by Susanna Bellino
On the day of the spending review, an optimistic refugee council set its Facebook status thus:
“Not much mention of asylum in today’s spending review, except that the home office is to save £500m by cutting IT and building costs, but will invest more in asylum casework. Could this be good news?!”
Sorry to burst your bubble, refugee council, but probably not.
The UK has had an ambiguous relationship with asylum seekers, to say the least. On the one hand, we like to appear liberal and sympathetic to their plight and the existence of such organisations as asylum aid and the refugee council demonstrate this. But on the other hand, headlines in the Daily Mail (Up to 80,000 bogus asylum seekers granted “amnesty” and Somali asylum seeker family given £2m house… after complaining 5-bed London home was “in poor area”) suggest that we are a nation that prefers to acquire its morals from right-wing tabloids rather than the universal declaration of human rights.
And despite the pre-coalition Liberal Democrats stance as the ‘fair’ party, things aren’t likely to change. The government has already been accused of deserting its promise to end the detention of children in immigration centres – a change that would have signaled one of the Lib Dem’s few influences on policy and demonstrated that the government was at last sympathetic to the cause of asylum seekers.
