United Kingdom Archives - Page 2 of 7

Brexit proves (again) that Europe’s biggest threat was and still is nationalism and xenophobia

Posted on June 30, 2016 by Migrant Tales

We speak of external threats like globalization and others like asylum seekers as threats challenging this great Post-World War 2 experiment called the European Project. While the achievements of the European Union are formidable taking into account that we’re not going after each other’s throats after 1945, there is one threat that is the greatest of them all and one we should pay more attention to – nationalism and xenophobia.

Xenophobia is expensive business for a society. Socially excluding people and creating discord don’t create jobs and economic wellbeing but cost the taxpayer an arm and leg.

Ruffle your nationalistic feathers with generous doses of bravado and you’ll end up like the United Kingdom today: A country that will see its political and economic clout diminished in the European Union thanks to Brexit.

Read full story here.

Continue reading “Brexit proves (again) that Europe’s biggest threat was and still is nationalism and xenophobia”

Brexit: Stoke the fires of natonalism and you’ll get burned

Posted on June 25, 2016 by Migrant Tales

After the United Kingdom decided Thursday to exit from the European Union, the question remains: why?

In many respects, the answer to that question is a similar one that you hear in some European countries why such-and-such country has seen the political rise of populist anti-immigration party.

Finland is a good example of the latter. The populist anti-immigration Perussuomalaiset (PS)* won 5 seats in the 2007 parliamentary elections. Four years later that number rose to 39 seats.

Nationalism and ultranatonalism, is one of the worst social ills inflicting Europe today. Speech that divides and incites nationalism has its consequences as we saw Thursday in the United Kingdom.

One of the questions we should be asking today is what is the United Kingdom’s and the Tory party’s end game after Brexit. It shouldn’t surprise us that they are probably in the dark about where their nationalism will take them.

Are they going to eat their imagined take-Britain-back nationalism at the table or what?

There is one matter for certain this week: Thursday’s referendum will not only impact Europe but especially the United Kingdom economically. It will fuel as well social ills like Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, homophobia and many other social ills that socially exclude minorities.

And for what? So that Prime Minister David Cameron gambled to unite his party and lost big time?

What can we learn one important lesson from Brexit? Don’t stoke the fires of nationalism because you’ll get burned.

* The Finnish name for the Finns Party is the Perussuomalaiset (PS). The English names of the party adopted by the PS, like True Finns or Finns Party, promote in our opinion nativist nationalism and xenophobia. We, therefore, prefer to use the Finnish name of the party on our postings. The direct translation of “Perussuomalaiset” is “basic” or “fundamental Finn.”

MP Jo Cox’s death revealed and reminded how important our struggle against barbarism is

Posted on June 17, 2016 by Migrant Tales

On Thursday, we heard about the tragic killing of Labor MP Jo Cox, which was a stark reminder of the things she warned us about like hate speech, racism and outright hostility towards migrants and minorities. All we can do when such a heinous act gives us and our democratic institutions a blow is to stand strong.

Cox death reveals in naked reality where Europe is failing and how it wants to correct its failure with violence. The brutality and bloodshed we are witnessing on European soil also involves the hundred of thousands of asylum seekers who have fled strife to only be given the cold shoulder by the European Union as was the deal with Turkey.

A paragraph in The Guardian sheds light on Cox’s death below.

“The idealism of Ms Cox was the very antithesis of such brutal cynicism. Honor her memory. Because the values and the commitment that she embodied are all that we have to keep barbarism at bay.”

A good synonym for barbarism is inhumanity.

Finland’s efforts to keep barbarism at bay are disappointing to say the least. The rise of the xenophobic Perussuomalaiset (PS)* party, the silence of most politicians to ever-growing racism and discrimination, stiffening family reunification laws and immigration laws, near-constant bravado and saber rattling from politicians are some of the challenges we have had in keeping barbarism at bay.

Institute of Race Relations: Immigration detention – a tale of two reviews

Posted on May 13, 2016 by Migrant Tales

Monish Bhatia and Victoria Canning

Two recent reviews of immigration detention offer a contrast in their approach to the fundamental injustice of immigration detention and in their usefulness to campaigners.

It has been four months since the publication of two key reviews of immigration detention: the Review into the Welfare in Detention of Vulnerable Persons undertaken by former Prisons and Probation Ombudsman Stephen Shaw, and the Serco-commissioned Independent Investigation into Concerns about Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre conducted by Kate Lampard and Ed Marsden. Both reviews have been broadly welcomed across the refugee sector. Although the remit for Shaw’s review excluded the issue of detention in and of itself, he advocated banning the detention of pregnant women and suggested there should be a ‘presumption against detention’ of sexual violence victims, victims of FGM, people with learning difficulties, those with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and transgender people. In all, Shaw made sixty-four recommendations, while the Yarl’s Wood review made thirty-five recommendations, Serco agreeing thirty-two of them.

