Tag Archives: seeker

Why would the UK give asylum to refugees from Rwanda if that country is safe?

Rishi Sunak – stop the boats: is he trying to trick us, claiming it is safe to send asylum-seekers to Rwanda while GRANTING asylum to people from that country who are endangered by the regime there?

The Tory government’s argument that Rwanda is a safe country to which the UK can send “illegal” migrants has been called into question after it was revealed that the Home Office gave asylum in this country to refugees from there.

While Rishi Sunak and a succession of Home Secretaries have been arguing in court and Parliament that Rwanda is a safe place to send asylum-seekers, they were also giving four Rwandans refugee status in the UK.

The in-private finding that their fears of persecution were “well-founded” undermines public claims that the country is safe; if people indigenous to that country are in danger there, how can foreign nationals be safe?

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The revelation, after an investigation by The Observer and Led By Donkeys, raises fresh questions about UK police ahead of this week’s debate in the House of Lords of the Rwanda Bill that claims Rwanda is “unequivocally” safe.

The investigation has also seen details of a dossier compiled by a western intelligence agency that accused Rwanda of orchestrating a dirty tricks campaign to smear and undermine critics including those based in the UK. It is further claimed that a London PR firm set up social media accounts to target a British author, but the company has denied this.

One of the Rwandans was granted asylum by the Home Office on 12 October, the day after the government concluded a case in the supreme court arguing the country was safe.

The refugee was a supporter of an opposition party led by Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza, who is campaigning for justice for colleagues who have been killed or disappeared. The Rwandan also witnessed alleged atrocities committed by president Paul Kagame’s forces in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

He and his wife were granted asylum with the Home Office stating in a letter: “We accept that you have a well-founded fear of persecution and therefore cannot return to your country Rwanda, and we have recognised that you are a refugee under the 1951 Refugee Convention.”

The refugee, who still fears for his safety, said: “Britain should stop pretending this is a safe place. Find some other excuse for sending people to Rwanda but don’t say it’s because the place is ‘safe’, because that’s just insulting to people like me.”

More information is available in the Observer article (link below).

Will it be enough to foil the Tory government’s attempt to say Rwanda is safe? Probably not, due to the huge Tory majority in the House of Commons.

But it may be enough to persuade voters – during an election year – that we have a government that says one thing in public and does another in private. And we don’t want liars and hypocrites like that.

Source: Revealed: UK granted asylum to Rwandan refugees while arguing country was safe | Migration | The Guardian


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Sunak says Tories have cleared the asylum-seeker backlog. Have they?

Stop the lies would be a better slogan: Rishi Sunak reckons his government has cleared the backlog of asylum-seekers who need a decision on whether they may stay in the UK – but in fact the number of people awaiting a decision has grown.

No.

The media has been abuzz today (January 2) with false claims by the Tories and their leader, Rishi Sunak, that they have cleared a more-than-92,000-strong backlog of asylum claims by refugees who have crossed the channel or come here by other means.

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Here are a couple of examples from the social media – and you can see very clearly that the claims are false because the facts are provided in the context notes:

Notice also that we are not being told how many people were allowed to stay and how many are being sent away.

So not only is there a falsehood in the number of cases in the system – the number of legacy cases in December 2022 would have been the same as the number on June 28 that year and any new cases would not have been counted. 100,000 more cases have begun in the last year-and a half – but of even those cases, 4,500 have not been cleared.

With 87,500 cases cleared and 104,500 not cleared, what is also clear is that Rishi Sunak has been lying his little-boy pants into cinders yet again.


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Spendthrift Suella: Braverman wastes cash on herself – and on cruelty to refugees

Benefits Braverman: how the Mirror reported the way the Home Secretary has been fiddling the system.

Is this what you call value for money?

Suella Braverman – like the rest of the UK’s current Tory government – seems to be adapt at playing the system to secure what she wants for herself and her Home Office. Apparently the same rule seems to apply to both:

The cost to the public doesn’t matter.

So we see that at home, she has exploited a loophole allowing her to claim £25,000 that she doesn’t need:

The Mirror article states:

She has claimed nearly £25,000 in five years for her London house, while living rent-free with her parents when not there.

Such handouts are designed to prevent MPs who live outside London from being out of pocket because they have to run two homes – but a Mirror investigation suggests Ms Braverman uses them to pay the household bills on her £1.2million family pad in Bushey, Herts.

