Edges Magazine Issue 37 - The Death of the Innocent

EDGES MAGAZINE Issue 37

April 2004

The Death of the Innocent
Sarah Schaefer of the ‘Tribune’ - from her article: Subterranean Jungle

TWO snapshots from contemporary British life: a nine-year-old boy, Callum Oakford, is knocked down and killed by a car driven by an Algerian refugee whose application for asylum was rejected more than a year before. The vehicle is unlicensed and uninsured. The Algerian flees the scene. The tabloids have a field day. In Morecambe Bay, meanwhile, 19 Chinese workers are stranded and drowned as they forage for cockles off the Lancashire coast. It emerges that the victims were illegal immigrants working 9-hour shifts for £1 a day. They lived in conditions of unspeakable squalor, terrorised by gang leaders and fearful of detection by the police. Their lives and deaths were those of slaves.

The death of Callum Oakford was an appalling tragedy and the behaviour of the culprit unforgivable. But the way in which this loss of life has been exploited to score cheap points about the failure of the asylum system is deeply distasteful. There are thousands of unlicensed vehicles on the roads, thousands of motorists who drive unsafely and thousands of dreadful accidents as a consequence. To suggest that this one was intrinsically linked to flaws in our asylum policy strikes me as shabby reasoning and disrespectful to this young boy’s memory.

A dangerous caricature of the average asylum seeker is seeping into the national consciousness: a swarthy scrounger, prone to criminality, leeching off the state and even a danger to children. This nasty stereotyping is the early 21st century equivalent of Victorian anti- Semitism or the Powellite view of Afro-Caribbean immigration after the Second World War. We are encouraged in ways subtle and not so subtle to equate the asylum system with fraudulence, crime and social instability. Was it not David Blunkett – himself a member of a minority – who said that schools could be "swamped" by the children of refugees? Was it not Number 10 Downing Street which floated the idea of patrol boats intercepting vessels suspected of carrying illegal immigrants – thus militarising asylum policy? So great is the hysteria about refugees that MPs whose constituencies house no asylum seekers whatsoever often report the issue as the number one concern of voters at their surgeries.

A rather different image of the average illegal immigrant has emerged from the Morecambe Bay tragedy. It is one of dreadful exploitation, in which people endure unbelievable hardship and spend their life savings in order to come to Britain – only to find themselves treated like coolies.

The 17 men and 2 women who died were, it is true, breaking the law by their mere presence in this country. But it is hard to see them as meaningfully guilty of anything. Quite the contrary: they were treated as human flotsam and jetsam long before they were swept away by the sea. They had been stripped of all dignity and basic human rights by the very nature of their position.

The next time you read a headline claiming that asylum seekers are defrauding the taxpayer of this benefit, or jumping that National Health Service queue, or "ruining" this or that school, remember the lives and deaths of these 19 people. They lived with more than 20 other Chinese men and women in a mid-terrace house, crammed with dirty mattresses, with excrement on the stairs and the barest amenities. The Snakehead gang which employed them – if that is the word – ensured that they dared not speak to the local authorities or the press. And yet it is hard to think of a group more vulnerable or entitled to basic Government welfare and deliverance from something approaching a living hell.

There is a subterranean Britain which most of us are fortunate never to see – a world brilliantly portrayed in Stephen Frears’ film Dirty Pretty Things, with its dark vision of the lives of cleaners, prostitutes and minicab drivers living illegally in London. That world is populated by those who come here in search of a better life and find only the manacles of the sweatshops and semi-slave labour.

They are portrayed in the tabloid press as villains sticking their hands in our pockets. In fact, most of them are clinging on by their fingertips to existence. It suits politicians of all parties to "take a stand" against such people, to promise "crackdowns", and to swear never to let Britain be a "soft touch". One expects the Tories to play this card. But Labour has disgraced itself in office by following suit and even trumping the Conservatives with a series of "eye-catching initiatives" designed to grab headlines rather than solve problems.

Every time an asylum seeker is involved in a crime we will see it splashed across our front pages. The Morecambe Bay deaths have provided a grim glimpse of a different world: a world of exploitation and suffering which has no place in a modern society. I would like to think that this is the sort of problem that would exercise Tony Blair. However, I have a horrible feeling that I will be disappointed.