Justifiable scepticism…

Of course, reviews and ‘independent investigations’ must be approached with a degree of scepticism. Institutional racism within the police did not disappear after the Macpherson report, and in fact seems as pervasive as ever in some areas; vulnerable women are still arbitrarily detained in prisons and immigration removal centres (IRCs) five years after the Corston report, and despite the Harris Review, young people still end their own lives in prison and detention. And since the Shaw and Yarl’s Wood reviews and recommendations were published in January, the IRC estate has again been plagued by reports of violence and abuse. Only a month after the reviews’ dual releases, Amir Siman-Tov died in IRC Colnbrook. Amir, a Moroccan man in his thirties, had been placed on suicide watch at the time. Less than a month after that, women in Yarl’s Wood held hand-written signs on t-shirts which read ‘Yarl’s Wood officers in relationships with vulnerable detainees’ out of the restricted openings in their windows, communicating allegations of abuse to protesters surrounding the facility. Photos from Pennine House have since surfaced which show an 18-year-old rape survivor being dragged down stairs whilst resisting immigration officers. On 4 April, the Home Office released statistics showing that suicide attempts in British IRCs are at an all-time high.

So what function do the reviews serve?

The limitations of the reviews

If we look at these reviews of immigration detention specifically, in each case, the terms of reference were drawn narrowly. Neither review was permitted to consider the big issues: the over-use of detention, indefinite detention, privatisation or time limiting, even though the government had only recently rejected the calls for a 28-day limit. Shaw was told not to consider detention per se but to limit his scrutiny to the treatment of vulnerable people in detention, while Lampard was restricted to reviewing ‘the culture and practices at Yarl’s Wood as they relate to the welfare and wellbeing of residents’. In Shaw’s case, he was assisted by two Home Office officials, arguably undermining the review’s structural independence.

Continue reading “Institute of Race Relations: Immigration detention – a tale of two reviews”

Migrants’ Rights Network: Why I’ve decided not to become British

Posted on April 20, 2016 by Migrant Tales

Noel Dandes

Is it worth spending just over £1,200 to become a British Citizen? After weighing up the pros and cons Noel Dandes thinks that, in his case, it isn’t.

I recently wrote an article on the Home Office’s changes to the naturalisation process, and how they have been conveniently timed to coincide with the referendum. At the time, I was determined that I would see the process through, no matter what they threw at me — but now, after careful consideration, I have decided I do not want to become British anymore.

Read full article here.

The reasons for this are twofold:

Unfeasibly high cost

The previous cost of close to £1,005 was already a stretch, and it would have been a significant drain on my savings account. The new cost of £1236, however, is close to unfeasible at the moment — and I don’t trust that our dearly beloved Theresa May, whom the Green Party quite accurately portrayed as a petulant child obsessed with kicking foreigners out in their recent #GrownUpPolitics ad, won’t change the fees again by the time I’m eligible.

Ideological

The UK is my home. It has been my home for nearly six years, i.e. most of my adult life. I studied here, paid my taxes here, started a career here; I even found love here. But the past eleven months, since the Tories were re?elected, have seen a shift in British ideology. Where I once felt welcomed, I now feel pushed to leave. The UK has had its way with its European immigrants, and now we are being discarded.

The other day I calculated how much money I’ve paid into the British economy, and how much I’ve benefited from the social welfare system. Including my degree, I have contributed close to £27,000. In return, I received about £800 in benefits for two months, plus three visits to the GP in six years. I would say that’s good value for money.

Future uncertain

But the British government doesn’t care. We mean so little to them that two months before the referendum, it’s still unclear what will happen to us if Brexit goes ahead. Will we be allowed to stay? Will we need a visa? Will we be eligible for certain rights? Nothing but radio silence from David Cameron and his troops.

I don’t want to pick a side. I believe the UK and the EU benefit from each other, no matter what the media says. But if I’m forced to pick a side, I pick the EU. I was born a European citizen and I exercised my right to move to another European country — and while I feel more British than Greek after six years here, I will not naturalise just to be allowed to stay in a country that clearly doesn’t want me.

Read original posting here.

This piece was reprinted by Migrant Tales with permission.

