Refuge? Asylum? Sanctuary?
News that a government asylum project cost £1m and resulted in only one family returning home prompts Chas Raws to look at the UK’s tangled asylum picture
The terminology changes but the underlying reality remains: public opinion, inflamed by the popular press, begrudges any rights given to non-residents to settle here under any circumstances, and no government has had the courage to challenge that attitude or to distinguish between the provisions of international human rights law and laws governing economic migration. The fact that only a small fraction of today’s immigrants are asylum seekers rarely gets publicised and it has suited successive governments to lump them together with those simply seeking to improve their economic well-being – as emigrants from Britain have done for centuries. In the popular mind, all incomers are parasites benefiting from our hard-earned welfare system and depriving our indigenous population of much needed resources. No wonder the BNP has a small but significant following.
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