"Fugees"

Saturday 23^rd September

Wigan v Watford

Wigan is an awful long way away, after all. I didn’t get up till midday and then couldn’t stay up during Sky Sports News after overdoing it a little last night but I was out of bed to hear about Bouazza scoring an equaliser after lots of Watford pressure. One point took us up one place, above Charlton, who lost at Man City today. After Jun and I watched “Children of Men” at the Islington Vue, we got back to watch MoTD. Once again we could have got more from the game, although Wigan might’ve scored 3 in the first half while we’re on the subject of the hypothetical.

"Children of men": I’m always tempted by British films but the backdrop to this - terrorism and the breakdown of societies across the globe - was largely incoherent. Although the main plot was simple enough to follow, there were scenes that didn’t seem to make sense. Set in a police-state Britain in 2027, 18 years after the last human birth, there were illegal refugees in cages all over the shop, like they parachuted into Central London each night. The treatment of the “fugees” should make anyone reflect on how rich contemporary societies dehumanise those experiencing such dire hardship but I’m not sure it will really.

I went to a refugee camp in Bethlehem a couple of years ago. Whenever I heard the term I’d always envisioned temporary structures but the Palestinians have been refugees in their own land for so long that the camps are just like an area of many cities I’ve been to. (Except for the occasional house demolished by the Israeli army and the bullet holes in most walls.) That trip to “the promised land” – a land of promise only because you always think things can’t get much worse – ended with me spendingt 5 days in a detention centre which hosted illegal aliens, though it was a converted three or four star hotel in Nazareth. Six people to a room, yes, but the bathroom was deluxe. Very different from the film and the reality here too.

Last year I was at a protest up at Dungavel, Scotland’s only refugee centre, which is an isolated converted prison where children are held too. People who have fled their own countries to seek asylum here end up locked up in conditions not fit for criminals and committing or attempting suicide. Their crimes? Escaping wars, persecution, poverty. The term for the latter group – economic refugees – is used as though it were self-explanatorily derogatory. People try to make a better life for themselves and their families in a world where information, products, money and the rich move freely across borders but where they cannot and we see them as “bogus” asylum seekers. If the model of globalisation we have were not exacerbating instead of relieving the poverty they attempt to escape, they wouldn’t be here.

Britain’s post-PC response to racism is to codify attacks with references to “asylum seekers” and the ‘successful’ ones, who gain refugee status after endless Home Office hassle, are despised and abused. BNP literature (yes, including The Daily Mail) would have you believe we were outnumbered by foreigners who’ve come to bleed ‘soft touch Britain’ dry and the governments are more than complicit in the shameful targeting of this vulnerable group. Five bills have been enacted since 1993 and they have all been motivated by the desire to make it more difficult for people to be afforded refuge. At least case law has sometimes been successful in limiting some of the more extreme measures of our government, so maybe not ALL lawyers are scum after all.