by
Jon Brookes
Belgium Correspondent

Published:
14 April 2023

It’s London, Monday, March 13 and the River Thames looks characteristically formidable. It sets the tone for what’s unfolding today. It’s one of the most significant parliamentary debates on migration policy in the UK since it left the European Union three years ago, and demonstrators will not go quietly.

I’m in London to attend a demonstration organized by the Stand-up to Racism collective, supported by various Trades Union and Refugee charities in the UK. The demonstration takes place in Parliament Square, a small park in the center of the “Westminster village” which has a tradition of hosting protesters, those rallying against legislation being debated in the Houses of Parliament just next door.

The piece of legislation in question is a new bill to halt the influx of Refugees from crossing the English Channel in small boats. This is the sea area between France and the UK, critical because the northwest coast of France is home to several dozen informal settlements, populated by hundreds of Refugees trying to get to this country.

Before Brexit, people in the migrant community would typically stay in the notorious camp called “The Jungle,” a heavily policed location controlled by French immigration authorities. When the UK left the EU, the French abandoned any responsibility for ensuring the people there had access to humane and safe conditions, and instead, cleared the camp, burned or destroyed peoples’  possessions and forced them into smaller unsanctioned spaces to camp or squat.

It’s impossible to know how many people are staying in these unofficial spaces, but the camps themselves number more than a dozen, spread out and hidden amongst the towns of Calais, Dunkirk and the coastline in-between.

In 2022, 45,755 people, including women and children, mostly from Eritrea, Sudan, Afghanistan and Kurdish-Iran, reached the south coast of England by way of small boats. Successive governments in the UK have attempted to address the issue with direct payment to the French police who have  brutalized and dispersed the refugee communities, aggravating their possibility for passage. It’s equally difficult to know how many people in the migrant community have died in their attempts to cross, but most charities put the number at hundreds if not thousands.

As with any attempt to stop asylum through punitive means, the UK and EU’s approach hasn’t worked.  Still, the most vulnerable and impoverished people in the world attempt to come to the UK because it remains their best chance of a safe and prosperous life. Most want to come to the UK for family or community connections. Some have had their asylum refused in Europe. Others simply prefer to be in a country where their native language, English, is spoken.

The situation is complex and each individual refugee has a personal motivation for attempting a perilous crossing. The Home Secretary and the Prime Minister of the UK have now introduced a bill to effectively circumvent the UK’s commitments to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights.

The use of incendiary language by the UK government is a familiar, if not tired attempt to demonize the most vulnerable people on earth, to delegitimize their suffering and to create a sense of fear and threat. The greatest irony of this hateful rhetoric is that it originates from two individuals—Suella Braverman and Rishi Sunak—who themselves are counted as part of second or third generation migrant communities, from Africa and South Asia, respectively.

The latest bill escalates the dehumanization in UK migration policy, seen by most people as a last-ditch attempt by the current government to galvanize its waning political base and pander to far-right voters. It is the latest in a series of actions which has also included an agreement between UK and Rwanda (as well as Denmark) to deport asylum-seekers to the African nation rather than process claims in the UK.

To-date, not one person has been sent to Rwanda. The process has been tied-up in court, with many charities challenging its legal basis. So if this is a policy of deterrence, it has already proven a failure.

Meanwhile, currently more than 160,000 people in the UK are waiting for decisions on their applications for asylum. They are not allowed to work or claim benefits and receive a desperately small living allowance whilst they await the results.

This is a pernicious approach. It immediately renders the asylum claims of those arriving in small boats (or in theory via any other irregular means) automatically “inadmissible.” In this instance, anyone making the roughly four-hour journey across the channel would be returned to France or deported to their country of origin.

There are currently no safe and legal routes for these asylum seekers to come to the UK.

The UK has enacted various country-specific humanitarian visa routes for places such as Ukraine and Afghanistan but legal routes remain unavailable for the vast majority of those expecting to seek asylum in the UK. Under the latest version of the Afghanistan scheme only two people—yes, exactly two people—were actually accepted and relocated in the UK.

So there we were at Westminster Park, many hundreds of us expressing solidarity and showing support for the thousands of people fleeing conflict and persecution, risking their lives at sea to join family or find refuge in a country whose relationship with migration is—to say the least—complex.

The crowd was addressed by speakers from many different political parties and by asylum seekers representing charities and refugee NGOs in the UK. The atmosphere was initially muted. Solidarity chants were caught in the winds and lost in the general chaos of the square. But as the tone of the speeches gained momentum, the scale of the protest and anger was palpable. People in the refugee and migrant community gave personal testimonies, Trade Union leaders expressed solidarity and Members of Parliament addressed the crowds. Caroline Lucas, the UK’s only Green Party MP; Diane Abbott, its first Black Female MP; and the crowd’s almost messianic figure Jeremy Corbyn MP—our British Bernie Sanders—rallied our energy and gave us a new sense of possibility.

The light faded and the wind fell, but the volume of the protest was raised. Many more such protests are planned and we’ll be there to keep fighting.