Lewisham’s Green council plans to officially collaborate with a group which seeks to ‘resist raids’ on illegal migrants ‘at all costs’, and has posted on its Instagram an illustration of a Home Office immigration enforcement van set on fire with its windows smashed.
At next week’s full council meeting, Hau-Yu Tam, the council’s cabinet member for ‘communities, sanctuary and healing’, has tabled a motion ‘to work with Lewisham Anti-Raids to support migrant businesses and those targeted by raids’ because ‘local and joined-up anti-raids resistance is a form of building care with Lewisham communities.’
The motion also declares that Lewisham will join with neighbouring Green-led Lambeth to create an ‘anti-raids sanctuary corridor… to improve… anti-raids resistance’ and will review council processes with ‘the aim of refusing to assist the Home Office or Immigration Enforcement teams.’
The council is going further than merely ‘banning’ its officials from working with the Home Office, controversial as that is. Lewisham Anti-Raids is a group that organises ‘mass community resistance’ against immigration enforcement operations, surrounding Home Office vans or coaches transferring migrants to detention. Some activists have been criminally convicted for this activity. The group sends out alerts to its activists telling them of Home Office activity in the area and mobilising them to gather to stop it.
Councillor Tam, the proposer of the motion, appears herself to be, or to have been, on Lewisham Anti-Raids’ alert system. Last year she posted one of its alerts on social media, warning of an ‘immigration raid in process’ (sic) on Deptford High Street, and urging people to ‘get down and support our neighbours’.
The good councillor was already a highly controversial figure. She said pro-Palestinian students ‘were correct to defend’ a book accused of providing propaganda for Hamas, adding: ‘Resistance to occupation is permitted in international law’. Tam also re-shared a post calling Zionism ‘the Nazism of our time’, and in April last year expressed support for a barrister representing Hamas in a legal effort to overturn its proscription as a terrorist organisation. She also called the Deputy Prime Minister, David Lammy, a ‘coconut’. None of this, of course, stopped her from being appointed by the Greens to a leadership role on the council.
Next door, in Green-controlled Lambeth, a cabinet member on the council, Jonathan Bartley, posed approvingly in front of graffiti reading ‘all migrants welcome’ to announce Lambeth’s own plans to stop working with those enforcing immigration law. ‘A frightened community is not a safe community,’ said Bartley. ‘We want to provide corridors of sanctuary for people right across the UK.’ Nationally, when asked if he wants an unlimited-immigration, open-borders policy, the party’s leader, Zack Polanski, says merely that this is ‘not a pragmatic conversation to have right now.’
The Greens’ mandate for this stuff is far thinner than they think
In the face of rhetoric about ‘supporting migrant businesses’ and protecting the safety of migrants, you do wonder if the Greens ever think about the actual community which elected them. What about the non-migrant businesses, operated legally by citizens who pay their taxes? What would a policy of ‘all migrants welcome’ mean for the safety of non-migrants in Lambeth? What, indeed, about people who don’t like graffiti?
Even in inner London, the Greens’ mandate for this stuff is far thinner than they think. Almost half of voters in Lambeth and Lewisham voted for parties backing lower immigration. The country as a whole, of course, is rapidly losing patience with the level of enforcement we have, much less the doors-open approach of Tam and Bartley. To quote from Tam’s (idiotic) job title, sanctuary seems most unlikely to strengthen community. Still less will it lead to healing.
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