditions to their employees. And perhaps worst of all, they won’t head off the rise of the far right, they’ll only encourage the fascists to make even more extreme demands and to crow that they were correct all along. Labour has just made a dangerous political climate even worse. As Yaxley-Lennon crowed on Musk’s racist cess pit of a social media platform: “The Overton window has been obliterated, well done patriots!” The centre of gravity in British politics is now close to where the National Front was in the 1970s, pushed there by a venal Labour party whose only vision is to win and wield power for power’s sake. Well fucking done indeed.

None of this is wanted or needed in Scotland where to date, despite the best efforts of the BBC and the British media, Farage’s vanity party has yet to win a single election. Scotland needs migrants, we have an ageing population due to a UK economy which bleeds Scotland dry of its brightest and best. Scotland’s interests are being damaged and we are being put at risk from the rise of intolerant British nationalist fascism due to a Labour party which is bereft of any moral centre and has sold itself out to corporate interests. It won the election in July 2024 by promising change from the nastiness and chaos of the inept and useless Tories, and it can’t even surpass that very low bar.

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