The case for making refugees welcome

Over the last year there has been a lot of talk about refugees in the UK, much of it based on the politics of fear. Newport, in particular, has seen is fair share of wolf whistle politics around the issue. “1 refugee for every 319 people” is the latest attention grabbing figures in the South Wales Argus. I don’t blame the editor though, in fact his editorial on the issue, although not a position I fully agreed with, was at least honest and brought some humanity to the issue.

What is often forgotten is that for years refugees weren’t distributed around the UK, they were concentrated in the South East costing the government a huge amount of money on private housing. The decision to distribute refugees was made in Westminster, last time Labour were in power, to reduce the costs to the government finances. This was a decision that even our own wolf whistle politician, Paul Flynn MP, voted in favour of.

The truth is that, in Newport, it is only 0.3% of the population that are refugees. A tiny fraction, we are told, that is putting undue pressure on our health service and on our schools, but any system that can’t handle an increase of 0.3% has much deeper rooted problems. Take a look at the Royal Gwent Hospital, as an example. It is overstretched, with A&E based out of Portakabins. For years, Labour have been telling us it is going to be replaced with a new Critical Care Centre, but every announcement seems to be about another delay. The creaking infrastructure is not due to an increase of less than 500 people in a population of 147,000. It is a symptom of many years of under-funding and poor political leadership from the Welsh Assembly. Newport’s population is growing much faster from commuters than it is ever likely to from refugees.

The people of Newport should be proud that as a city we are so welcoming. I encourage anyone to really see what it’s like to be a refugee. From being housed in some of the poorest private housing stock while being provided with little to no furniture, to having to survive on only £36.95 per week, only half what someone on job seekers allowance gets. Even the allowance is paid on a card and can only be used on food and essentials. Most have fled wars and persecution that we have to take at least some historic responsibility for. Most have lost friends and family, risking everything they have to find safety.

For those lucky enough to be granted asylum, their previous experiences as teachers, nurses, scientists and entrepreneurs are boosts to the new communities they call home. Let’s not forget that 1 in 7 new companies are started by people not from the UK. So, instead of scaremonger politics and blaming refugees for a struggling infrastructure, let’s be proud of what we are doing as a city, let’s make refugees welcome so that if they are granted asylum they choose to make Newport their home, bringing benefit to all of us.
As for the infrastructure, our health service and our schools, Labour have been in charge for 17 years in Wales, so maybe it is at the politicians we should be directing our anger, rather than at those who have lost everything just trying to find safety.

* Paul Halliday is a Lib Dem Christian Forum Exec Member Newport & Severnside Welsh Liberal Democrats Chair, was PPC for Newport East General Election and is Newport East Candidate for Welsh Assembly Elections

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6 Comments

  • I think you mean “dog whistle”. Wolf whistling is something quite different…

    There are genuine issues around a small number of areas in the UK having to host a disproportionately large number of asylum seekers. Unfortunately, people who point this out are often accused – as you’ve done here – of using coded racist language.

    I think it’s reasonable to assume that the people at The Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford are not attempting to dog whistle when they write: “Policies of dispersal risk creating social tensions by… thrusting [asylum seekers] into already marginalized communities (Boswell 2001). While these communities may not always act negatively to the new arrivals, the arrival of asylum seekers may place greater burdens on existing public resources in places already under strain. The chances of community backlash are thus often high.”

    It seems pretty obvious to me that if you place large concentrations of asylum seekers into areas of high poverty and social marginalization, the end result is not always going to be the kind of welcoming social cohesion we all want to see.

    I don’t know about the particular situation in Newport, but I suspect your claim that an asylum seeker population of just 0.3% is a drop in the ocean is a bit misleading, since I suspect some neighbourhoods have massively higher concentrations than that, whereas others have none at all. That’s the way the system works elsewhere. Though in theory no area is supposed to have more than 1 in 200, this is applied at a local authority level, so individual wards can well exceed that figure. The situation has been exacerbated by the massive funding cuts and privatisation of asylum housing under the coalition, which has predictably led to private sector housing companies plonking asylum seekers in the cheapest areas possible, with no control by local councils. The streets full of cheaply painted red doors in some of the less salubrious parts of Middlesborough are the inevitable result of such a policy.

  • Thank you Stuart, very nicely put.

  • Eddie Sammon 29th Jan '16 - 1:38am

    The only way forward is qualified support for refugees. We are at one extreme at the moment with a mess of a system that is just leading to lots of suffering. We’ve got a race to the bottom in Europe with states trying to make themselves less attractive than the others. Something needs to change.

    However letting lots of people in isn’t going to be accepted. I’ve got ideas for qualified support, but people will mock them, but at least I’ve got ideas, rather than staring at the mess and blaming it on others.

    Basically, we need to build more refugee camps in Britain. It will allow us to keep a track on illegal immigration, rather than people just walking through the channel tunnel and making lorry drivers feel in danger and calling for the army (which they have been doing, a frightening thought).

    There has been a problem in Calais recently where new heated accommodation hasn’t been accepted and people wanted to stay in their tents instead. We need one or two people per room, not four, as in the accommodation that France has built. Although it was a nice idea to build something for them.

  • Thailand and other countries have hosted refugees in much greater numbers than the UK. Few genuine asylum seekers make it to the UK.On flights to Britain passengers much show their visas and passengers from some countries are not allowed to transit.

  • I left Wales just under 30 years ago and its health service was laughably (it wasn’t funny if you had to use it) bad then. The problem has nothing to do with refugees. It appears to be a strange Welsh refusal to question how the NHS is run.

  • Catherine Royce 29th Jan '16 - 11:21am

    I wrote to my local paper on this topic only last week. My local council, Test Valley, in Hampshire, popln. 116,000, will be accepting just two families this year and ten by 2020.
    Contrast with Isle of Bute, NW Scotland popln. 6,700 who have already accepted more than 100 families and willingly, see recent articles in the Guardian.
    I think we will find that the pitifully small number of refugees our government are willing to accept will be concentrated well out of the site of Tory voters.
    The nasty party really is back, to that description we can now add shameful, immoral, and inhumane.

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