In a sweltering café just outside Tunis’s old medina last summer, a local human rights defender spoke of living in a climate of fear.
You couldn’t remain in one place for too long. At a galloping pace, he told me stories of vicious police raids into informal camps of people looking for better lives, of people randomly apprehended and dumped in the desert, and of civil society surveilled and criminalized for speaking out.
It’s a far cry from fifteen years ago, when Tunisian street grocer Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation helped spark revolts against autocracy across the Middle East and North Africa.
European powers paid lip service to celebrating these democratic protests. In reality, they maintained and deepened their relationships with authoritarians, as they sought to harden the controls on migrants at all costs.
In 2023, as Tunisian president Kais Saied consolidated his personal rule, he sought to distract from the worsening living conditions facing Tunisians through a clampdown on migration. Migrants and black Tunisians were attacked. Instances of violence and torture were widely documented. Many drowned attempting to escape by sea.
Saied had implied that migration was a neocolonial plot to import black Africans to Tunisia. This put a faux anti-imperial spin on the “Great Replacement” conspiracies espoused by European far-right leaders. With those leaders — and Italy’s Giorgia Meloni acting as point person — he took tens of millions of euros in European Union funding for his security forces.
In February 2025, facing mounting pressure, the European Commission agreed to review its Tunisia deals. But in Britain, reinforcements were on the way.
In a glossy video posted on Twitter/X this month by Britain’s foreign secretary, David Lammy, a drone zooms through the skies.
The video cuts to Lammy boasting of bolstering Tunisian surveillance with drones and night-vision goggles to prevent people crossing the Mediterranean.
This is the same coast guard that a United Nations report accuses of “physical violence, including beatings, threats of use of firearms; removal of engines and fuel; and capsizing of boats.”
Last November, I returned from a month on a rescue ship patrolling the central Mediterranean near the Libyan and Tunisian coast.
Returning home, I realized that the region’s politics had come with me. Prime Minister Keir Starmer jetted to Italy last autumn to seek Meloni’s advice, while British home secretary Yvette Cooper appeared at an Italian far-right youth event.
What would Italian advice have contained? To simplify, there are three basic techniques that have helped to keep the central Mediterranean as the world’s most lethal migration route.
The first is the withdrawal of official rescue and the harassment of volunteer efforts. In a smaller body of water like the Channel: well-covered by the semi-official Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI), a lifeboat charity that has resisted attempts to weaponize its work, this is somewhat less of an issue. (There remain, however, questions about delayed responses and ignored calls in Anglo-French rescue operations.)
The second is to criminalize the people crossing. Lammy’s rhetoric about “smashing smuggling gangs” ignores core problems. One is that the denial of safe routes and difficulty of rescue increases the market for, and dependence on, smuggling services. Another is that in the Mediterranean case, European policy has actively worked with actors linked to smuggling. A third is that in practice, enforcement targets refugees themselves en masse on flimsy smuggling charges.
Take the case of Ibrahima Bah, a Senegalese teenager who allegedly drove a small boat, and found himself jailed in Britain as a “smuggler.” The UK government is now looking to introduce laws that could increase such miscarriages of justice.
The third method in the Mediterranean model is outsourcing migration control to the brutal security forces of countries like Tunisia and Libya.
Under the previous Conservative government, Britain attempted to force asylum seekers to Rwanda. This model of outsourced asylum processing became an expensive and acrimonious failure, as a similar scheme in Australia did. But the idea is echoed again in Donald Trump’s plans to send undocumented people to Guantanamo Bay, and EU proposals for so-called return hubs.
In opposition, Starmer lambasted the Rwanda scheme. In government, however, he has praised Italy’s new Rwanda-style deal to put asylum seekers in Albanian camps even as it collapses into farce, and looked to deepen UK-Albania cooperation.
The UK Foreign Office is meanwhile on a border security spending spree from Tunisia to Turkey, while deepening cooperation with scandal-hit EU border force Frontex.
As people fleeing conflict, desertification, resource exploitation, and a chronic lack of opportunities suffer and die in the Mediterranean, Britain seems to want to import the model adopted there wholesale.
All this has been painted by Starmer’s supporters as necessary to take on Nigel Farage’s hard-right Reform party, whose polling surge has placed it ahead of both the Labour government and Conservative opposition in surveys.
The propaganda effort hasn’t been effective. Most right-wing comments under Lammy’s video castigate him for what they see as “foreign aid.”
Starmer has surely received little praise from right-wingers for his record deportation numbers or attempts to reopen detention camps closed over abuse issues.
Nevertheless, he persists. Following Labour’s adverts in Reform-style branding, and entertainment videos of raids and deportations, Starmer has announced a new round of cruelty.
People who arrive in Britain by boat will be virtually unable to claim sanctuary under new rules, regardless of how urgent their need is.
This wider policy shift is being supplemented with individual acts of cruelty.
As all this was announced, Starmer was challenged by Conservative opposition leader Kemi Badenoch over a court decision that allowed a family from Gaza to claim asylum under some of the protections introduced for people fleeing Ukraine in 2022.
Starmer hit out at the ruling, which granted their claim on the grounds that the family’s youngest children, aged seven and nine, were “at a high risk of death or serious injury on a daily basis.” He promised to close what he called a “legal loophole.”
(Starmer failed to specify what difference he saw between Ukrainians and Palestinians — perhaps it is that in the latter case, he is exporting weapons to the country bombing them.)
Far from reversing Starmer’s polling woes, all this will only keep the most helpful issue for Reform at the top of the headlines. Consistent failure to contest cynical but effective right-wing narratives only fuels them; as data across Europe has shown.
Nor has the Mediterranean model done much to reduce migration. Much is made of a drop in numbers crossing last year. But I’m old enough to remember when a temporary fall caused the EU to declare the “migration crisis over” in 2019.
For as long as we have an unequal global economy, environmental crises, and conflicts — fueled by powerful countries’ consumption patterns and political agendas — people will continue to move to seek safety and better lives. Most who move stay close to home; only a very small proportion attempt to migrate to Europe or North America.
This proportion would be eminently manageable with a coherent policy. But the deeper problem is that Labour is vulnerable on the migration debate because beyond platitudes about “growth,” Labour doesn’t know what it has to offer people attracted by an alternative after decades of what Starmer himself refers to as “managed decline.”
Absent a vision sufficient to fix a deeply broken state, Labour focuses on who to punish, rather than who to help. Some groupings of Labour MPs now want an even tougher stance.
This systemic failure to address basic issues around collapsing living standards explains politicians’ obsession with migration control in countries as diverse as the United States, the UK, Italy, and Tunisia.
In opposition, today’s foreign secretary Lammy developed something he called “progressive realism” — a foreign policy that used the UK’s clout to achieve moral aims. So far that seems to have consisted mainly of fueling Israeli war crimes and now North African desert dumps.
As Trump looks to ethnic cleansing in Gaza, mass deportations at home, and alliances with the global far right, people are crying out for at least one country to articulate a progressive alternative.
Britain, which has thus far bucked the trend of hard-right parties winning, might have been a source of such hope. But that now seems more distant than ever.
Great Job Nathan Akehurst & the Team @ Jacobin Source link for sharing this story.
