It is the May Day bank holiday. It is officially summer. It was also, of course, the International Workers’ Day. You can dance round the maypole raise the red flag, or indeed both if that is your bent. In one of many highly ineffective and somewhat ludicrous actions, I once danced around a maypole outside of GAP. We were apparently highlighting their exploitation of garment workers. Ah youth… Confusingly though this is our April newsletter. It will though mainly contain use of upcoming events. Perhaps it should be the May newsletter. Time is an illusion (and lunchtime doubly so).
Events
Our friends at the Jollof Café have a dinner and talk this coming Friday. The theme is being anti-racist and taking action. There will be speakers from the Jollof Café and the Anti-Racist Movement. There will be music from Radio Calais. It is not one to be missed. Doors at 18:00 at Dorset Gardens Methodist Church on Friday, 8 May (sorry Sarah, I had feedback that ordinals were old-fashioned. I want to be modern and trendy).
You can hear me in conversation with our very own Luqma Onikosi, Cindy Hawkins Rada, Cath Senker and Zoë Svendsen in café conversation. It is a free event as part of Brighton Festival. It is on 10 May between 15:00 and 16:30. It is at the Avenue Café in Kemptown. It should be fascinating.
Loss
Speaking of the festival, the family of the late Richard Williams, founder of Sanctuary on Sea and an inspiration to many, including myself, are honouring his memory by turning his house into Richardstan. It is part of the Open House festival with art from local legend Phati Mnguni and a sound installation from Helen Dewhust. It is a space of sanctuary and, indeed, sanctification.
Sadly, Richard’s memory is not the only one that must be for a blessing. Our beloved member Ruth Keynes also died recently. She was one of the driving force behind our events group. Her death was very sudden and unexpected. It will be hard for us to replace her indefatigable work, but we will probably miss her warmth, kindness and generosity even more. One of the tremendous privileges of working with this organisation is that you get to meet people like Ruth. Sometimes people ask me, ‘how do you stay so positive?’ The answer is Ruth Keynes. To know and work with people who quietly get on with making the world a better, warmer and more welcoming place allows me to keep faith in the possibility of something better. We will all miss her. We send our love to her surviving partner, two children and grandchild.
The family, in a fitting tribute to Ruth, asked for donations to 2 organisations close to her heart, us and Standing Together. That raised over £1700 for us. We are going to use that as the Ruth Keynes Memorial Fund to provide emergency accommodation when people present to us in a crisis as homeless. We are going to keep it topped up with some of the proceeds from our events, particularly money raised through raffles as Ruth was such a legend when it came to sourcing prizes.
Help us grow
In terms of fundraising, there are two things that you can do to help grow this wonderful project. It is becoming harder and harder to reach people on social media. Twitter is a cesspool, Facebook is a mess and we have never understood Instagram. We are now on bluesky, if any of you would like to give us a follow on that. Really though we need to return to good old fashioned word of mouth. A lot of us now use WhatsApp to message our friends. Many of us are in WhatsApp groups, neighbourhood groups, book groups, running clubs that sort of thing. If the social mores of your group allows it, could you send a short message about us to that group? To make things easier, here is a model message that we prepared earlier:
Hi, though this is not exactly what this group is about I thought members might like to know about Thousand for £1000 (T4K). Every month I give a small amount to this small local charity. It was set up when a few Brightonians came across people living in the city with no safe or secure accommodation. Unable to return to their home country for fear of their life, they were in the process of recognition as refugees, but because of their status had very little to live on and were destitute. A few people have been able to host a homeless person or family, but the main focus is on the £1 a month (or more) that supporters give which is used to help with deposits and rent in advance, buying clothes, shoes, and train tickets for medical or Home Office appointments. T4K is always looking for new supporters who would be prepared to sacrifice the price of a cup of coffee each month to extend a welcoming hand to someone in need. You can find out more by asking me or at https://www.thousand4thousand.org.uk/
One of our supporters, Lina, is a keen sea swimmer. Along with five friends, the Surfrajets, she has decided to swim the channel this summer. She is deeply conscious of the ironies of choosing to swim the channel as a feat of endurance whilst others make similarly arduous crossing as their only route to safety. As Lina puts it:
I acknowledge my privilege to choose to swim a Channel relay swim, recognising that to 1000’s of people fleeing danger, the Channel is a dangerous & terrifying barrier and the border is hostile. There is no safe passage to safety and sanctuary. Every year people die, attempting to seek asylum in this country.
