Refugees are forced to flee in desperation

CONGRATULATIONS to the Hull Daily Mail on your recent articles on Welcome House centre for asylum seekers and refugees in Hull.

This and the long-standing Open Doors project based at Princes Avenue Methodist Church are doing very necessary things to make life better for people who, for no fault of their own, have found themselves uprooted and trying to survive in a strange country. All of us need friends in such a situation.

Recent press coverage of very large numbers of people making the perilous crossing from France in small boats has highlighted how many more people are doing this than there were last year.

There are several reasons for this, including fewer arrivals by air due to Covid, and, due to Brexit, the withdrawal of Britain from an EU agreement that refugees should claim asylum in the first safe EU country they arrive in. Also it is now more difficult for people to stow away on lorries, so the people smugglers put them on small boats to take their chances on the water.

It is worth looking at some figures, because visually the numbers arriving or perishing in the small boats are so striking, and are indeed an increase on last year.

The number of people coming to the UK to claim asylum fell by 4 per cent last year. This number in 2020 (29,456) is less than half, and only just over a third of what it was in 2002 (84,132).

Britain receives a fraction of the asylum applications of Germany and France and fewer per resident than the EU average (in 2020, 6 per every 10,000 people in the UK; 11 per 10,000 in the EU). Compared with EU Countries, the UK ranked 14th in terms of the number of asylum applications per capita.

Low-income countries host nine out of ten displaced people worldwide

People awaiting asylum decisions are not allowed to work and have an income of £5.66 per day.

Priti Patel has claimed that 70 per cent of people arriving in small boats are not genuine asylum seekers, but this has been contradicted in a recent analysis by the Refugee Council using Home Office data, which found that 98 per cent of such people apply for asylum, and 61 per cent of initial decisions are likely to be allowed to stay.

Among the Government’s Nationality and Borders Bill proposals are: that the small income for asylum seekers would not be given to those not arriving on a government settlement scheme, asylum seekers to be housed in large reception centres, the appeals system to be scrapped, and – alarmingly and possibly against maritime law – the forcible return of small boats to France.

In fact, there is in law no such thing as an “illegal” or “bogus” asylum seeker. Anyone has the right to apply for asylum in any country that has signed the 1951 Refugee Convention and to remain there until their claim is assessed.

How are people to arrange in advance to be on a government settlement scheme when they are in an immediate desperate plight? If they have relatives or friends or other means here, why should they not live where they please? Why should they not have the basic protections of law that the rest of us enjoy?

The stark fact remains, ultimately this is not about numbers and comparisons, but about human beings.

People don’t abandon everything they have on a whim, on an idea of getting something for nothing. They do it out of sheer desperation.

No country is immune from the possibility of chaos, persecution and war. It could come to us all, and in our political conduct we do well to remember that.

What would you do?

Flick and Geoff Lawes.