The right to work for asylum seekers

Argus title : Let asylum seekers work

The Trades Union Congress (TUC) has been in Brighton this week. Most of its deliberations have focussed upon ways of defending workers’ rights, wages and conditions in the face of recession – and on influencing the Brown government to change direction.

However, the TUC has never confined its interest solely to UK workers’ rights. It is also concerned about the rights of those who are unable to work – and is committed to international solidarity with trade unionists abroad.

The trade unions’ record in this regard has not always been heroic. At times, in the past, they seemed less concerned about workers’ rights than about protecting the limited work-place privileges of white male workers against the incursions of women and immigrants. However, those days are long gone. The TUC is at its best when it flexes its muscle to defend those who are unable to protect themselves from injustice. It has done so this week.

On Wednesday, at a meeting in Brighton’s Friends’ Meeting House, Brendan Barber, General Secretary of the TUC joined with individual leaders of many of the UK’s major trade unions to support the Refugee Council’s national campaign to allow asylum seekers in the UK to work.

Currently, the vast majority of asylum seekers are forbidden to work – despite the fact that many have no immediate prospect of returning home. Those whose applications for asylum are still in progress are forced to live on benefits which are set at just 70% of the level of Income Support. Those who have been refused it, receive nothing even though in many cases the government accepts their countries are too dangerous for them to return. Individuals are left in a state of limbo, with no recourse to benefits or services provided through public funds.

At Wednesday’s meeting – which was jointly organised by the Refugee Council and Brighton Voices in Exile – trade unionists pledged themselves and their unions to campaign against this injustice.

A spokesperson from the Refugee Council said: “These are people who fled persecution in their own countries looking for a place of safety….they want to work, support themselves and their families, pay taxes, and contribute to the economy. But they are being denied these opportunities. Instead they are forced to live on handouts…or are denied support altogether and end up destitute. It is unhumane to treat people in this way and it makes no economic sense.”

Helen Connor, of the Educational Institute of Scotland, said: “The right to work is a fundamental right – one the trade unions have founght for through the centuries throughout the world.”

She criticised the myths that fuel media attacks, saying: “Asylum seekers are often referred to as economic migrants or illegal immigrants, which is very misleading to say the least. They have not come to the UK for economic reasons, neither are they here illegally. They have been driven from their homelands by persecution, conflict and human rights abuses They are exercising a legal right in making a claim for asylum – a human right we all share.”

The Refugee Council stresses that the majority of asylum seekers have skills and a high level of education. Some have been employed as journalists and civil servants in their home countries. Many are qualified nurses, teachers and academics. There are, for example, 1,500 refugee teachers in England – and 1,100 medically qualified refugees on the British Medical Association database. The Refugee Council points out that while it costs £250,000 to train a new doctor, it takes a mere £10,000 to prepare a qualified doctor from abroad to practise in the UK.

Donna Covey, Chief Executive of the Refugee Council said:

“We know asylum seekers want to work. Many are highly qualified and had good jobs in their home countries, and are desperate to contribute to the country that has taken them in. It is an outrage that they are left to rely on handouts from the state when they have so much to offer this country.”

Tendai is an example of this. She is Zimbabwean asylum seeker who lives in Brighton with her 2 children. She told the meeting:

“I worked as a Chief Cash Controller for a company in Zimbabwe until I began to have problems because of my political opinions. This forced me to flee leaving my one year old son. I arrived in 2001 to seek asylum and it has not been what I expected. I am able and happy to work and contribute to the British economy but I am not allowed, and I am being forced to live on handouts.”

She added:

“I do really appreciate the protection given to me by this country, which of course my country failed to give me. But what was taken from me is my right to work…Because of this my confidence is taken away, I am deskilled and it has an effect on my children and family life”.

She explained movingly that though she wishes to marry, she is prevented from doing so by government regulations.

The meeting heard that many refugees have become refugees because of their trade union activities. Luka Phiri, also a Zimbabwean, is a skilled toolmaker in his home country, trusted and relied upon by his employer. He told the meeting that the proudest achievement of his career was to design and build a die-casting smelting furnace. He said: “The furnace worked perfectly and the company had to make three more furnaces to sell to other companies. My ambition was simply to accomplish something as a family man and share my valuable knowledge and special skills with young people training to be engineers and toolmakers.”

Robert Mugabe’s government put paid to that dream. Luka was a trade unionist and became regional secretary of the Engineering Trade Union of Zimbabwe. In 2003, as the country began to slide towards anarchy, he was forced to leave because of his opposition to the government.

He said: “When I came to this country I thought it would be easy for me to integrate, since I come from a Commonwealth country. But my asylum case has not been an easy road. My case has been refused and I do not know what the future holds for me in the UK.