This is one of the reasons why she has chosen to use her attempt to raise money for us. This is the link sharing and donating, https://chuffed.org/fundraiser/35036.
Closing the gap
I will leave you with an experience that has stayed with me. One of the things that we try to do is accompany people to their tribunal hearings. As you can imagine appealing a refusal of an asylum claim is an incredibly stressful experience. At the beginning of the month, I went with a woman who I have been working with since 2021. Part of the delay has been that she had a baby who spent most of her first year in hospital. She has just given birth to a second child. The hearing was at Hatton Cross in the backend of Heathrow. It is not easy to get there and 9:00 in the morning, even if you’re not 8 1/2 months pregnant and even if you don’t have a small child in tow. We duly schelpped up there to discover that the hearing had been postponed. My guess is the barrister had told the solicitor to make an application for adjournment because of the child to be. I had been nagging the solicitor for some time to take her instructions with respect to this new baby. He had been stonewalling me. I had even double-checked with him that the hearing was going ahead. It is in fact the second time that he is sent this woman up to Heathrow for a hearing that had already been postponed. The appellant was not best pleased.
In an attempt to cheer her up, rather than going straight home, we did a bit of sightseeing in central London. We took a boat down the river and went to Parliament. Before that, we went to the Middle Temple for lunch in their garden. It is not far from Farringdon which is on the Elizabeth line. It is also tranquil. I also thought that was a sort of poetic justice in taking her to the gorgeous home of part of the legal profession, given that at least one lawyer had badly let her down. I should be clear, it was not her barrister. Even so, it made sense to me to insist that she had a right to the clubbable side of the law. It contrasts with the hearing centre at Heathrow. You are just by one of the runways in an office building in a car park next to a giant Tesco. You are searched and x-rayed on entry. You are reduced to a piece of paper stuck up on the listings noticeboard. The whole area around Heathrow always strikes me as dead.* There is grass and there are trees. The houses are neat. The warehouses are well maintained, but it is so functional as to be lacking in life. It could be anywhere. The Middle Temple is sedate, serene but makes sure that you are well aware of its glorious tradition. It is hard to imagine that the barristers taking lunch in the gardens spend a large part part of their working lives in the dreary, quotidian surroundings of places like Hatton Cross IAC.
The reason that we danced round the maypole outside of GAP all those years ago was, if I recall, to draw attention to the realities of the garment workers who make the clothes in sweatshops in Bangladesh and elsewhere. We were trying to highlight that the flipside of affordable fashion was misery and exploitation. We failed, but it is the same gap that exists between Hatton Cross and Temple. It is not that justice should be done exclusively in luxurious surroundings. Rather, asylum seekers should not have to rely on solicitors who cannot even extend the basic professional courtesy of apologising for failing to communicate that a hearing has been adjourned.
I am still trying to bridge that gap. I am still seeking to extend the repose of the Middle Temple garden to the garment workers in Bangladesh. Fortunately, Thousand 4 1000 is a far more effective method of building that bridge. Every donation, no matter how small, every gesture of kindness and solidarity, chips away at the barrier that keeps people like my friend marooned in transitory spaces like Heathrow. We will use the rubble to build the paths of the garden, until we really do have space for all.
* Jim had this to say about Hatton Cross in response to the email version:
I just thought I’d put in a very small word for Heathrow/Hatton Cross. A few months back, just before H’s hearing there, I did a recce of the area on my bike so that Sally, Annie and our friend Norrette (who lives up that way) would be able to find the place. After sketching out the route from Feltham station I did a bit of exploring, and discovered a lovely little linear park to the east of that area, behind all the industrial estates. It’s the course of the river Crane, which is joined by an old canal coming from the west. I don’t know if you’d be able to navigate the path, but there are definitely no stiles, and I was able to ride most of it; although it was so lovely – and such a contrast with the rest of the area – that I wanted to linger, so I dismounted and walked. And I saw a kingfisher – which Sally said confirms that, nature-wise, it is a healthy place. The river water is indeed clean and fast-flowing, and it seems to be respected by locals as there is no litter. There’s an info board somewhere in the park that tells you the history.
The main trouble is that you’d never guess that it’s there. It needs signposts and maybe a little info board near the airport/Home Office place so that anyone who happens to be visiting can find it. And maybe a big notice saying something like “Want to regain your sanity? Walk this way!”
