Labour’s Vile Appeasement of the Anti-Migrant Right Won’t Even ‘Work’
Stripping refugees of their jewelry is part of a cruel new anti-asylum plan by the British Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood.
The cycle of more and more extreme anti-migrant policies and outright racist statements from UK politicians has become so familiar that much of it barely registers. This week, however, the Labour Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has pulled off something impressive: policy announcements so disgusting as to produce real shock across her jaded party – and the country. The proposals read like a dystopian caricature, far more extreme than what the previous Conservative Governments – who defined themselves by their hostility to immigrants – ever enacted.
The most ghoulish aspect that has captured the most attention has truly sinister historical echoes: confiscating jewelry and valuables from refugees escaping persecution as they arrive on UK shores. But most asylum seekers arrive with only the clothes on their backs – their valuables long lost in bombed or abandoned homes, stolen, or sold to afford the dangerous clandestine passage to safety because of the lack of safe routes of escape. The real thing of value to be snatched from refugees under these proposals is far more painful: their families and futures.