“The Home Office has said I cannot work. That deprives me of a lot of things as a human being – especially my dignity. But this policy has meant that the great skills I brought with me to this country have become rusty over the past 5 and a half years. Not only is this a tragedy for me, and wasted potential for the UK economy – it is a disaster for my country.”

He ended poignantly: “When it is safe, I would like to return to Zimbabwe to help rebuild my great nation and recover my shattered dreams and ambitions. How can I do that if I have lost my skills and work experience?”

Brendan Barber, General Secretary of the TUC, was evidently much moved by what he had heard and pledged his full support. He said:

“Forcing often highly skilled, highly trained individuals to sit idle for considerable periods of time is not only a personal tragedy for them but is also a huge loss to the UK economy, which is missing out on their many talents. The Government must think again and change the rules so that asylum seekers are allowed to work….”

The TUC and Refugee Council will now be working together to persuade the government to reinstate the right to work. Given the passion and deep commitment expressed at the meeting, it is hard to imagine they will fail.

Anyone wishing to help the campaign should contact the Refugee Council on 0207 3466700 or visit the website at www.refugeecouncil.org.uk/letthemwork. Trade unionists can email Wilf Sullivan, TUC Race Equality Officer at wsullivan@tuc.org.uk. Brighton Voices in Exile can be contacted on 01273-328598.

Human Rights in Britain and the London Olympics

Argus title : Cool Britannia? Not with our rights record

I’ve enjoyed watching the Olympics. I still don’t think the Olympic authorities should have approved games in China, because of human rights abuses there, but I must confess to real excitement and a sneaky surge of nationalistic pride when our athletes achieved medals.

I’ll look forward to the London Games in 2012. It’ll be interesting to see what the British organizers make of the challenge. In Beijing the contrast between the closing ceremony of the Chinese and the British acceptance slot was fascinating. As was the case in their opening ceremony, the Chinese chose to make reference to symbols of their ancient culture – and there was no particular emphasis on the city of Beijing.

The British, on the other hand, made no reference to our history and focused not on the country as a whole, but on contemporary London – choosing a London Bus; queuing in the rain; rock music; and football as centre-pieces of the presentation. My husband lifted his head from his newspaper just long enough to comment “So they didn’t show 50 young people being stabbed then?”.

The organizers had obviously made a decision to market London as “cool”, yet the presentation seemed oddly dated. I was reminded of old films of the sixties featuring what was then called “swinging London”. I kept expecting to see shots of Carnaby Street and Mary Quant and to hear Roger Miller’s 1966 pop song “England swings like a pendulum do/Bobbies on bicycles two by two”.

There were no bobbies on bicycles in this display. I guess the UK organisers couldn’t take the risk. In the past, people of other nations may well have had an image of unarmed, helpful British bobbies in big boots and strange hats helping old ladies across the road. However, nowadays they’re more likely to have in mind poor innocent Jean Charles De Menezes shot repeatedly at close range by a police officer while lying pinioned in the London Underground.

Our politicians and the media have been forthright in condemning human rights abuses in China and rightly so. However, I don’t believe our leaders and opinion makers are at all prepared for the international scrutiny of Britain’s social welfare and human rights record which will almost certainly accompany our preparations for the London Games.

