Labour right winger Pat McFadden
Labour minister Pat McFadden has called on the cabinet to “work harder” to crack down on refugees.
His remarks came after figures released this week showed a record number of people have tried to make it to safety in Britain.
Nearly 20,000 people have been forced to make the life-threatening journey across the English Channel in 2025 so far.
Almost 60 percent of those travelling by small boats come from Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Sudan, Migration Observatory figures for 2018 to 24 show. They are all countries the West has bombed, sanctioned or backed brutal dictatorships in.
The same Labour politicians who cheerlead wars in the Middle East now want to crack down on people fleeing them.
Only last week McFadden praised Donald Trump for bombing Iran, a move that threatened wider war and making millions more people into refugees.
The single biggest group of refugees crossing in small boats—17 percent—are fleeing Iran.
Samira Ali, Stand Up To Racism national organiser, slammed McFadden’s remarks. She told Socialist Worker, “This is a government in crisis—U-turn after U-turn.
“It is trying to accelerate its attacks on migrants and refugees to distract from their endless failings of working class people.
“Anti-racists see through this and Keir Starmer’s ‘apology’ for copying racist Enoch Powell’s language.”
She added, “The anti-racist movement can stop Starmer’s racism.”
In May Starmer said Britain risked “becoming an island of strangers”—using phrases that echoed racist Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech in 1968. He pushed the racist lie that migrants have done “incalculable damage” to Britain.
Last week he claimed he had “no idea” that the words were similar to Powell’s.
But the Labour government is still pushing its racist Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill through parliament.
The proposed law would hand counter-terror style powers to police and introduce new criminal offences to crack down on people-smuggling gangs.
But people-smugglers only exist because of Britain’s and the European Union’s racist border regimes. If there were safe and legal routes for refugees, they would not be forced to pay people traffickers.
A crackdown that makes it harder to cross the English Channel won’t “smash the gangs” or stop desperate people trying to make it to safety in Britain.
In fact, it will only force them to take more dangerous routes—and makes many more deaths inevitable.
The only solution is safe and legal routes for refugees so they aren’t forced to cross in small boats.
But Labour wants to “out-racist” Nigel Farage’s far right party Reform UK by stampeding to the right over immigration. This will only further legitimise the far right and fuel its rise.
Anti-racists have to stand up to the Starmer government’s scapegoating of migrants. And the left and unions have to say loudly and clearly, “Blame the rich, not migrants.”
19 homes have been destroyed and at least 19 more damaged
Another Blairite gimmick
Human rights groups say the sentences are 'torture'
