We are all Citizens UK! (Reasons to be optimistic in the midst of a national meltdown)
It’s up to us to make Britain a welcoming place for refugees
Last week the British Home Secretary Amber Rudd presented a list of 387 child refugees to French ministers during talks over the imminent demolition of the Calais Jungle camp. The list, naming children with a legal right to come to the UK who were stuck in the Jungle, had been drawn up and given to Rudd by the campaign group Citizens UK.
At the time of publishing this, 26 of the children on that list will have arrived on British soil.
While the refugee issue continues to be batted around parliament and slung across headlines, Citizens UK has been working tirelessly behind the scenes to build a more welcoming Britain from the community level up. As well as securing safe passage for refugee children, the campaign group has identified private landlords with available accommodation to offer and trained volunteers to lobby local councils to improve resettlement efforts.
So who are the citizens behind Citizens UK?
“When governments and states don’t do enough, we the people have to do more” — National Refugee Welcome Board
I found out for myself as I boarded a coach bound for Birmingham one drizzling Saturday morning in September. Our destination: the Refugee Welcome Summit, an event organised by Citizens UK bringing together the 100+ community groups which make up the nationwide Refugees Welcome movement.
Among the 500 people crammed into an unassuming community centre I encountered faith groups, councils, charities and students from all over the country. I sat at a table between nine-month-old baby and a woman in her 90s. We heard talks by people who had come to the UK as asylum seekers from Syria, Lebanon, Nepal and Zimbabwe.
Regardless of which community they’d come from, everyone was there for the same reason: to make UK a place of sanctuary for those fleeing persecution.
Looking around, I experienced a strange sensation that I haven’t felt in a long time: national pride. Some post-Brexit narratives would have you believe that standing up for the rights of refugees is the privilege of the urban elites. We are supposedly a nation divided more than ever: by geography, by generation, by culture, by class. Not so on that rainy Saturday in Birmingham. To see such diversity and such unity together in the same room gave me hope that there is something worth salvaging in the midst of our collective national meltdown.
I discovered that from Lancashire to Gloucestershire, Syrian families have been arriving under the Syrian Vulnerable Persons Resettlement (VPR) Programme since the beginning of this year. I met people from Oxford, Nottingham, Cambridge and Bristol who had volunteered to join their local resettlement committees.
A woman from Bath spoke about how she was moved to set up her local group after witnessing violent altercations between migrants and French police on the motorway on the way back from her family holiday. A man from Worcester told me about the welcome meal they’d hosted in the town hall for 20 newly-arrived Syrians and how, despite the language barrier, he was looking forward to getting to know them.
“Refugee rights are our rights” — Refugee Action
The Refugee Welcome movement in the UK gained momentum last September, after pictures appeared of the drowned Syrian toddler Aylan Kurdi. The resulting groundswell in public support for the cause of refugees prompted the government to increase its commitment to taking in 20,000 refugees from Syria by 2020. But while political pressure is a good start, it only gets us so far.
According to the Refugee Council, just under 3,000 Syrian refugees have been resettled up until now. That’s because there’s only so much that can get done in parliament. The buck gets passed on to local councils to work out the practicalities of resettlement. And councils— many of whom have complained that they cannot afford to cover the costs of taking in refugees — will only commit to doing so if they know what local residents can give or do.
This summer the government launched the Community Sponsorship scheme, allowing community groups are able to take on the responsibility for resettling families seeking asylum. This means that charities, faith groups, businesses or groups of individuals — with the consent of local councils — can approach the Home Office directly with their own plans to provide housing, orientation and other services. At the moment Community Sponsorship is being trialled in nine areas in the UK.
If — like me — you don’t live in one of those areas, you’re not a community group or you don’t have a spare house to offer, there are still ways that you can help. This online service lets you tell your local council what you would be willing to give or do, such as:
- Cultural workshops, family trips, sports activities
- Clothes, furniture, toys
- Jobs or career mentoring and coaching
- Befriending, conversational english, showing people around the area
- ESOL, mental health services, legal services
“This is the great human rights issue of our time and it’s not going to go away” — Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner
Above all, the Welcome Summit served as a powerful reminder of two important things about refugees that are easy to forget in the current climate: this is not a new problem, and it is not just a Syrian problem.
The refugee ‘crisis’ has been happening for years, and will only get worse unless societies learn to cope with the realities of mass displacement and migration. Calais has been home to unofficial migrant camps since 2002. Migrants have died crossing the Mediterranean on a regular basis since 2009. In that same year, there were already 100,000 illegal border crossings into the EU.
Syrians are not the only refugee community in Britain. We are getting better at acknowledging the national and ethnic diversity of refugees entering Europe — Iraqis, Afghans, Eritreans, Iranians and Sudanese. There are also steady numbers of Ukrainians, Albanians and Kosovans claiming asylum in the UK and elsewhere in Europe.
The number of people displaced by conflict, political persecution and poverty may well pale in comparison to how many will be forced to leave their homes due to the effects of climate change. Right now, there are 65 million forcibly displaced people on earth. By 2050, according to some estimates, there may be up to 200 million climate refugees.
No matter how isolationist our governments become, movements in one part of the world will continue to affect other parts of the world in unpredictable and unforeseen ways. Displaced people don’t disappear when our armies build fences or demolish camps, or when we turn off the television or close down our browsers. This is happening now, it will keep happening, and we need to figure out how to make it work.
It’s a small start, but by showing solidarity and generosity towards people fleeing danger we start to move towards a world that confronts the realities of mass displacement and seeks sustainable solutions. We can demonstrate to local authorities that we are ready and willing to help, which in turn puts pressure on the national government to fulfill its commitments.
There’s no doubt that it’s a long and difficult journey ahead. But it only takes one click to start.
