At Manston Airport, households are being compelled to spend weeks sleeping on the ground in circumstances described by the Chief Inspector of Immigration and Borders as wretched and harmful.
Individuals detained there have confronted outbreaks of illness, overcrowding, too few assist workers and a scarcity of entry to charities and authorized recommendation.
However this disaster has not occurred by likelihood.
It has been created over a few years by Governments which might be extra involved about robust headlines and hostility than really making an attempt to know and repair the issues in our refugee safety system.
This neglect – the place cash has been lavished on costly and merciless plans just like the deal to deport refugees to Rwanda and never the place it’s actually wanted – has left the system near breakdown.
Hostile insurance policies imply the Authorities has created no routes to for folks to say asylum within the UK, so refugees proceed to have to make use of felony smugglers to get right here.
Hostile insurance policies imply folks typically wait years for a choice on their asylum declare – which creates enormous backlogs within the system, and swelling the variety of folks left in accommodations, military barracks, or Manston.
And the phrases Ministers use to dehumanise folks searching for asylum to promote their hostile insurance policies creates worry that would have catastrophic penalties – such because the assault on a centre in Dover on the weekend.
The circumstances at Manston aren’t remoted. This isn’t a one-off. For years households in our asylum system have suffered the prison-like camps at Napier or Penally Barracks, confronted bodily hurt in decrepit and harmful dispersal lodging, felt their psychological wellbeing crushed whereas warehoused into small resort rooms, or been made road homeless.
These issues – like all the issues in our refugee safety system comparable to horrendously lengthy wait occasions, Channel crossings, poverty and psychological ailing well being – can solely be fastened from the highest down.
And fixing should begin with a change of method. Hostility isn’t working. It’s inhumane, ineffective and dear. Solely an method rooted in compassion and understanding will succeed.”