British authorities are no keener than the Chinese to see their dirty linen washed in public. A “Visit London” video which was screened in Beijing caused outrage within government and opposition alike, because it contained a brief glimpse of Marcus Harvey’s portrait of Myra Hindley, made from multiple copies of children’s handprints. It was immediately withdrawn. Yet child abuse in Britain is hardly a rarity.
Just this week Detective Chief Inspector Nick Stevens, head of the Metropolitan Police’s paedophile unit, said: ‘There are huge numbers of paedophiles online, surfing the net and looking for child abuse images, at any one time. The problem is far, far larger than anyone is aware of. Ten years ago the Metropolitan Police seized perhaps a few thousand images a year. Now you’re talking millions.”
Vicky Gillings of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP), which operates nation-wide to prevent abuse, warned of growing evidence that paedophiles are concentrating on ‘pre-verbal’ victims, who are attractive because they are unable to report abuse or describe their abuser.
Jim Warnock, head of operations at the CEOP, estimated that as many as one in six children – 1.9 million – might be victims of abuse.
Our leaders tell us that violence in Britain is decreasing – yet what we see in London is a carnage of young people, killed by gun and knife crime. We know that at least one child a week dies at the hands of a parent or step parent. And within the last few days we have learned that in some impoverished parts of Britain a baby born now will have a life expectancy of only 53 years, while those living in more affluent areas of the same city can expect to live well into their eighties.
End Child Poverty (ECP), a network of children’s charities and other groups, has condemned the gap between rich and poor, calling it a “huge injustice”. Its recent report “Health Consequences of Poverty for Children” was based on an analysis of government data. It found that children from poor families are at 10 times the risk of sudden infant death as children from better-off homes. ECP also revealed that babies from disadvantaged families are more likely to be born underweight, that poorer children are two-and-a-half times more likely to suffer chronic illness when very young and are twice as likely to have cerebral palsy.
Nick Spencer, who is Professor of Child Health at the University of Warwick and one of the report’s authors, told the Observer newspaper this week: “Poverty is now one of the greatest dangers faced by our children” adding “If poverty were an infection, we would be in the midst of a full-scale epidemic.’
This bleak portrait of British society is confirmed by another recent report in the Observer, this time about a collaboration between fashion magazine Vogue and Kids Company, a south London charity set up to assist children and young people in difficulty.
Journalist Stephanie Merritt wrote of the children: “The majority of the young people who knock on the door…… asking for help do not have a functioning adult at home. Many of the parents are rendered incapable by drugs, some are abusing the children or permitting them to be abused in return for money or drugs. Some of the children appear in states of severe malnutrition and steal because they are starving. Most are not registered with doctors or dentists.”
Camila Batmanghelidjh, one of the founder of Kids Company, told Stephanie Merritt that in her opinion 500,000 young people ought to be on the Child Protection Register, adding grimly that “there is only capacity for 30,700”.
Batmanghelidjh said “We allow ourselves to describe children who present disturbed behaviour as “young offenders”, then we can say: “They made a poor moral choice.” But if your brain chemistry is adapted for violence because of neglect or abuse, you don’t have much of a choice. By labelling them criminals, we say the flawed morality is the child’s and the rest of us get away with not facing our flawed morality in failing to help them. In my experience of working with these children for 11 years, none of them wants to be a criminal.”

It is hardly surprising that, according to UN research, our children are some of the unhappiest in the developed world.

The news of recent days has repeatedly emphasized the connection between financial investment and good results in the Olympics. It’s now acknowledged that it is long term, stable central funding from the Lottery that has made the difference. This provides a valuable lesson from which politicians should learn.

If the government invested properly in welfare, educational and health services and child protection systems with a view to eradicating inequalities and abuse, we could have a very different society, one in which children could be both safe and happy.

We can only hope that in the run up to the Olympics, the scrutiny of the world may help concentrate the minds of our politicians to better support and protect our young people. However, I am not confident.

I keep thinking about the rich pickings to be made from sportspeople and visitors who will flood the capital before and during the 2012 Games – and the market they will create, not least for sex and recreational drugs. I’m sure every major pimp and drug dealer in London is already making plans.

It’s to be hoped that London’s police and politicians have a genuine commitment to disrupt them.

Gypsies

Argus title : Racism doesn’t spare children

My family and I have recently returned from a trip to the Italy’s Lido di Jesolo near Venice, where there are ten miles of near perfect sandy beach and safe swimming in the Adriatic. We lounged by the beach, swam when we chose and ate and drank far too much in our very comfortable hotel. It’s a place we have visited many times before.

The only slight irritation on this occasion was that our somnolent lazing on the sand was regularly interrupted by hawkers selling cheap watches, bags, towels and toys and others offering massages. It troubled us that they appeared both more numerous and more desperate to sell items than they had ever been before.

We returned to Britain to learn that just a week or two earlier, elsewhere in Italy, two child hawkers 13-year-old Cristina and 11-year-old Violetta Djeordsevic had died by drowning, on just such a beach, surrounded by holiday-makers.

The two were part of a group of four children who traveled from a poverty-stricken gypsy community outside Naples to the beach at Torregaveta, west of the city, which is popular with Italian day-trippers. Like the men and women offering their wares on the Venetian Lagoon, the girls went to sell cheap trinkets to visitors and tourists.

The red flag was up and the tourists weren’t swimming. However, for reasons that are not yet clear, Violetta jumped into the water and got into difficulties. Cristina attempted to help her, but tragically both drowned.

The dead children were dragged from the sea by a passer by and surrounded by a curious crowd, but when they could not be revived were simply left on the sand, their corpses laid side by side under beach towels. No ambulance attended.

