It is right if those people have money in the bank, people have assets like cars, like e-bikes, they should be contributing. No, we’re not going to be taking people’s heirlooms off them at the border. But we do want, there is an individual for example who is getting £800 sent to him, he has got himself an Audi, people have cars, if people have e-bikes, if those are assets they should contribute to the cost of their living people have cars.
Interviewer Sophy Ridge pressed Norris on whether Labour were planning to seize jewellery from asylum seekers. The MP tried to squirm his way out, insisting that we should wait for the official announcement. However, Ridge pointed out that the jewellery talking point was taken directly from earlier press briefings.
Norris answered that Labour didn’t plan to seize assets if someone had “a nice necklace”, in Ridge’s words. However, he stated that:
What we’re saying though, if someone comes over with a bag full of gold rings, well that might, that’s different.
If you’ve ever tried living on £800 a month, you’ll know it doesn’t buy you a fucking Audi anytime soon. People aren’t regularly braving the channel crossing in a dinghy with a “bag of gold rings”. If they were, it’d never leave the front page of the Daily Mail.
Even that “£800 a month” is a crock of shit. Asylum seekers often live on around £7 a day, or just £1.26 if they’re in hotel accommodation. They have no choice in the accommodation they’re given, which is often deeply substandard.
Policy from the Trump playbook
However, Norris, Mahmood and the Labour Party are trying to conjure up an image of a kind of fat-cat asylum seeker. We’re meant to believe they’re hoarding their own assets and living on UK handouts. We know that this is a fiction. They know that this is a fiction. Even this piss-poor excuse for a government can’t believe that stripping asylum seekers of their jewellery will generate any meaningful amount of revenue.
Rather, this is a policy clearly designed to appeal to a particular kind of racist shithead. It’s targeting the people who desperately want to believe in that fiction. ‘They’re coming over here with bags of gold rings’. ‘They’re buying fancy cars with taxpayers’ money’. That pathetic attempt to appeal to the far right is borne out by Norris’ later chatter about Trump-style visa bans for certain countries of origin:
There are significant numbers of people who’ve been through the system – they’ve come to this country, have an asylum claim rejected, they’ve appealed it, that’s been rejected and now they’re in accommodation paid for by the taxpayer, going nowhere fast. Terrible for those people, terrible for us collectively.
But the country of origin, which is a safe country, which often we have a returns agreement with, aren’t doing their bit in helping us remove their citizens back to home.
The three “safe” countries which are potentially in line for visa sanctions are Angola, Namibia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. That’s the same Democratic Republic of Congo with the 4-year armed conflict and UN-confirmed “deepening hunger crisis”, by the way.
