Today it is concentration camps for asylum seekers looking for sanctuary in Britain. Tomorrow it will be you if you are poor, marginalised or homeless.

Five people drowned in the English Channel last night. They were refugee claimants who sought safety in Britain. The news media labelled them migrants because the term is a pejorative. It shouldn’t be but corporate journalism at the behest of their entitled masters turned “migrant” into a trope for humans not deserving of a helping hand.

The drowned had their reasons to become refugees from the land of their births. Take your pick because one of them will apply- authoritarian politics, harsh economic conditions, or climate change to flee your homeland.

The death of those five refugees in the straight between France and England happened hours after the Rwanda Bill was passed into law by the legislators of Britain. Now non-white asylum seekers will be sent to concentration camps in Rwanda if they arrive through unconventional means to the UK. Despite some concerns raised by the UN; Britain isn't an outlier in its inhumanity to refugees. It is just refining trends already set by other countries to criminalise asylum seekers. I don’t think the government believes it is a deterrent. But it does moves us further down the road of dehumanising refugees which makes it easier for the public to swallow when they die in unprecedented numbers in the future.

The inhumanity against refugees has become harsher in the West because our societies have been transformed into fiefdoms for fascism. It's not individual populist leaders taking us to the abattoir of authoritarianism but neoliberal capitalism. 21st-century capitalism is owned exclusively by the 1%. It's a cartel on all things extracted from the earth or other species. They control the production, distribution and sales of all consumer goods, including the arts, the news media, education, technology, housing and healthcare. To them, refugees without marketable skills are just factory floor waste that must be swept up and binned in this brave new world of ours.

Our political class want refugees to be treated as an invasive species that must be contained rather than cared for with compassion. Xenophobia as an ideology is a neoliberal Government's best friend during a cost of living crisis. It diverts the public from the greed of the entitled and shifts the blame from the 1% to the penniless refugee who just wants a safe place to live free of bombs, war or famine.

Britain is not unique in its cruelty towards the refugee crisis. Every G7 and EU country want to do the same or is working up to the “out of sight out of mind method” to erase the refugee crisis. The inconvenient truth is Labour under Starmer is just as xenophobic as the Tories and will use a similar level of inhumanity against asylum seekers when they form government.

The “Big Lie,” used by the Nazis to create hysteria against Jewish citizens, gays, trade unionists, the developmentally challenged, Jehovah's Witness, socialists, and the Roma is now an accepted rhetorical device used by the news media and government leaders when describing refugees. 

It’s not people smugglers causing today's refugee crisis no more than it caused yesterday's. People smugglers existed during the time of Hitler. There will be people smugglers as long as we continue to allow our corporations to exploit developing nations.

There will be people smugglers as long as we vote for governments that support tyrants. There will be people smugglers as long as we believe our nation's economic plan should include manufacturing weapons of war to be sold or gifted to conflict zones. There will be people smugglers as long as consumer society continues to enable the climate crisis.

Allowing refugees to be detained in concentration camps makes it easier for the entitled to put the next vulnerable group into a concentration camp. My money is on the homeless.

We live in a world that is more perilous than even 5 years ago, for the average person. It's a nightmare because we can't elect our way out of the shit storm that we slept-walked into. The entire Western world is now in the clutches of the 1%. They aren't going to let go of it without a fight and most of us aren't going to survive the struggles to come. 

Thanks for reading and supporting my Substack. It’s an SOS because the end of the month approaches and I am short on rent with only 7 days to go. Your support keeps me housed and also allows me to preserve the legacy of Harry Leslie Smith. A yearly subscriptions will cover much of next month’s rent. Your subscriptions are so important to my personal survival because like so many others who struggle to keep afloat, my survival is a precarious daily undertaking. The fight to keep going was made worse- thanks to getting cancer along with lung disease and other co- morbidities which makes life more difficult to combat in these cost of living crisis times. So if you can join with a paid subscription which is just 3.50 a month or a yearly subscription or a gift subscription. I promise the content is good, relevant and thoughtful. Take Care, John.