Recently the Guardian broke the news that the reason we are seeing increasing numbers of asylum seekers on our beaches is because they have cottoned on to the fact that, thanks to Brexit, we are no longer part of the Dublin Agreement. This inconvenient truth seems to have escaped Farage and Johnson and all those who are hell bent on ruining the country’s economy at any cost if we can only get control of our borders.
For years, I trolled them.
“The quitlings literally voted to not be able to send them back to France……oh the irony.”
I was told that this was all Project Fear. Turns out it wasn’t!
What is the Dublin Agreement?
Basically, it states that an asylum seeker should claim refuge in the first European country they arrive in. So when we were in the EU, we could legally send an asylum seeker back to Spain had they got there first. But we are no longer in the EU, Johnson has ripped up the Dublin Agreement and now we have no legal means to send people back. Hence, the larger numbers now arriving on our beaches.
Previously, the UK could make ‘take charge’ requests which meant that our officials had access to the Eurodac fingerprint database. This could prove that an asylum seeker had moved through other EU countries and could therefore be sent back. However, our participation in Eurodac perished as part of Johnson’s bonfire of bureaucracy.
So much winning and taking back control.
This year, just five asylum seekers have been sent back compared to 289 in 2020. That’s a 98% drop since Brexit really kicked in.
The Home Office is distorting the narrative
Since 2016, the Tory party has rapidly morphed into the BNP-NF-Brexit Party-UKIP-Tory party but how far has it gone?
Put it this way. Now it’s suppressing its own reports on the reasons people make the treacherous journey across the channel. Home Office data show two thirds of those attempting to make the crossing are genuine refugees, many coming from war-torn parts of the world. As one of the world’s largest exporters of arms, the UK has had a great deal to do with creating the hell that they are escaping.
But the Home Office is not publishing this data. Why? Because it doesn’t fit the narrative. These are inconvenient truths that the Tories don’t want people to hear. So best they just make out that the asylum seekers are illegal immigrants coming over here to scrounge benefits and get a nice hotel on the back of the taxpayer.
The fact that asylum seekers in the UK are housed in squalid accommodation provided by the likes of Serco, are not allowed to find work and receive a daily allowance of £5.66, from which they have to buy food, clothing and everything else is, strangely enough, never mentioned by Priti Patel and her ilk.
Are we really inundated by refugees?
No, we’re not. We’re not even taking our fair share, according to Andrew Levi, reporting in the Bylines Times.
As has been the case for years, our refugee numbers have seen little or no increase. This is just a fiction made up by the drum-beaters of right wing hate.
The infamous Brexit referendum poster by Nigel Farage has been compared many times to the work of Goebbels and it is easy to see why. What is more concerning is that the Tory party is now adopting the same mantra.
Pull up the drawbridge
Recently, Patel (a second-generation migrant who seems determined to pull the drawbridge up on anyone else being able to come to Britain like her Ugandan-Indian parents) claimed:
“All the data and evidence has shown this – that in the last 12 months alone, 70% of the individuals who have come to our country illegally via small boats are single men, who are effectively economic migrants. They are not genuine asylum seekers. These are the ones who are elbowing out the women and children, who are at risk and fleeing persecution.”
Is this true? Labour peers David Blunkett and Shami Chakrabarti have both asked her to verify this claim and the Home Office has also been asked to provide the data to back it up. So far – nothing.
Nothing Patel has claimed has been verified. Could she be lying? Surely not. But I point you towards a recent Guardian report that analysed Home Office data and – quelle surprise – found that nearly two thirds of applicants are likely to be given asylum.
As shown in the figure, the Refugee Council looked at the people crossing the channel during the first five months of 2020. They found that 91% (11,123 people) came from only ten countries.
At this point, I think it becomes quite clear the majority are escaping war torn areas. It does rather raise an intriguing question of whether taxes raised directly from our arms sales to these countries could be spent on re-housing asylum seekers. Seems fair enough, don’t you think? It would certainly make for some interesting balance of trade graphs.
The recent tragic deaths of more than 30 people really summed up the state of the nation. Most of us were shocked and saddened by the events but we were also shocked to see just how quickly the hate mob Team GB shot out of the blocks. The Daily Mail and even the Sunday Times comments were inundated with people laughing at this terrible tragedy. What a time to be British.
Compassion at Christmas
If like me you would like to show a bit of solidarity with fellow human beings this Christmas, then please join me in donating to the Refugee Council.
