There are definitely some signs of spring. I have even seen daffodils. This gives me enormous hope. It is not always easy to have hope. This is going to be a newsletter about hope.
Success
Here are some hopeful things that have happened in the last month. Both Refugee Valentine and Moving Lives were great successes. Quite apart from the money raised, about £400 and £1000 respectively, they provided a vision of what the world looks like when we care for each other. The money though is very useful. As well as the ongoing provision of homes and financial assistance to 6 people across five houses, your support kept at least one very vulnerable young man off the streets this month.
The big news is that you acquired a house for five months. It is going to be used to house two women seeking asylum. Although both of them could probably access asylum support accommodation, neither of them want to, in part because it would mean leaving Brighton and, in even larger part, because mainstream asylum support accommodation is so terrible. Shared houses are hard enough when you have money, you choose your housemates and your landlord is prepared to fix things. Asylum support accommodation is the opposite all of those things.
Can you help?
Nobody should be in asylum accommodation. It is punishment for claiming asylum. There are just over 100,000 people in such accommodation. The Home Office spends a staggering £4.53 billion on this inhuman system, They could give everybody £25,000 a year and more or less half the bill. They could cut it even further if they just let people work and claim benefits. It would also save them money on the legal aid bill, because some people would be able to afford their own lawyers. But even if you want to keep people out for as long as possible, we are proof that the Home Office are not getting value for money. You support someone in a decent home, with dignity for about £12,000/year.
Here is something that gives me hope. We really ought to be able to house more people. When we set up, we figured that we would aim for £1000 per month from a thousand people. Both of those assumptions were a bit naïve. Fortunately we raise about £4000 every month. The problem is that it comes from far less than a thousand people.
With the collapse of Twitter and the hugely right wing shift in the algorithms in all the major social media, it has become really hard to reach people. We need to get the word out, but we don’t know how. We need to find people who do. We need a dedicated team who know how to spread the word.
We have tried this before, and although people stepped forward, we have not even understood how to build a proper communications team. We are trying again. We are desperate for creative, kind, imaginative people who are able to take on the challenge of building a team that can communicate in an increasingly hostile media landscape. If that is you, please get in touch.
Memory, infrastructure and change
One of the reasons that is so hard to have hope is that it can look like we have lost. The long summer of migration is more than 10 years ago now. We are just one of the myriad of projects that mushroomed in that moment of rupture. People on the move had overturned the logic of Europe’s borders. It made a whole new approach to migration politics possible. Consciously or not, the projects sprung up in solidarity were done to make that rupture permanent. Not only did European states quickly regain control of the border, but the memory of that moment and its potential has been suppressed. The solidarity infrastructure still exists, but it is no longer part of the mainstream challenge to the politics of the border. Instead what we have is the government proposing to make settlement something that you earn after a baseline probationary period of 10 years. Meanwhile the seemingly most popular opposition party is proposing to remove settled status altogether, as well as declaring a state of emergency to carry out a policy of mass deportation that would be the envy of Donald Trump.
But just as the photo of Alan Kurdi did not change anybody’s mind, rather made a movement possible, the fact that we are marginalised does not mean that we have gone away. Artists, filmmakers, musicians and writers have all made the case for compassion and the right to move. Campaigners and communicators have been making the case for diversity. There may be less space in the mainstream for all of these things, but that just means that the margins are bigger. More importantly, the infrastructure that you created still exists. It still supports people to re-establish their lives here.
There will be another moment when possibilities open up. In 2015, we didn’t have this infrastructure. When that happens, we will be working from a firmer base. I don’t know if we will succeed. It does not seem impossible. Pedro Sanchez’s government in Spain have decided to regularise up to 500,000 people without status and to embrace the benefits of immigration, itself the fruit of an amazing campaign. It does not seem impossible that a political leader here might try to follow suit. Perhaps there will be an explosion of anger at the way successive governments have tried to rip our communities apart.
Things change rapidly, often for the worst, but all we can do is keep working, keep supporting each other and keep on building. It is what keeps people alive now and it is our only hope of ever changing the system that treats the majority of our lives as disposable. It gives me hope.
