Matthew Rees / @AFCMRees
Estimated read time: 5 minutes
When we look at the rising coronavirus death toll, we think crisis. When we see economies slowly crumbling across the globe, we think crisis. When news breaks that hundreds of people risked their lives on dinghies to seek asylum in Britain, we think crisis?
Despite many claiming Britain to be a harmonious hub of multicultural acceptance, the past week has provided yet another example to dismiss this notion. As record numbers of desperate men, women and children have attempted to cross the English Channel to seek asylum, a vicious animosity has seeped into mainstream conversation, seeing some of society’s most vulnerable people face unrelenting hostility.
Rather than treating those who are risking everything in search of safety with dignity, the response has been quite the opposite. News crews, such as ITV, waited before sunrise to find, chase down, and quiz any person trying to cross the Channel. In a desperate effort to make himself relevant again, Nigel Farage took to Twitter to denounce images of refugees visiting Anfield, claiming them to be living a life of ‘luxury’ and sponging off the system. And in yet another demonstration of her utterly heartless authoritarian politics, Priti Patel laid out plans to deploy the navy to ‘block migrant crossings’.
What is striking about this point of view is that it is gift wrapped in hypocrisy. It is symptomatic of an imperialist ideology that places Britain’s foreign policy actions on a pedestal. According to these people, Britain has, and always will be, an undeniable force for good. It’s ok to spend billions funding and supporting atrocities abroad, but when it comes to temporarily housing a family who have escaped a bruising civil war, we have to hold our hands up and say that we cannot afford to feed them.
One only has to look at the thousands of Iraqi nationals who have sought asylum in recent years – a nation that has been ravaged by conflict since it was invaded by, you guessed it, British and American troops in 2003. In 2018, over a two hundred and fifty Yemeni citizens escaped the humanitarian crisis and sought refuge in Britain. It might be worth remembering that the UK continues to arm Saudi Arabia to the teeth with weapons it is using to bomb and blockade innocent citizens to death and starvation in Yemen. Who remembers when, in 2015, MP’s cheered and stomped their feet like giddy kids at the prospect of a bombing campaign in Syria? Since then, more than 17,000 Syrian refugees have settled in the UK. Obviously, Britain isn’t solely responsible for the crisis in Syria and to claim so would be wholly incorrect, but its pandering to military might over diplomacy leaves them with a duty to help those seeking refuge.
On Friday, Julia Hartley-Brewer used her influential position as a Talkradio host to claim that those crossing the border from Calais are France’s responsibility, sneeringly stating that “no one getting on a dinghy from France is desperate” and that they should claim asylum in France because it is a “safe country”.
However, if this logic were to be applied, then claiming asylum in Britain would be essentially impossible due to our geographical location. There are a handful of official government programmes in place, like the Gateway Protection Programme, that safely resettles 750 refugees from camps in Jordan and Turkey to the UK each year. However, this facilitates for only a minute proportion of those claiming asylum and the majority make their own way to Britain, mostly via criminal gangs, as getting access to official travel documents while being persecuted or fleeing a war is unthinkably difficult.
Without the aid of an official government programme, in order to claim asylum one must reach said country first. As Britain is an island west of Europe, the route from Asia and Africa to reach the UK requires passing through European nations considered ‘safe’. Therefore, if Hartley-Brewer’s xenophobic ideas were to be implemented, it would essentially see Britain dump responsibility onto other countries purely based on geographical factors, even if, like in the case of Yemen, Britain is contributing to the displacement of these people. Although she championed Brexit as a way of making Britain ‘Great’ again, Hartley-Brewer’s views are symptomatic of a ‘little Britain’ way of thinking that is simply incompatible with a globalised world.
It doesn’t take much to understand this, however what it does require is a sense of empathy that is lacking when it comes to welcoming non-English speaking people into Britain.
It’s devastating that wanting a better life free of fear is stigmatised. I doubt that those lambasting asylum seekers ever bother listening to their stories. Despite media glamorisation, asylum seekers are unable to work and are left to live off £5 a day. Meanwhile, the process of getting here is abhorrent. When people flee a nation, they enter refugee camps where torture, rape and murder are all commonplace. This is not forgetting the reason why people have made the heart-breaking decision to leave their own country. They may live in fear of being stoned to death because of their sexuality. Their town may have been destroyed by a Western backed bombing campaign. Due to a civil war, children may have been left starving for days. This is not forgetting that only 54% of first time claims to seek refuge in Britain are successful, leaving many fearing deportation. Last year, a gay Ugandan woman was unlawfully refused asylum and sent back to her own country, where she became the victim of a gang rape. How on earth can anyone honestly justify sending someone back to a country where your safety cannot be guaranteed?
Instead, what far-right groups will show are images of bearded young men who suit a blatantly racist terrorist narrative. We’ll be told that these people are taking over our country and that we can’t trust them, despite the fact Britain is home to just 1% of the world’s refugee population. We won’t hear about the terrifying lorry journeys asylum seekers undertake where death is prominent, or the starving children whose parents have been killed.
The whole conversation on those seeking asylum is horribly distorted. The hostility is often driven by people born into a wealthy family, private education and well-paid job, whose snobbery and racism keeps the establishment alive.
Ultimately, asylum seekers are not eroding the ‘Greatness’ of Britain: they are holding together its remaining fragments.
Matthew Rees 