It is within the rules but not “in the spirit” of them, one MP said.

Her expenses claims are all within the rules, but the hardline Tory, who earns £67,505 on top of her MP salary of £84,144, has been accused of exploiting a loophole in the system.

Ms Braverman, who recently railed against a “Benefits Street culture”, told watchdogs she “fully funds” the home she stays at in Fareham, Hants.

But she failed to mention it is her parents’ house and so costs her nothing in rent.

And at work, she has refused to roll out an accommodation scheme for people who have come to the UK to claim asylum that would cut costs in half – apparently because it is not cruel enough:

According to the Graun,

 a Home Office-funded scheme in Bedfordshire … cut the cost of accommodating refugees and migrants by more than half when compared with placing them in detention. The savings came through housing people and giving legal and welfare support.

This week, the UNHCR (the [UN] refugee agency that helps the UK government improve its asylum system) will praise [the system].

The home secretary, however, is intent on overseeing a huge increase in the Home Office’s detention estate, which experts estimate will take billions to fund… The Home Office is also paying more than £5m a day to house asylum seekers in hotels.

Meanwhile, the illegal migration act will, says the Refugee Council, lead to “tens of thousands”’ of refugees being detained, with internal government projections indicating costs could top £3bn over the next two years. A report this week by IPPR thinktank is expected to warn that the law will only worsen the chaos.

The UNHCR’s evaluation of the Home Office-funded pilot is expected to praise the Bedfordshire scheme because it was “more humane” and treated refugees and migrants with civility. Critics say it is this aspect that has seen the scheme effectively abandoned by the Home Office, whose bill gives the home secretary a legal duty to detain and remove anyone deemed to be entering the UK illegally.

Sources with knowledge of the scheme said: “The findings fly in the face of the illegal migration act. They certainly contradict the Home Office narrative and rhetoric of ‘invasion’ and ‘scary migrants.’” Shortly after she was reappointed as home secretary by Rishi Sunak, Braverman told the Commons last October that refugees and migrants crossing the Channel in small boats were “the invasion on our southern coast”.

The report stated that “The King’s Arm Project, based in Bedford, has since August 2020 supported 75 vulnerable migrants of 23 nationalities, offering them legal advice, clothing, mental health support, English language learning and GP registration while in the community.

“The pilot was more cost-effective than detention and led to better outcomes, such as settled status. Fewer than half of those held in immigration detention centres are deported.”

The demands of the new Act of Parliament should not have been relevant to the pilot scheme in Bedford, as its findings were made available to the Home Office last summer. It is not even the only “alternative to detention” scheme to be wound up by the home office – one in Newcastle was ended in 2021.

Instead, her latest development is a plan to spend £306 million creating three new “migrant detention centres” to house a total of 1,020 people.

The logical conclusion is clear: Braverman wants to inflict as much unnecessary cruelty on people seeking asylum here as she possibly can, and she doesn’t care how much the country has to pay for it.


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Deporting people from foreign countries is not new – but it shows we are regressing

The Empire Windrush: the people brought to the UK on this ship in 1948, the Chinese deported back to that country two years before, and Afghan asylum-seekers who face death trying to cross the English Channel are all victims of the same primitive racism.

It’s always sad to see proof that a country is evolving backwards – especially when that country is your own.

That’s exactly what This Writer saw, watching an old BBC documentary series called Mixed Britannia.

It showed me that the current fervour for shipping people of foreign extraction who have been re-defined (take careful note of that: re-defined) as “undesirables” out of the UK (destination: anywhere) is a regression to the attitudes of more primitive times.

In the series, the late George Alagiah relates what he describes as the “shameful” episode in which people who were originally from China but had settled in Liverpool, some having married local women, were separated from their families in a night-time raid, thrown onto a ship and sent directly back to their country of origin.

Their labour had previously been welcomed but then it was considered no longer to be needed and racist law-makers dispensed with their services, with extreme prejudice.

Their wives and children were not told the truth about what had happened; they were left to believe they had been deserted by their husbands.

This happened under the otherwise-progressive Labour government of Clement Attlee; it should perhaps serve as a warning to us all that we should be careful not to view history through rose-tinted glasses, or any other distorting prism.

Mr Alagiah went on to show how attitudes had improved over the decades leading to 2011, when Mixed Britannia was made.

Hindsight renders it ironic that he referred to the arrival of the Empire Windrush, packed with passengers from the West Indies who had been promised UK citizenship in return for their help in rebuilding our then-war-torn nation, as a great step forward that happened only a few years later.

