This is In Conversation with Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, a subscriber-only newsletter from i. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.
This week, an asylum seeker was found dead on board the Bibby Stockholm barge berthed in Portland Port in Dorset, in an apparent suicide. This bleak vessel holds migrants waiting for their cases to be heard, which can take an inhumanely long time, because Rishi Sunak and co throw our money at Rwanda to push through an unworkable scheme instead of employing enough staff to process applications with due diligence.
Locals left flowers and messages on the pavement. Some are revolted by the Government’s scorn for humans who arrive seeking refuge or life chances. When the barge first arrived there was dread and anger among locals, brainwashed into thinking the incomers are criminals, liars, a threat to their wives and daughters. Slowly, the objectors began to meet the strangers in church and at English classes and saw they were human after all.
That will alarm Sunak and his heartless political brigands. They want “the British people” to fear and loathe the migrants as they would rats and bedbugs.
The Tories don’t want us to know who the dead man was or why he couldn’t bear to live any more or the stories of all those who come here. Information like that could lead to a breach in their hate agenda. Journalists are kept away from detention centres; politicians too.
In October, this appeared on Labour MP Clive Lewis’s website: “I have written to the Home Secretary Suella Braverman requesting an urgent visit to assess living conditions for asylum seekers on the Bibby Stockholm barge. The barge is a symbol of government cruelty and incompetence. Our communities deserve safe, humane asylum accommodation and refugee protection. The letter has been co-signed by my Labour party colleagues Nadia Whittome MP, Kim Johnson MP, Olivia Blake MP, Lloyd Russell-Moyle MP, and Paul Sweeney MSP.”
They were not given access. The night before the body was found, inmates – for that’s what they are – have said they heard shouting and complaints about conditions on the barge. In a strange twist, for a few hours, an immigration lawyer mistakenly claimed that he was a young Cameroonian doctor. The doctor is alive and languishing in that place.
Migrant and refugee groups are seriously concerned about suicides and self-harm among the savagely misnamed “illegals” who seek refuge here. A Tory peer told me last year that I should stop defending “the dregs of humanity who are nothing, nobodies”. Our argument got so blisteringly un-Lordly that we were asked to leave the grand tea room where I was meeting another peer.
Just imagine how these people feel. If you don’t care, don’t read further. Many of us do care, will care. To right wingers that makes us “enemies of the people” – a nasty, contemptible slur. Jesus, as has oft been said, was a refugee baby.
The refrain that this country has always been “welcoming” is a lie, a fabrication, a false alibi. Political leaders have always scapegoated and demeaned migrants – even those invited in, like the Windrush generation.
I am heartily sick of this endless persecution of voiceless people, generation after generation. Now, the PM and other offspring of those who came have turned horribly nativist. It will get them nowhere.
I was on Any Questions? on BBC Radio 4 last Friday, in Burnley, a Brexit-voting town with serious economic challenges, periodic racial tensions and some support for far-right groups. The other panellists were Richard Tice of the anti-immigration Reform Party, Tory minister Esther McVey, and Labour’s Lisa Nandy. The cold church was packed with mostly older white people. I thought I would struggle to win them over, but they were with me on Rwanda and Sunak. Like those good people of Portland Port, their sympathies have moved to the dispossessed. I get many more missives these days expressing revulsion about the Government’s unfair policies and rhetoric against the boat people. More Britons than ever before are turned off by this ugly politicking.
A new YouGov poll shows the Prime Minister has reached his lowest ever net favourability score of minus 49, a ten-point drop from late November. He will be getting desperate. The tides are turning. I can’t tell you how happy this makes me.
I still can’t believe this poet, activist, actor, novelist, noble soul loved by all who met, heard or read him, is no longer with us. His life was Dickensian. His father was physically brutal to his mum and Benjamin, one of eight children; she daringly escaped from the family home, taking Benjamin with her. There were years of crime and punishment, then salvation came through words which he could use like no other.
We became friends after he publicly shamed me on Channel 4 News for accepting an MBE. What he said was both caring and incontrovertible. I returned the honour and felt cleansed. We talked a lot, about the bonds between people from the old colonies, Malcolm X, Africa and Britishness. Our last exchange was on the phone earlier this year.
He’d moved to Lincolnshire and was living there with his Chinese wife Qian Zheng. He was happy. I shared my anxieties about the online racists who relentlessly came for me. The great wordsmith replied: “You’re getting under their skin. That’s why. Carry on.” I can hear his voice, feel the power of those words. And like millions of others, will never forget.
Someone I know brought up a dilemma this week, about friendships and politics. With the immigration debate and Gaza, relationships are falling apart. It’s far worse than it was during the awful Brexit years. Some of those ruptures have never been mended. Today’s divides are deeper, even more emotive and probably irreparable. What do you do when an old friend or a relative starts expressing views that are overtly racist, xenophobic or heartless? To tolerate that would be a betrayal of my deepest beliefs.
So, when one old mate told me Sunak was right about the boats, I told him a line had been crossed, ended a 40-year attachment and walked out. Gaza has resulted in a similar walkout. Not everyone can or should be this hardline. I don’t judge them if they can’t bear to let go of someone who has long been in their lives. But I do wonder how it can be sustained when each is on the other side of a big river.
Thursdays are First Date nights for us. You might ask, what draws us oldies to this Channel 4 show? It’s the possibility of love. It was our 33rd wedding anniversary on 7 December.
I tweeted about my beloved, who wore a black jumper and gave me a box of Milk Tray. It was viewed, liked and retweeted by thousands. As I said above, for them too, it was the possibility of love.
This is In Conversation with Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, a subscriber-only newsletter from i. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.
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