Almost exactly a year since the riots that saw lynch mobs attempting to set fire to hotels accommodating migrants and refugees, the British government has decided to set loose another lawless mob onto blameless asylum seekers: food-delivery platforms.
The government announced that the accommodation data of asylum seekers will be shared with Deliveroo, Uber Eats, and Just Eat, supposedly so that these companies can detect “patterns of misuse” on their platforms. The BBC reports that they will use the hotel data to identify “an account spending a lot of time near one of the hotels” — that is, to try and catch asylum seekers working in food delivery without authorization.
Officially, this is an attempt to clean up the labor market in the food delivery sector. Unofficially, Prime Minister Keir Starmer is throwing red meat to the racists who appear to be geared-up for another summer of anti-migrant violence. Just a day before the asylum hotel data-sharing initiative was announced, more than a thousand people protested outside a hotel housing asylum seekers in Essex, to the northeast of London, with two people arrested for violent disorder.
Rather than standing up to the rising tide of racism, Starmer has sought to stir the pot. This May, he mimicked 1960s hard-right Tory Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” rhetoric by describing Britain as an “island of strangers.” Starmer, who apparently fears a return of last year’s riots, wants to be seen to be doing something, anything, to clamp down on that great scourge of the British worker: asylum seekers, by definition the people with least power.
The true motivation for this ploy is to get a story that plays well for the government in the right-wing press. Yet the doom-loop of…
Auteur: Ben Wray