Today, the Windrush Scandal is one of the deepest scars on the face of the Conservative administration of 2010 onwards; documentation proving the right of the Windrush generation to live in the UK was deliberately destroyed and people who’d had every right to believe they were UK citizens were forced through a deportation process that was entirely unwarranted, unfair, and illegal. The Tories have yet to make full restitution to those they wronged.

Today we live overlooking the river of blood (to adopt a phrase) that used to be the English Channel – where refugees and asylum-seekers place their lives in the hands of criminal gangs because they have no safe, legal route to claim asylum in the UK; the Tories have closed them all off and say anybody trying to make the crossing is coming here illegally.

Does that include people from Afghanistan who worked as employees of the UK government and its forces there for 20 years after the post- 911 invasion, as implied by this social media post about the people who died or were rescued in the tragedy that happened on August 12:

“Their labour had previously been welcomed but then it was considered no longer to be needed and racist law-makers dispensed with their services, with extreme prejudice.”

It fits, doesn’t it?

Remember: The current Conservative government has deliberately dismantled the UK’s immigration and asylum system in order to make it impossible to properly process people coming to these shores to claim asylum.

They have done this in order to fool you into thinking that our borders are being overrun by foreigners who have no reason to come here.

They believe they need to put a fake enemy in front of you because otherwise you will realise that the only real enemy you have is the current Conservative government.

At the time of writing, Mixed Britannia may be viewed via the BBC iPlayer here.


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How many more will die before the Tories reopen safe, legal asylum routes?

Channel migrants: this photo is obviously not of anything that happened today (August 12, 2023) – but Tory policies are putting people like this in danger every day.

Another day, another Tory tragedy. Six people have died in the Channel – and it could be argued that the Conservative government caused the deaths.

Here’s the story:

There’s a lot of right-wing lunacy circulating on the social media. Never mind that. There’s only one question to be asked and it is this:

How many people would have died today if there was a safe, legal route for people to claim asylum in the United Kingdom?

I think you know the answer is none.

Not only that, but there would be no criminal gangs making money from suffering like we’ve seen today, because there would be no demand for them to help people get across the water.

So these words by Suella Braverman…

… are meaningless.

Bear the following in mind also:

It is Conservative policy for the crossings to continue, for the criminal gangs to make money from the people on the boats, and for some of them to die.


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The Tories are lying about asylum-seekers with an old trick

Symbol of hate: the Tory government doesn’t want any asylum-seekers to stay in the UK, so ministers are coming up with bizarre and cruel excuses to get rid of them. Bibby Stockholm – the cramped, firetrap, disease-ridden prison barge the Tories hired to house them at great expense – has become the symbol of this cruelty.

Oh look – the Conservative government is cooking the books; lying about the number of people who have arrived in the UK in search of asylum.

According to The Guardian, Stephen Kinnock of the Starmer Party accused the Conservatives of “artificially withdrawing claims” if someone misses an appointment.

“It doesn’t mean they’ve been processed, it just puts people into limbo. Then essentially people are just slipping into the underground economy,” Kinnock said.

More than 6,000 people have been wiped off the list without being fully assessed in just three months, for reasons such as failing to attend interviews or appointments, and not filling in new fast-track questionnaires.

Is this a revival of an old Tory trick – cutting off support with a false claim about the people they are affecting?

We can check this by asking a few questions: Do they even receive notification to attend these interviews? Do any of you remember when the Department for Work and Pensions was cancelling benefit claims by disabled people and those with long-term ilnesses, claiming that they had missed appointments – of which, it later transpired, they had never been informed?

I think the government would need to prove these people had been aware that an appointment had been made and that they needed to attend, before taking any action.

I wonder if anybody will bother to find out.

Then there’s this:

On this, at least, we have a little guidance on what will happen.

According to Bing‘s friendly AI: “The immigration minister, Robert Jenrick, has said that if you decline the accommodation that’s provided, such as a barge, then we will consider removing your asylum support and that individual will ultimately have to fend for themselves.”

What does this mean? “The government begins the process of removing the asylum seeker from the UK. Some are offered money to leave voluntarily.”

So in other words, if people refuse to board a ship that has been condemned as a firetrap by the Fire Brigades Union and has been found to be full of Legionnaire’s Disease, they will be deported – presumably back to France.

