“People who have taken the horrible of a journey and it is unacceptable, we need a fairer, better way of dealing with immigration, we need to have legal routes, as we had for Ukraine, as we had for Afghanistan, where people can apply in the country they are in, and travel without having to take this perilous journey,” Feryal Clark, Labour MP of the UK’s House of Commons told Rudaw’s Hevidar Zana in a TV interview this week.
Clark, 45, was born and raised in Britain. Her parents are originally from the city of Malatya in southeastern Turkey. Clark was Labour’s candidate for London’s Enfield North constituency.
Clark’s Labour Party returned to power 14 years after winning the general election on Thursday. She said her party will go after the syndicates transporting immigrants via illegal routes, including the English Channel, where hundreds of immigrants died because their boats capsized.
“We want to go after the gangs who are charging and putting the lives of people at risk in the boats, and we are going to make it harder for them, we’re gonna go after them, so they are not able to abuse people, and also put people’s lives at risk,” Clark said.
Britain’s Conservative Party, which had been in power since 2010, adopted an anti-immigrant policy during the election campaign. Clark said the Tory Party’s immigration stance was unpopular and rejected by the people.
“The sad thing is the Conservative party, like they do at every election, try to use immigration as a policy, as a way of dividing people,” she said. “But their policy this time around of sending people to Rwanda didn’t work. It wasn’t going to work. It was cruel, it was illegal, and People didn’t buy it.”
In 2022, Britain's Conservative-led government announced asylum seekers entering the country through “illegal routes” from a safe country could be sent to Rwanda for their asylum claims to be processed.
“It was cruel, it was illegal, and people didn’t buy it,” Clark said about the policy.
On Thursday, Clark garnered 21,368 votes, approximately 49.1 percent of the total votes cast in the constituency, besting the Conservative candidate Chris Dey, who earned 19.8 percent.
Clark’s Labour party scored a massive win in the vote, ending 14 years of Conservative ruling. Labour won 412 seats in the House of Commons, a 210-seat increase from the 2019 elections, while the conservatives won 121 seats.
With 412 seats, Labour secured an absolute majority in the 650-seat parliament. The center-left party regained power for the first time since 2010, when former Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron beat over Labour’s Gordon Brown.
