Are the Tories’ Concentration Camps for Asylum Seekers A Deliberate Anti-Immigration Deterrent

This is another piece simply based on my impressions of the titles of a couple of videos I’ve come across on YouTube, so again, I may be prejudiced and incorrect in my assumptions. But I don’t think I am. A few days ago some of the anti-immigration channels on YouTube put up videos about the demonstrations by asylum seekers incarcerated in the new detention centres set up by the grinning racist, Priti Patel. There has also been a fire at Napier Barracks, which one of the videos seemed to insinuate was an act of arson by the immigrants there in protest at their conditions. If you believe liars like Alex Belfield, illegal immigrants to Britain are living in the lap of luxury at the British tax-payer’s expense. In fact, as Mike has pointed out, the conditions in the new detention centres are appalling with inadequate showers and hygiene facilities and arrangements for social spacing. He compared them to concentration camps. Now, according to one of these right-wing videos, the asylum seekers incarcerated in them are trying to escape back to Europe. At least according to the wretched channel, We Got A Problem.

It struck me that this wasn’t unintended. Thatcher’s whole attitude to welfare support was based on the Victorian idea of ‘less eligibility’. You make the conditions of state support deliberately harsh, humiliating and degrading to deter people from seeking it. It was the idea behind the workhouse. Now it seems the Tories have created workhouses for asylum seekers in Patel’s new detention centres as a deliberate deterrent to stop them from either coming to this country in the first place, or to encourage them to leave if they’re here.

Tony Benn warned that what governments did to immigrants was what they’d like to do to the rest of the population, if they were able Ten years ago right at the beginning of this long period of Tory rule, I was alarmed by the possibility that the Tories were considering the restoration of the workhouse system. It was only abolished in 1947 with the creation of the welfare state, and Thatcher wanted to destroy the latter. Food banks were originally set up for asylum seekers after Blair removed state support. Then the Tories expanded the system to include domestic citizens, who were thrown off state benefits thanks to the wretched welfare reforms.

Which means if this carries on, will the Tories start building camps like Napier barracks for the unemployed and disabled, as a cheap alternative to the present benefit system and to deter more of poor from seeking them? Just like they’re now doing to asylum seekers?

Tags: 'less eligibility', Alex Belfield, Asylum Seekers, Food Banks, Immigration, Margaret Thatcher, Priti Patel, racism, the Disabled, Tony Benn, Videos, Welfare State, Workhouses, Youtube