Author Louis de Bernières sends a message
My warm best wishes to all of you who are sleeping out tonight, in order to draw attention to the perversity of government policy concerning the treatment of asylum seekers. Policies that consign already desperate people to homelessness and abject poverty are clearly designed to discourage refugees from coming here at all. This calculated hardheartedness is against the spirit of the international conventions to which we have signed up.
It also means that we are failing to take advantage of what is being offered to us, as it is often the brightest and best who are forced to leave their countries, and the most resourceful who manage to get here. It makes no sense to force people to sleep in doorways, usually becoming ill in the process, and nor does it make sense to oblige asylum seekers to try to exist on 70% percent of the usual income support, when they could be supporting themselves completely by finding jobs whilst their cases are pending.
My own family came here as refugees from religious persecution in France, and since then we have contributed industrialists, clergy, and officers in all three services to the life of the nation. No doubt every Briton has a relative either distant or close who came here seeking sanctuary at some time in history. When my family came here you didn’t even need a passport, and nobody told them that they had to sleep outdoors under newspapers and eat out of rubbish bins whilst their case was being considered. Two hundred years ago they were welcomed to Northern Ireland, and they set up a business that employed a great many people. Times have changed, it is clear, but cruelty to the miserable is against our tradition, and doesn’t amount to a sensible policy either.
Sleep well,
Louis de Bernières
