Media Coverage

Afghanistan Response

We have been overwhelmed by the generosity of our community in Marlow in wanting to offer clothes and other items, money, time and skills in response to the arrival of several thousand refugees from Afghanistan in the UK. 

As the refugees were quarantined in a number of hotels around the country to which only a few organisations had access, we have signposted your kind offers to organisations like Care4Calais www.care4calais.org/thedropoffmap/. We also gave a £200 donation to the Wycombe Youth for Christ who were able, through a paramedic working at a hotel where refugees were quarantining, to provide essentials for babies and children. We have met with WYC subsequently and will see how we can continue to support these efforts.

MRA is in regular contact with Wycombe Refugee Partnership who are supporting a family from Afghanistan as they move to High Wycombe. WRP send out requests for specific items, or specific help, as they identify them and we will ensure that these are promoted through our social media as well. You can follow WRP to get the latest updates here: www.facebook.com/groups/1069995593044656

We also attended the All Saint’s Church Fun Day in September and had a Donation Station for mobile phones – we were delighted to receive so many and are happy to receive more. These will go to refugees via Care4Calais. Please visit www.phones4them.org.uk to donate a phone.

You are no doubt aware that Buckinghamshire Council were one of the local authorities who agreed to support Afghan refugees. We have signed up with them to offer support. However, the Council have specific criteria for organisations they will engage with to support refugees coming to Buckinghamshire, which we do not meet. We will continue to explore ways of offering support however and will update you as soon as these become available. 

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Proposed UK Reforms to Immigration Policy

You may have heard Home Secretary Patel announcing yesterday (24 March) the public consultation on the government’s New Plan for Immigration.   The wide-reaching reforms are to be debated in parliament in summer and are allegedly aimed at smashing the criminal gangs which bring those seeking asylum to the UK. Most notable among the reforms is the proposal to differentiate between those arriving through “safe routes” and those who arrive in other ways – regardless of the merits of the individual’s claim. 
Unfortunately so much of the language and the information that is given in these debates – whether through government statements or parts of the media – is misleading and incorrect. Given the potentially devastating impact of these proposed reforms, and the fact that there is a public consultation under way, we believe it is important that people are properly informed about the facts and figures about the asylum system. More information and relevant links will be provided in our next newsletter. 
Although the language surrounding asylum tends to refer to the system being “in crisis”, last year, some 30,000 people sought asylum in the UK.  In comparison to previous years, this number is relatively low – and it also low when compared to other countries, including countries in the EU – eg Germany received 120,000 applications for asylum during the same period.
Over 8,000 of those crossed the English Channel to reach the UK. The largest number of people seeking asylum in the UK came from Iran.
Home Secretary Patel claims that the UK asylum system is broken. Certainly numbers awaiting decisions on their applications have grown significantly.  In 2010, nearly 12,000 asylum seekers were waiting to hear if they could stay in the UK. Just before the pandemic hit last year, that number had reached almost 44,000. But this is because cases are taking longer to resolve. Non-governmental organisations and legal firms who support people seeking asylum maintain that this is due to mismanagement of the process over many years and poor quality of decision-making which results in people then seeking a review of the decisions made.
The UK government is a signatory to the UN Refugee Convention – indeed, it was one of its key architects in 1951. Nowhere in the Convention does it state that asylum can be granted on the basis of how one has travelled to a country. Although the government is proposing official routes, it gives no detail about these. Nor does it recognise that, for people who are desperate and fleeing persecution, they will travel in whatever way possible to reach safety. Rather it seeks to make conditions considerably less favourable for those who use routes which are not “official”, even if they have a solid claim. Further, the government will try to send them back to other “safe” countries they have travelled through, even though there is nothing in the Refugee Convention which obliges a person seeking asylum to seek sanctuary in the first safe country they reach. Now that the UK is no longer part of the EU and has therefore left the EU system governing transfers of people being removed, the UK cannot force other EU countries like France or Greece to receive people without permission.
Lastly while the Plan includes important commitments towards, eg family reunification, no numbers are provided.
We encourage our supporters to have their say in the public consultation, open until 6 May 2021. This can be found at: https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/new-plan-for-immigration. You can also find the New Plan at this link.

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Migrants and the Media

As you will all have seen over the past few days, several media outlets have turned their lenses toward migrants crossing the channel in order to reach the UK; with this change in focus, the rhetoric of “invasion” has returned to the forefront of British conversation.

At Marlow Refugee Action, we have been appalled to see news crews pull alongside boats full of migrants, only to commentate as if it were some kind of spectacle rather than reach out and provide life-saving support. Such a response toward innocent people, seeking a better life for themselves and their families, is abhorrent.

Unpacking motivation and educating ourselves on the issues at hand is the only way to begin to understand why there has been an increase in channel crossings in recent weeks; this piece will hopefully shed some light…

The UK does not provide safe and legal routes to access asylum in the UK. Instead, we invest in fences and walls around the port of Calais and as part of the French-British Le-Touquet agreement, we also fund the CRS police in Northern France. The recent aggressive tactics has led more migrants to, once again, seek a new home as they are forced out of the refugee camps.

This shift, combined with tougher restrictions on transit brought on by the current global pandemic, has pushed people to utilise more dangerous methods and crossing routes with many forced to make their attempt at reaching the UK aboard ill-equipped rubber dinghies as opposed to hidden in convoys.

The number of people doing this has risen sharply in 2020, with over 4000 people risking their lives to make the voyage.

This has caused a great deal of public outcry, both positive and negative, so it’s vital to understand how many people actually want to enter the UK and why they wish to come in the first place.

A survey carried out in Calais in 2016 found that 40% of those interviewed wanted to come to the UK because they had friends or family here, 23% because they already spoke good English, and 14% because they thought Britain’s asylum system would give them better protection than that in France.

Contrary to an often flippant attitude, refugees cannot claim housing benefit in the UK and asylum seekers are given an allowance of just £5.39 per day. These people are not in the UK to abuse the welfare state, most are fleeing conflict. 

The majority of refugees in Calais that are seeking to reach the UK come from Afghanistan, Sudan, Eritrean, Iraq, Iran and Syria, places which are amongst the most dangerous in the world.

As a nation, our lives are historically enmeshed with the people of these countries, and we should neither be surprised when a small number of them arrive on our shores, nor treat their presence as illegitimate.

Under international law, anyone has the right to apply for asylum in any country that has signed the 1951 Refugee Convention and to remain there until the authorities have assessed their claim. 

The UK is home to approx. 1% of the 29.6 million refugees, forcibly displaced across the world. By contrast, both Sweden, Hungary, Germany and France have embraced more refugees, both per capita and total applications, whilst developing regions the world over host around 84%.

As economic crises, political conflicts and climate change put more and more pressure on people living in vulnerable areas of the world, we must be there to provide these innocent families a safe haven in which they can thrive and prosper.

For more information, the following websites are helpful sources of facts around the subject: 

The Truth About Refugees

The Truth About Asylum

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