Nightingale centres can help fix broken asylum system - Alex Cole-Hamilton
In 1999, Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel delivered a speech about the perils of indifference. “It is so much easier” he warned, “to look away from victims.” It is, he said, “awkward, troublesome to be involved in another person’s pain and despair”. But “indifference is not a response”.
I often reflect on those words when I think about what’s happening in the Channel. Since 2021, more than 100 human lives have been lost in those terrifying crossings. That number includes children. They have become the most graphic and undeniable illustrations of our broken asylum system.
And as well as the crossings, I see the millions of pounds being spent on asylum hotels. I see the people kicking their heels, in town centres with nothing much to do and nowhere to go, in fear of violence, in destitution- that’s what living off £7 a day means.
Everyone is being failed by this broken system. To do nothing is not a response. But all too often, the “solutions” being proposed are anything but solutions.
Under Conservative schemes like Rwanda, four people were deported at a cost of £700 million. It was the Conservatives that opened asylum hotels in the first place and the people protesting outside them are doing so because of those failed schemes.
Labour’s ID cards will only add to our tax bills and bureaucracy, while doing next to nothing to tackle channel crossings.
Meanwhile, Nigel Farage wants to send men, women and children back to Afghanistan perhaps to be murdered - paying the Taliban to do it.
Too many parties have ceased to look at asylum policy logically and reasonably. An understaffed NHS? Most will say “staff it”. An underperforming education system? Most will say “make it perform”.
And yet, when it comes to immigration, this is all we hear: “waste millions of pounds”, “sidestep the issue” and “just send people back to their deaths”.
We should be applying our minds- not losing them - to an issue as important as this. That’s why Liberal Democrats have a realistic plan to fix our broken asylum system for good.
Right now, 90,000 men, women and children are stuck in the UK’s asylum backlog. Some will have no right to be here and will be deported. Others will have legal claims to be here and want nothing more than to integrate into society, get jobs and contribute to the economy. We need to clear the backlog.
We want the UK Government to declare the asylum backlog a national emergency and invoke the Civil Contingencies Act to set up Nightingale processing centres - similar to the Nightingale hospitals we saw during the pandemic. By speeding up the processing of claims, those centres could clear the backlog within six months.
We would double the number of caseworkers dealing with claims. We would let asylum seekers work while they are awaiting a decision. This is the right thing to do for everyone: for asylum seekers on hold in hotels, for communities hosting hotels and for taxpayers.
No matter how awkward or troublesome, all of us as elected representatives have a duty not only to do something about the migrant crisis, but to be serious about how we propose to tackle it. Compassion, empathy and pragmatism are the pillars on which my party was built, and it is those same principles which can help us fix our broken system.