“Well,” I said in surprise this morning when I read this story (see link below). “Good for Caroline Noakes!” I said. She is right to say that Home Office policy is intended to provide asylum seekers with accommodation that makes the country appear “as difficult and inhospitable as possible”. She is right to say the Home Office should provide better accommodation instead of what its victims tell us they are experiencing: “cold and filthy conditions”, with uneatable food and no drinking water, conditions which, they add, give them flashbacks of the cruel treatment and torture many of them fled from in their home countries. So of course she’s right: credit where credit is due.

But it’s surprising nevertheless. Noakes was immigration minister in Theresa May’s government. During that time, the Home Office cancelled my friend Zana’s UK passport with no justification at all – and did the same to several thousand other British citizens of Kurdish-Iraqi origin. Noakes didn’t lift a finger to help. Zana never got his passport back. Nor, as far as I know, did any of the others.

It’s also a bit hard to take this complaint from her:

“I don’t think the Home Office is listening to me. I think they have become very blinkered.”

She herself became notorious for adopting her own version of just such a “blinkered” approach when she was the minister: asylum seekers, trying to find out what their status was and not getting any replies at all to their emails and letters, desperately tried to contact her on her Twitter account. What did she do? She blocked them. Out of sight, out of mind I suppose.

Still, as my title suggests, “There is joy in Heaven over one sinner that repents” (Luke’s Gospel, 15:7). And Noakes is not alone. Several Tory MPs have joined her. Perhaps for mixed reasons. They mostly represent constituencies with barracks, or old barracks, within their borders. Many of their constituents may be reacting according to old fears and prejudices. In the past, these buildings were, for some of them, a source of pride – after all, they housed Britain’s finest who were armed to the teeth with weapons to kill Britain’s enemies. Now they are being used to house asylum seekers who, they may think, probably shouldn’t be here at all but, since they are, should be grateful for any accommodation they can get. Instead, they protest outside about their poor conditions and wander round the village looking hungry and distraught. The government seems to be in line with this: The Independent on Saturday quoted a government equality impact assessment as saying: “Any provision of support over and beyond what is necessary to enable the individuals to meet their housing and subsistence needs [they have, of course, provided less than is necessary] could undermine public confidence in the asylum system …” Many constituents, however, will simply be worried that we are treating people in this way at all and some will remember how British troops helped to dismantle the Nazi concentration camps after the Second World War and wonder why we seem to be building … No, it’s not the same thing, but it’s an unnerving association.

Is Noakes a repentant sinner? Who can tell? I doubt it. The twists and turns of Tory politicians are often indecipherable by outsiders until well after they’ve happened. What we might hope for, or even demand, is that the Labour Party will campaign vociferously for an immediate end to the barracks accommodation and for the humane treatment of asylum seekers. Shadow immigration minister Holly Lynch said, after an outbreak of covid-19 in one barracks, that the claim in the equality impact assessment cited above was “reprehensible” and that it was an “affront to the values of the British people” to lock people into accommodation with no way to self-isolate, and called for residents to be moved into Covid-secure housing “as a matter of urgency”. Good. That needs to be turned into a campaign on the whole question of accommodation and provision for asylum seekers, involving local Labour Party constituencies and community groups of all kinds. Decent accommodation and support and the abolition of the barracks system ought then to become a promise in the next Labour manifesto. It should then become firm policy, if Labour wins the next general election.

I’m full of impossible dreams, me!

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/feb/02/former-immigration-minister-criticises-use-of-barracks-to-house-asylum-seekers?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other