Brit Beats n.1 - Bibby Stockholm and the race to the moral barrel's bottom
Brit Beats is out, plus a suggestion to read Gary Younge and Anna Lekas Miller's narrative journalism books .
Over the last three years, I have worked on a podcast (in Italian) focused on British affairs with my friend and talented videomaker Alessandro Mariscalco, Post Brexit News Explosion.
That podcast and the connected newsletter have concluded, but I will continue to cover British affairs in a newsletter format, this time in English.
So, let’s get started with Brit Beats, this time on the Bibby Stockholm.
The Bibby Stockholm and the Tory race to the bottom of the moral ladder…while Labour is also competing
The first asylum seekers have been "taken onboard the Bibby Stockholm barge in Dorset, a symbol of the transformation of the UK into the “Australia of Europe”.
Australia is known for its “No Way” approach to migration, which also applies to those seeking asylum: all those who attempt to reach Australia by boat are deported to islands in the Pacific like Manus Island, where the local detention camps are managed by companies like Serco. I interviewed on this topic Australian cartoonist and trade unionist Sam Wallman for Equal Times 8 years ago. When it comes to a testimony of what happens in those camps, there is the book by Iranian Kurdish journalist Behrouz Boochani “No Friends but the Mountains”, translated into English by Omid Tofighian.
The Fire Brigade Union (FBU) has raised alarm about the fact that the barge is unsafe, because of the narrow exits and passages, as well as the planned occupancy (up to 500 people). Ben Selby, Assistant Secretary General of the FBU told Times Radio “Likely, at some point, rescues may be hampered by [The Bibby Stockholm’s ] design and occupancy”.
Unsurprisingly, while the FBU concerns are also around the safety of the firefighters that could be called to stop a fire and rescue the asylum seekers, these have fallen on uninterested ears. Deputy Prime Minister Oliver Dowden has blasted the FBU concerns as politically motivated.
The tone of the whole cabinet goes from one bottom of the moral barrel to the other on this front. Lee Anderson, deputy chairman of the Tories said that if asylum seekers do not like barges, they can f%$k off to France, while Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick (who recently ordered to paint over children cartoons murales from a centre for asylum seekers in Dover, so that children would not feel too welcome) defended his colleague, adding that the UK may leave the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) in order to pursue the Rwanda plan. Jenrick also hinted that leaving the ECHR may be a point for the Tories to campaign for in 2024 General Elections.
The Tory language against migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers has gone from "swarm" (David Cameron in 2015) to "...f%$k off to France" (Lee Anderson). Who needs UKIP or the Reform Party, when you have the Tories?
On another note, Nigel Farage is now born again as “champion” of the unbanked (becoming once again relevant as he had not been since Brexit), but we will discuss the new life of the former UKIP and Reform Party leader on another occasion.
Regarding Labour leadership, like on ULEZ and green policies, the party confirms how much it is not bothered to make itself at least look slightly appealing to progressive voters. The shadow immigration minister, Stephen Kinnock said that Labour would have no choice but to continue “housing” (detaining is the right verb, but the UK political language has been stuck in a Neolanguage Orwellian loop for a while) asylum seekers on barges and ex-military bases, if it will be able to win the elections and form the next government.
In this scenario, the real opposition to these hateful policies is played by NGOs like Migrant Rights Network, Migrant Voice, and Detention Action. Also, in yet another disturbing trend displayed by the Tory ministers (mainly by Priti Patel as Home Secretary in Boris Johnson’s government) and now continued by Suella Braverman, the latter category keeps on being targeted, with labels like do-gooders and lefties, invalidating what they are working on and exposing the lawyers themselves to risks.
On September 7, 2020, a man with a large knife entered a London law firm, launching a “racist, violent” attack that injured a staff member. Days before that, then Minister Priti Patel attacked the category by saying that “activist lawyers” were getting in the way of the removal of migrants, pushing Britain’s top lawyers to write a letter to the Home Secretary following the attack, given her inflammatory comments,
The hostility towards immigration solicitors has not changed. Migration and human rights lawyer Jacqueline McKenzie wrote in the Guardian that she is the target of a government smear campaign, carried by the rightwing press because she has represented someone who was threatened with deportation to Rwanda. As McKenzie also adds, she was “outed” as a trustee of Detention Action, given how the NGO challenged the Rwanda deportation plans in court.
This is all for the first Brit Beats, now off to two books suggestions. Articles and podcast suggestions will be back in the next edition of the newsletter, before my holiday break. Also, if you like what I write, why don’t you subscribe?
Good Reads
Are you also someone who reads two books at the same time? At the moment I am reading “Dispatches from the Diaspora. From Nelson Mandela to Black Lives Matter” (Faber and Faber) by Orwell Prize winner, author, journalist and Sociology Professor at Manchester Gary Younge, and Loves Across Borders: Passports, Papers and Romance in a Divided World (Algonquin Books) by Anna Lekas Miller, author, journalist and contributing editor at New Lines Magazine.
I cannot recommend enough both books. The former is a journey through the career and experience of Younge, with his impeccable and unique style, following him from when he went to South Africa, for the Guardian , aged 24, to witness the election that saw Nelson Mandela becoming the President of his country, after 27 years of imprisonment. Younge had picketed the South African embassy in Trafalgar Square with his mother when he was 17 calling for Mandela’s release, and as an 18-year-old he had set up an anti-apartheid organisation at his university in Scotland.
Then there are his essential reportages from the US, a country where he has lived and reported from for years, from New Orleans devasted by Hurricane Katrina to Ferguson, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the icons he interviewed in the US, South Africa, and the UK, Angela Davis, Desmond Tutu, all the way to Stormzy.
This is a must-read, signed by a brilliant journalist and author, whose recent contribution for Double Down News (you can see the video below) highlights how much the conversation is poor around race, class, and identity in the Global North’s media.
A link between the two books can be found around how the personal is also political. Lekas Miller is a brilliant colleague and author and her book analyses an element that is often forgotten in the discussion around borders and migration politics: love. This is based on her own experience, as she met her own husband, Syrian journalist Salem Rizk in Istanbul, as they were both reporting on the Syrian civil war. Lekas Miller, who has Lebanese roots through her mother, navigates in the book her own experience and her husband’s asylum claims, through Trump’s ban and beyond.
Lekas Miller also shows how the world’s borders were different and there was major freedom of movement paradoxically in the past. The book also analyses how people, not numbers on a spreadsheet, not labels, fall into the cracks of an unjustly divided world, where the place where you are born and the passport you have matters more than anything else.
Then Lekas Miller goes beyond her own story, in a journey from Italy to the US and the Middle East, and more, making a powerful case for a world without borders. In the video below, Lekas Miller dissects the power of passports and their history. So, my advice is: go and get your copies of Younge and Lekas Miller’s books, ideally from an independent bookshop or from Bookshop.org.