We knew that the aim of Tory policy is to clear anybody who seeks asylum in the UK out of this country, no matter what their reason for coming here.

The more we discover about their methods, the lower our opinion of them must fall.


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Would Lee Anderson have told Jewish refugees to ‘f*** off’ back to Germany in WW2?

Floating concentration camp: Bibby Stockholm (pictured) is a floating mirror of the camps built by Nazis for groups they considered undesirable. How many Jewish asylum-seekers and refugees have been forced to board it?

Here’s a sad reminder of the lengths by which the Conservatives have regressed UK society:

Professor Roberts is only slightly inaccurate; while the Bibby Stockholm and any other converted prison barges are reminiscent of those ships from centuries ago, they are more accurately described as concentration camps – a label most commonly associated with the Nazi extermination of Jews, Romanies, homosexuals and other proscribed groups in the 1930s and 40s.

One cannot help but feel that this was an intended aim of Tory immigration policy; they did not have to let the issue of refugees migrating across the English Channel happen at all – it used to be well under control but successive legislative changes by the Tories changed that.

Is it a sinister message to the people of the UK? “Do as you’re told or you will be next?”

The Conservatives themselves have been strident in their support of a policy that imprisons people who have done nothing wrong, with a view to deporting them to a foreign country with a highly-questionable human rights record.

But they have (deliberately?) got the tone all wrong. Their party’s deputy chairman, “30p Lee” Anderson, actually used obscene language when referring to asylum-seekers – which implies that he considers them to be a form of life that is below him (this is impossible; as a Tory, Lee Anderson is already lower than vermin).

The associations with other far-right political organisations were quickly identified, but Anderson has been defended by other high-ranking Tories:

And public opinion has judged them all:

In fairness, the attitude is being challenged – and you can judge the pitiful response from Justice Secretary Alex Chalk for yourself:

There isn’t a queue to jump, of course. The UK government picks and chooses who it allows in and, if you are from a wide array of countries that includes territory the UK has bombed within the last 13 years, there is no legal route for asylum open to you.

People who believe they must seek sanctuary in the UK – and remember, France takes three times as many refugees as this country has; German takes 10 times as many – have no choice but to do as they have.

Here’s Chalk again, showing that he shares Anderson’s fascist views about foreigners:

His claim that people should stop at the first “safe” country has long-since been debunked; international law does not demand that and never has.

Fortunately the rest of us aren’t putting up with any of this Tory/Fascist/racist nonsense:

Now brace yourself for a bombshell:

If asylum-seekers and/or refugees refuse to take places on the Bibby Stockholm floating concentration camp, they won’t be sent back to France but they will lose financial support from the UK government, which will not provide accommodation for them.

So let’s be clear on this: they’ll still be in the UK, but out on the streets, unmonitored? Isn’t that what they want?

So the Tory plan to deal with these asylum-seekers and refugees is either to make them put up with conditions similar to those faced by concentration camp victims in Nazi Germany or to flood the UK’s streets with them – something politicians like Lee Anderson and Alex Chalk have been strenuously opposing for a long time.

Where’s the sense in that?

Meanwhile, on the other side of the House of Commons, we see no opposition at all:

So Keir Starmer agrees with the Tories yet again. No surprises there.

Indeed, the rhetoric of Starmer’s STP (Substitute Tory Party – formerly Labour) is identical to that of the Conservatives on this matter:

£6 million a day adds up to £2,190,000,000 a year for hotel accommodation. The barges cost – well, see for yourself:

So: £800 million per year. But that’s not instead of the cost of hotels – it is in addition to that cost.

And what are we – and asylum seekers/refugees – getting for that cost? Edwin Hayward has researched it:

He had a highly-pertinent response to a correspondent who thought this didn’t seem too bad:

The best word on this whole sorry affair has come – as it usually does – from the most unfairly-vilified politician in Westminster: Jeremy Corbyn. He reminds us that the UK used to have a human immigration and asylum system, before the fascists and racists who currently call themselves Conservatives (and their counterpart cuckoos in Keir Starmer’s party) came along.

And look at the comment on his words, below:

We have come full circle.

UK policy on refugees and asylum-seekers is not only vile and inhumane; it reflects that of the Nazis to the minorities they persecuted.

Lee Anderson, Alex Chalk, Keir Starmer and Stephen Kinnock (it seems clear) would have put Jewish refugees from the Nazis in concentration camps, if they had been alive and in Parliament at that time. And how many of those currently aboard Bibby Stockholm are Jewish, anyway?


