Gary Lineker spoke his mind. Now we should too: fate could have put any one of us in those migrant boats

Even to talk about it is a distraction, but let’s be clear: Gary Lineker is not the villain here. On the contrary, he deserves admiration for speaking out against a naked injustice, for taking a stance that has now required him to “step back” from presenting Match of the Day while he and the BBC work out what he is, and is not, allowed to say on social media.

True, he deployed the wrong analogy: the Conservative government’s policy and language on refugees are foul, but they are not a match for either the policy or language of “Germany in the 30s”, as he tweeted. When the home secretary, Suella Braverman, speaks of desperate people as an “invasion” she dehumanises them, and that is appalling enough – but even in the earliest stages of the Nazi dehumanisation of the Jews, both the words and the deeds were worse.

So Lineker erred by making the one comparison that makes this government look less bad than the alternative. In the process, he allowed the culture war machine to crank itself up to full heat, thereby diverting attention from what actually matters. Because every minute we are talking about Lineker is a minute looking away from the actual villain: this cruel and useless government and its reprehensible plan to mistreat refugees.

It’s wrong on every level, except perhaps party politically – with Tory strategists detecting an advantage to be had in “red wall” seats by talking tough on migration. But practically, legally and morally, it is a disgrace.

The proposed new legislation would, in the words of the UN High Commissioner on Refugees, “amount to an asylum ban – extinguishing the right to seek refugee protection in the United Kingdom for those who arrive irregularly, no matter how genuine and compelling their claim may be”. Some might read that sentence and think the obvious solution is for genuine refugees to arrive “regularly”. The trouble is, for most people seeking asylum in the UK no such route exists.

There are schemes for those from Ukraine, Afghanistan and Hong Kong. But for a person fleeing from somewhere else, there is no office they can walk into, no form they can fill in. A small boat, or the back of a lorry, might be their only way to safety. Yet the government wants automatically to deny such people the right even to apply for asylum: instead, they will be detained and then deported within 28 days. Where would they be held? Where would they be moved? The government has no answers.

As the UNHCR notes, that’s a “clear breach of the refugee convention”. Written on the face of the bill is Braverman’s admission that the new law may be incompatible with the European convention on human rights. Rather appropriately, it’s called the illegal migration bill: it’s almost certainly illegal. It’s also the second time this government has asked the Commons to pass legislation that it admits is at odds with international law.

The Conservatives’ justification is that the UK faces that supposed “invasion” of would-be migrants and refugees. But besides being grotesque and inhuman language – a dog-whistle that’s been heard by the far right, turning out in force outside places where new arrivals are housed – it’s also wholly false. Numbers from the Migration Observatory show that the UK is, in fact, a laggard when it comes to taking in those in need.

The UK granted asylum to 13,000 people in 2021, a fraction of the 60,000 taken in by Germany and much less than half of those admitted by France. Spain, Italy and Greece all took in more than we did. In other words, this is not some unique challenge faced by Britain. Far from it. Asylum claims went up across the entire EU last year, and globally we are scarcely doing the bare minimum. The biggest refugee populations are in Turkey and Colombia; Germany is home to 2.2 million refugees. In Britain, there are 232,000.

At this point, ministers and their allies insist they’re not trying to keep out genuine refugees, but economic migrants – people who are not fleeing from peril, but rather seeking a better life. Put aside that the new approach will treat both categories of people the same: if you arrive here irregularly, you’ll be shut out of the asylum system, no matter what hell you’ve fled from. Put aside, too, the Refugee Council’s figures showing that two-thirds of those crossing the Channel qualify as refugees – and the fact that plenty of long-established Britons, some of them in the cabinet, are the descendants of people who were economic migrants. Focus instead on those who are described that way now.

Chief among them are Albanians, who have become a ready target for the anti-migrant crowd. They’re easily cast as abusers of British generosity: from somewhere officially deemed a “safe country”, what right do they have to come here? Except more than half of the asylum claims lodged by Albanians are upheld: it turns out they are refugees after all. Most of those are women and children, often the victims of trafficking and exploitation. But young Albanian men, those most easily demonised, are often victims too, whether fleeing violence and blood feuds back home or abducted into a modern form of slavery once here. Consider the case of the trafficked 16-year-old boy who was locked into a cannabis farm in Leeds for three months, before he was freed in a police raid.

Of course, some of those coming here will be acting on the eternal and universal human impulse to move in search of a brighter future. We could follow Braverman’s dream to put them on a plane to Rwanda – or we might note that, at the very moment the government launches this rancid bill, it is “quietly” seeking to bring in more overseas workers to plug a chronic shortage in the labour market, “starting with looser rules for the construction sector,” according to the FT. It can’t be beyond the wit of even this government to see the connection – and come up with a scheme that would open up a regular route for people who could help fill some of the 1.2m UK jobs that remain stubbornly vacant.

We need to see this whole question differently. To realise that migration is a global challenge, like the climate crisis, that will require nations to work together, forging arrangements such as those agreed on Friday by Rishi Sunak and Emmanuel Macron, and each country to do its bit: there’s no escaping it, Britain will have to take in its share of people. To see that those people can be like every cohort of refugees and migrants that has come before it: a huge asset for a country in need of extra hands now, and down the generations. And to remember what exactly it is that these people are fleeing – whether from Iran, where schoolgirls have been targeted by a wave of poisonings credibly suspected to be the work of those in power, from Eritrea, where torture and executions have become routine, or Afghanistan, where the Taliban are once again barring women from the fundamentals of a human life. Above all, to reflect that, but for the lottery of fate, it would not be them on those boats – it would be us.

• Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

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