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If you’re happy that “illegal workers” are set to be deported after a crackdown on delivery firms, think again.
It means the Labour government engineered conditions to make asylum-seekers desperate, then criminalised them for acting out of that desperation.
The result has provided a handy headline with which to distract us from the fact that the government has no coherent immigration and asylum policy whatsoever.
Here’s the BBC with the latest development:
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“The government says 60 takeaway-delivery riders found to be working illegally in the UK are facing deportation.
“The Home Office says the group are among 171 riders arrested over seven days in November in a national “enforcement blitz” in villages, towns and cities across the country.
“Border Security Minister Alex Norris has also met representatives from food-delivery firms to encourage them to do more to tackle the issue – such as using facial recognition checks to prevent riders sharing their identities with people who do not have permission to take up work in the UK.
“The Home Office says it has recently been sharing the locations of asylum hotels with food delivery companies so they can “monitor hotspots for illegal working”.
“Deliveroo, Just Eat and Uber Eats say they have increased randomised facial checks to ensure riders match their account names.”
Don’t get me wrong – illegal work by people who have come here from other countries and are not allowed to take employment here is a crime and should be punished.
But it is likely that these people feel forced into it because they have been trapped in limbo for much longer than they could ever have expected, due to a failed UK government system that has been starved of the resources it needs for more than a decade.
I wrote in July: “Banning work for asylum seekers, cramming people into hotels, and then watching them struggle to survive — it’s a vicious cycle.
“Labour is outsourcing enforcement to tech companies, instead of tackling the root causes of the UK’s migration and asylum challenges.
“The government is turning asylum seekers into suspects, and delivery drivers into potential informants – all of it cloaked in the language of “loopholes” and “illegal working.”
“It really amounts to a corporate-backed surveillance dragnet — one that disproportionately targets the people Labour once claimed to stand for: the vulnerable, the displaced, and the working class.”
A system designed that way will always produce “offenders”, because it gives people no lawful route to survival.
Now Labour is using the inevitable result as evidence that its approach is “working”.
My warning that the government was turning asylum seekers into suspects, and delivery drivers into informants, has now played out in full view.
The “enforcement blitz” described by the BBC is exactly the kind of dragnet I predicted: one driven by app-based monitoring, identity checks, and pressure on gig-economy platforms to police vulnerable people on the state’s behalf.
Labour calls this “tightening the law”, but it’s really a widening of suspicion.
The party still has no coherent immigration or asylum strategy — no plan to clear the backlog, no plan for safe routes, no plan for accommodation, no plan for integration — so it falls back on public displays of toughness to mask its own failure.
When you create a system that produces desperation and then criminalises people for responding to it, the problem is not the people – it’s the system itself.
But what else can we expect from Keir Starmer’s Labour? It is an administration that governs not by policy… but by headlines.
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First the data, now the deportations: Labour cracks down on foreign delivery riders
Share this post:
If you’re happy that “illegal workers” are set to be deported after a crackdown on delivery firms, think again.
It means the Labour government engineered conditions to make asylum-seekers desperate, then criminalised them for acting out of that desperation.
The result has provided a handy headline with which to distract us from the fact that the government has no coherent immigration and asylum policy whatsoever.
Here’s the BBC with the latest development:
“The government says 60 takeaway-delivery riders found to be working illegally in the UK are facing deportation.
“The Home Office says the group are among 171 riders arrested over seven days in November in a national “enforcement blitz” in villages, towns and cities across the country.
“Border Security Minister Alex Norris has also met representatives from food-delivery firms to encourage them to do more to tackle the issue – such as using facial recognition checks to prevent riders sharing their identities with people who do not have permission to take up work in the UK.
“The Home Office says it has recently been sharing the locations of asylum hotels with food delivery companies so they can “monitor hotspots for illegal working”.
“Deliveroo, Just Eat and Uber Eats say they have increased randomised facial checks to ensure riders match their account names.”
Don’t get me wrong – illegal work by people who have come here from other countries and are not allowed to take employment here is a crime and should be punished.
But it is likely that these people feel forced into it because they have been trapped in limbo for much longer than they could ever have expected, due to a failed UK government system that has been starved of the resources it needs for more than a decade.
I wrote in July: “Banning work for asylum seekers, cramming people into hotels, and then watching them struggle to survive — it’s a vicious cycle.
“Labour is outsourcing enforcement to tech companies, instead of tackling the root causes of the UK’s migration and asylum challenges.
“The government is turning asylum seekers into suspects, and delivery drivers into potential informants – all of it cloaked in the language of “loopholes” and “illegal working.”
“It really amounts to a corporate-backed surveillance dragnet — one that disproportionately targets the people Labour once claimed to stand for: the vulnerable, the displaced, and the working class.”
A system designed that way will always produce “offenders”, because it gives people no lawful route to survival.
Now Labour is using the inevitable result as evidence that its approach is “working”.
My warning that the government was turning asylum seekers into suspects, and delivery drivers into informants, has now played out in full view.
The “enforcement blitz” described by the BBC is exactly the kind of dragnet I predicted: one driven by app-based monitoring, identity checks, and pressure on gig-economy platforms to police vulnerable people on the state’s behalf.
Labour calls this “tightening the law”, but it’s really a widening of suspicion.
The party still has no coherent immigration or asylum strategy — no plan to clear the backlog, no plan for safe routes, no plan for accommodation, no plan for integration — so it falls back on public displays of toughness to mask its own failure.
When you create a system that produces desperation and then criminalises people for responding to it, the problem is not the people – it’s the system itself.
But what else can we expect from Keir Starmer’s Labour? It is an administration that governs not by policy… but by headlines.
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