Photographs of what happened during the hour it took for the mortuary van to arrive, were flashed around the world – and have shamed Italy. As the girls lay dead on the beach, their thin feet protruding from under the towels, Italian holiday makers around them began to return to their leisure activities. There are photographs of them picnicking, applying sun lotion, sunbathing and even playing ball and throwing frisbees.
The Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera reported. “Few left the beach or abandoned their sunbathing. When the police from the mortuary arrived an hour later with coffins, the two girls were carried away on the shoulders [of the officers] between bathers stretched out in the sun.”
One eyewitness on Italian TV said: “It was very surreal. There was this picture of a typical Italian beach with families enjoying the sun and then just metres away were the bodies of these two children. People were completely indifferent about what had happened.”
Laura Boldrini, a spokeswoman for the UN High Commission for Refugees, commented: “Accounts would seem to suggest that hardly anybody intervened to save this children and even in death there seemed to be total indifference as their bodies lay on the beach while people continued to enjoy themselves.
Crescenzo Sepe, the Cardinal of Naples, condemned the attitude of holidaymakers, saying: “At times turning the other way or minding one’s own business can be more devastating than the event itself…. in the background holidaymakers…appear more upset at the fact their view of the beach has been obstructed.”
He said that Cristina and Violetta “had faced nothing but prejudice in life and indifference in death; an unforgivable truth.”
Laura Boldrini commented: ”I wonder if these people would have behaved in the same way if the children in question were Italian and not Roma?”
It is a question being asked across Italy. Civil liberties groups have pointed out that a Roma encampment near Naples was burned to the ground this year after its inhabitants had been evacuated for their own safety. It was just one of several such attacks.
Italy’s Roma live in discrimination and poverty and their situation has become worse since Silvio Berlusconi’s rightwing government came to power in May. One of Berlusconi’s key partners in government is the National Alliance, a party formed as a successor to Mussolini’s Fascists. Another is the Northern League, a party comprised of individuals whom Dan McDougall of the Observer has recently called “restyled former Fascists, anti-immigrant forces and traditional conservatives.” The League’s leader Umberto Bossi is notorious for having advocated shooting at boats bringing immigrants into Italy.
Berlusconi has ordered the fingerprinting of the country’s Gypsy population, including children. According to Francesca Saudino, a human rights lawyer “The Italian right blames much of the country’s street crime on the Roma, in particular on children sent out by adults to rob and steal” adding: “..many working class people think the Roma no better than animals, and the government is using this xenophobia to win votes and popularity…The deaths of these girls has come to represent something more, perhaps a battle for Italy’s soul.”
Berlusconi has told the European Commission that the children are being fingerprinted to encourage school attendance. Saudino suggest a different reason “There are an estimated 152,000 Roma in 700 camps across Italy and the Interior Ministry hopes to dismantle them all. Thirty per cent have Italian citizenship, but the rest are immigrants, many from Romania and the Balkans. We suspect that the Gypsies are being identified only so that they can be expelled.”.
The European parliament has recently approved a motion condemning fingerprinting as an act of discrimination banned by the European convention of human rights. Catholic human rights organisations have criticised the practice as reminiscent of the Nazi persecution and the chief rabbi of Rome has insisted it must be stopped. Amos Luzzatto, former head of the Italian Union of Jewish Communities, said that the policy recalled “days when I could not go to school, and people would point at me saying: “Look Mummy, it’s a Jew.” This is a country that has lost its memory.”
The British, unlike the Italians, have no strong tradition of fascist activity, but we are very capable of racism and of indifference to the suffering of marginalised groups. It is not so very long since a Sussex bonfire society caused outrage by choosing to torch, not a Guy, but a caravan decorated as a travellers’ home, complete with cardboard figures of women and children it referred to as “Pikeys”.

According to Rachel Shields of the Independent: “Studies in recent years have shown that Gypsies and Travellers experience more racism than any other group in the UK, including asylum-seekers. The most recent Mori poll on the issue revealed that a third of UK residents admitted to being prejudiced against Gypsies and Travellers…”
According to the British Medical Association, the community has the lowest life expectancy and highest rate of child mortality in the UK. Ofsted has also reported low levels of educational achievement and high rates of illiteracy among Traveller children, due to a disrupted education and bullying.
Richard Sheridan, president of the Gypsy Council said “”I don’t think that the situation in the UK has changed much since the 1960s – those ‘No blacks, no dogs, no Gypsies signs’ are not very far away.”
Here in Brighton, the settled community is faced with a decision about where to site a permanent travellers’ site. The Council’s preferred location for a 14-pitch site is at the former BMX track off Wilson Avenue. Labour and Green councillors asked for the decision to be reviewed, but this was not agreed. The matter will now go forward to the Planning Committee, which will make a decision taking into account public representations. The stage is set for major and potentially nasty confrontation.

I have no knowledge of the advantages and disadvantages of this particular location and confess ignorance of the planning issues involved. However, the one thing of which I am certain is that our community needs to make provision for well-planned traveller sites which are appropriately situated, resourced and landscaped – not least so that traveller children can receive the education and access to health care which is their right.

All one can ask of members of the settled community is that they make their representations and decisions on a basis of generosity, fact and reason and that they do not allow travellers – especially their children – to become pawns in what could become a very ugly political game.