The destitution of failed asylum seekers: a story from the days of Gladstone and Disraeli, not Brown and Cameron

Cutting off support to failed asylum seekers is tantamount to starving them out of country argues former Labour deputy leadership candidate Jon Cruddas MP.

A new film is being shown to MPs today by Amnesty International that aims to shame us into action. It’s about a group of people forced into abject poverty: sleeping rough, eating food out of bins, depending on churches and charities for clothes. Not only that, many live in fear of being forced to leave this situation for somewhere that may be much worse. This is all happening in the UK, under our very noses. And few politicians will go near the issue because these people are refused asylum seekers.

When someone reaches the end of the asylum process – often after poor legal representation from start to finish – their support is cut off and they are denied the right to work, access to benefits and the right to NHS hospital treatment except in an emergency. They are forced into destitution. Some get “hard case support” but many believe this is a ploy to make them sign up to return to their home country – and many asylum-seekers are simply too scared to go home, or are unable to return.

And many people can’t be removed. For people from much of Somalia and Iraq or Zimbabwe, their home country may simply be too unsafe to go back to; in some countries there is no safe airport to fly to. And many people don’t have valid travel documents as they were confiscated in their home country or they have been told to destroy them by the agent that brought them here.

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Its a class thing

Jon Cruddas argues that it is trite to play off the votes of Middle England against those of Labour heartlands such as ethnic minority communities.

To win the next election Labour has to change. This will not happen by accident. As a party we have to consciously choose to change. The debates to be had over the next couple of weeks are critical in this process as they will demonstrate whether we have the will and the capacity to do so.

However, a worrying trend has emerged over the past few days. It is being suggested that anyone who questions the strategy that led to the collapse in our popular vote at the local elections – a further loss of 500 councillors when we had already reached a 30-year low – and a continuing decline in our membership is in some sense proposing a “lurch to the left”, or “wanting to go back to the 1980s”. It is trite to play off a swing-seat strategy in some mythical middle England with a core-vote strategy in the Labour heartlands – the former belonging to New Labour, the latter the preserve of those who simply want to inhabit the past. A more nuanced analysis is needed.

Labour lost nearly 5 million voters from 1997 to 2005, and not to the Tories. Four broad elements can be detected in this change: a significant movement away from us among workers in the public services; among black and minority ethnic voters; and among those described by marketing experts as “urban intellectuals”; and a huge shift away from us among working-class voters, especially manual workers. These voters did not go to the Tories, they went to the BNP and other nationalist groupings, the Liberals and Respect. Or they simply stayed at home. In fact the only group where Labour support has actually grown between 1997 and 2005 has been among the professional, administrative and executive classes – but we cannot go on to win with them alone.

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Let’s make the most of remittances

Labour deputy leadership frontrunner, Jon Cruddas MP, argues that we need to do more to help remitters make the most of the money they send to relatives in the least developed countries in the world.

I was a signatory to an Early Day Motion tabled in the House of Commons last November which supported a courageous campaign being waged by City office cleaners. The cleaners, who earn as little as £5.35p per hour, were demanding better pay and conditions. They are just some of the countless, low paid workers who keep our economy on its feet, increasing numbers of whom are migrants from developing countries.

Contrary to the “benefit scroungers” image painted by the tabloid press, many migrants struggle to make ends meet. They often work long hours, are poorly paid and hold down several jobs at a time. Despite these hardships, migrant workers here from developing countries manage to send money – referred to as “remittances” – to their families in their countries of origin, which it is estimated totaled more than £2.3 billion last year. The main recipients of these remittances are India, Pakistan, the Caribbean, China, Bangladesh, Nigeria and Ghana.

The World Bank estimates that remittance flows from migrants to developing countries globally is more than twice as large as official overseas development aid. As Treasury minister Ed Balls MP said in his answers to my parliamentary questions on this topic,
“remittances are an increasingly important source of development finance and can have a significant positive economic impact in developing countries.”

Research commissioned by the Department for International Development shows that remittances are spent mostly on basic subsistence needs such as clothing, education, food and health. So remittances help meet the Millennium Development Goals of reducing poverty and increasing access to education and health. In Bangladesh and Ghana alone, it is estimated that remittance flows have helped reduce poverty by 6% and 5% respectively.

The advantage with remittances is that they go direct to the people that need them. They are not sent to recipients through bureaucratic NGOs which often have costly overheads which eat into aid, nor are they sent through the developing countries’ governments, many of which are ridden with corruption.

Concerns have been raised that remittances may be used for terrorist purposes. However, the money transfer companies have to comply with the same tough anti-money laundering measures introduced in the wake of 9/11 as the rest of the finance industry.

It has also been suggested that there is a danger of remittances being viewed as a substitute for official overseas development aid, but no one is pretending remittances can replace official aid or the partnerships which have been established to help deliver services to the world’s poor.

The government has done a lot of work to increase competition and transparency in the money transfer market for remitters by, for example, establishing the www.sendmoneyhome.org website, for which it deserves credit. But we must go further. We must look at other ways of ensuring remitters can make the most of the money they send to relatives in the least developed countries in the world. I do not claim to have all the answers in this respect, but here are just two ideas.

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