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Labour will continue using firetrap barge to house migrants if elected, says Kinnock

The barge: Bibby Stockholm has been modified to take nearly twice as many asylum-seekers as it would have accommodated when it was a prison, creating serious humanitarian concerns – and meaning that there would be no escape for many if a fire broke out there.

The Labour Party has confirmed that, if elected into government, it will continue to house asylum-seekers in converted barges that have been condemned as fire hazards by the Fire Brigades Union.

Reactions have not been positive:

The Guardian report states that Shadow Immigration Minister Stephen Kinnock admitted the prison barge Bibby Stockholm (and others like it) would remain in use after a Labour government came into office because it would take time to sort out the mess the Tories have made of the UK’s immigration and asylum system.

Crucially, he did not even estimate how much time it would take to clear the 172,000-person backlog of claim processing enough to dispense with the barges.

Their use would clash with long-standing left-wing humanitarian principles of solidarity – supporting people in need in a humanitarian way (not possible on an overcrowded barge that is a floating fire hazard).

This in turn supports claims that Keir Starmer has changed Labour into nothing more than a Substitute Tory Party (This Site calls it the STP) that is practically identical to the Conservatives in its main policy aims because Starmer believes that will attract, from the so-called ‘Establishment’, support that he needs in order to seize power for himself.

Starmer’s supporters have been quick to point out that Labour has not said it will keep the barges forever – but this is sidestepping the fact that the party has said it will keep them indefinitely.

A better message would have been that Labour will get rid of them as soon as possible. The fact that Kinnock chose not to describe his party’s policy that way should be deeply worrying for any “traditional” Labour voters who actually pay attention to whether that party is actually sticking to any of the long-standing principles that make it worth electing.

At a time when even hard-right-wing activists like John McTernan are admitting that Starmer’s party cannot win an election without help from the Left, this is a critical – and unforced – blunder.

Would you vote for a Labour Party that doesn’t treat all people with equal respect?


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Refugees: Grace Blakeley explains (and hammers) Tory ‘divide and rule’ tactic

A right-wing TV pundit had his arse handed to him when he tried to invoke the Tory tactic of ‘divide and rule’ to turn viewer opinion against people who have travelled to the UK in search of asylum.

Grace Blakeley, one of the UK’s brighter political commentators, pointed out exactly why his argument is utter rubbish, as highlighted by Maximilien Robespierre here:

Yes: if the issue is our treatment of Johnny and Janey Foreigner, the right-wingers tell us they are our enemy; but if the issue is accommodation of working-class people, they tell middle-class people that the workers are the baddies.

They always “other” the people who have the least. In fact, in most cases, fault lies with those who have the most. How did they get all that wealth and why are they hoarding it?

Keep the link to this clip handy; you can use it if you identify further attempts to use this false argument.

Asylum barge is potential new Grenfell Tower-style deathtrap

Suella Braverman considers a kinder, ‘compassionate Conservative’ response to asylum-seekers.

Isn’t it good to know the Tories are taking their responsibilities seriously?

Oh, wait…

Once they have detained people they believe have come to the UK illegally, they have a legal responsibility to ensure the well-being of those people until their future can be decided.

So, do they house these people in safe and secure accommodation? No!

They say: “We’ll put them up in a floating firetrap with no means of escape if it burns; that’s good enough for ’em!”

Or at least, that’s what This Writer gets from the following:

Here’s the supporting information:

Bizarrely, if I recall correctly, the Tory government could have put the same number of people into luxury hotel rooms for less money than it has cost to hire this floating incinerator.

The Fire Brigades Union has now written to the Home Office, and you can read the letter here:

It says: “Firefighting operations on vessels such as the Bibby Stockholm provide significant challenges and require specialist training and safe systems of work.”

Then it describes safety provisions on the Bibby Stockholm as “diminished” and warns that the nature of those provisions “exacerbate our operational concerns”.

The letter also states that “The FBU believes fire safety standards are universal and apply to everyone… Fire does not discriminate and therefore neither should safety regulations.”

The implication is clear: the boat is unsafe and the FBU believes it has been deliberately made unsafe on Home Office orders.

This Writer looks forward to hearing Suella Braverman’s excuse for housing asylum-seekers in a deathtrap.

I’m willing to bet it will include a lot of bullying talk and probably a bit of racism as well.


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