Migrants’ Rights Network: In this migration crisis, common humanity isn’t enough. We need to reimagine who ‘we’ are

Posted on August 17, 2015 by Migrant Tales

That migrants are talked about in dehumanising language is intensely problematic. But common humanity isn’t enough to create lasting change in how we view migration.

Katherine Tonkiss*

One of the dominant features of the national discourse concerning the plight of the Calais migrants in recent weeks has been the dehumanising language applied to the men, women and children risking their lives in desperation to find lasting safety. This reached its peak with Prime Minister David Cameron referring to ‘swarms’ of migrants attempting to reach the UK and Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond describing the ‘threat’ of ‘marauding’ African migrants.

Migration rights advocates have been right to call out this language and to reintroduce the quite obvious and seemingly non-problematic notion that migrants are human beings, just like ourselves, and that as such they deserve to be treated as human beings. But it is equally true that calling on a common humanity is unlikely to create lasting change in the treatment of migrants.

This is because our relationships with our fellow human beings are deeply shaped by a national model of citizenship which we layer on top of our common humanity to differentiate between those we can sympathise with, and those to whom we think social justice applies and who we think have a justified claim to membership of our political community. We live in a nationalistic social order which constantly reproduces the exclusions that compromise the basic human rights of migrants in places like Calais. This order allows us to judge that some human beings are more important than others.

George Kateb has characterised patriotism as a dangerous and violent ‘mistake’. We can extend this argument to the plight of migrants around the world, and to help explain why migration is constructed as a ‘crisis’, rather than simply a normal part of life. It is seen as a crisis because it challenges the exclusions that national systems of membership continuously reproduce, while all the time those same national systems rely on migrant labour to stimulate economic investment and to sustain their welfare states.

Continue reading “Migrants’ Rights Network: In this migration crisis, common humanity isn’t enough. We need to reimagine who ‘we’ are”

Institute of Race Relations: One nation – but whose?

Posted on May 22, 2015 by Migrant Tales

Frances Webber

The first of a post-election three-part series on civil liberties in the UK examines the government’s proposal to replace the Human Rights Act by a British Bill of Rights.

Prime minister David Cameron was quick to don the mantle of ‘One Nation Toryism’ after his party’s election victory. But the Tories’ priorities set out in their manifesto would suggest that Cameron’s version of ‘One Nation’ owes more to Thatcher and Bush than to its inventor Harold Macmillan.

UN Human Rights Commissioner Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein.

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Institute of Race Relations: Why we should listen when the UN condemns the UK’s ‘extremist media’

Posted on May 8, 2015 by Migrant Tales

Matt Carr

Below we reproduce an article by author Matt Carr from his blog, Infernal Machine, on the current situation in the Mediterranean.

British tabloid editors have never struck me as a particularly reflective and thoughtful breed of humanity, so I doubt they will be plunged into a mood of remorseful self-analysis by the very strongly-worded suggestion from the United Nations High Commissioner Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein that there is a connection between their skewed coverage of immigration and asylum and the horrors now taking place in the Mediterranean.

It is far more likely that they, their journalists and many of their readers will scoff at the impudence of some jumped-up Johnny Foreigner with an unpronouncable name who is probably a Muslim to boot having the temerity to criticise their courageous attempts to have a ‘debate’ about immigration and shrug off the politically correct shackles imposed on them by muesli-eating liberals from Hampstead.

Continue reading “Institute of Race Relations: Why we should listen when the UN condemns the UK’s ‘extremist media’”

Migrants are not a burden to Finland

Posted on March 7, 2015 by Migrant Tales

The letter to the editor below could be perfectly well applied to Finland. In Finland, migrants and minorities are tired of being called a burden by opportunistic politicians that want to gain with xenophobic sound bites voter attention.

Sensible Europeans know better and more of their voices are needed in the face of this hostile attack against migrants and minorities.

One good recent example of the near-constant attacks against the migrant and minority community is the Perussuomalaiset (PS)* party program on immigration policy. On top of this, the PS chairman, Timo Soini, wondered in an interview with YLE in English why so few migrants move to Finland.

Silence shouldn’t be our language when challenging all forms of intolerance.

Continue reading “Migrants are not a burden to Finland”

Migrants’ Rights Network: Is the penny finally dropping? – Migration is a sign of how normal a society is, rather than a threat to its existence

Posted on March 2, 2015 by Migrant Tales

Don Flynn*

The fact that the government failed to reach its target for reducing net migration is bad news for them, but rather good news when considered as an indication of an economy not still mired in deepest recession.

Read full blog entry here.

Continue reading “Migrants’ Rights Network: Is the penny finally dropping? – Migration is a sign of how normal a society is, rather than a threat to its existence”