The UK once welcomed refugees - now we detain them indefinitely. It must end

In the last few months I’ve found myself returning, again and again, to a phrase that I associate with the project Refugee Tales and its campaign to end the indefinite detention of asylum seekers: counting up. When prisoners are given a jail sentence, they can count down to their release date; when refugees are placed in detention they can only count up from the date they were incarcerated, without knowing how high the number will go. In the last few months, we’ve all been counting up. Counting up from the last time we saw people we love, counting up from the last time we were at liberty to traverse the cities and towns in which we live, counting up from the last time we planned for an imaginable future; and, for some people, those who are most vulnerable, still counting up, from the last time they left the confines of their homes.

But when I say I’ve found myself returning again and again to that phrase, I don’t mean to imply that the months in lockdown led me to think that I know what it feels like to be in detention. Quite the contrary. While I was counting up I was also reading and writing and going on walks and able to see people I love, even if that was via a screen. I knew that the lockdown wouldn’t go on forever and, crucially, I knew the lockdown hadn’t been implemented with the express purpose of making people like me suffer. So when I considered those in detention centres I thought how lucky I was; I thought of how many people had been living in a counting up world well before the pandemic, and how they would continue to live in that world, regardless of treatments and vaccines.

In the years since I first came to be involved with Refugee Tales I’ve been talking and thinking about the “indefinite” part of “indefinite detention”. The UK is the only country in Europe that doesn’t have a time limit on detention – that must change, and this is where many of us have focused our attention. But in my privileged counting-up world I was already beginning to understand something that came to the fore when the co-founders of Refugee Tales decided on the theme for 2020: “Calling for a future without detention.” The real problem wasn’t the “indefinite”; it was the “detention” itself. “Indefinite leave to remain” really should be the only use of “indefinite” in our immigration system.

While I was thinking all this, the Black Lives Matter movement gained force and strength. It brought together so many strands of news: the third anniversary of Grenfell; the continuing scandal of the Windrush generation and the government’s failure to right the injustices unearthed there; the vastly disproportionate number of ethnic minorities dying of Covid-19. The tales of refugees detained for an undefined period slots easily in right beside all those other stories. These are all stories of a society with a profound faultline running through it, a faultline of race.

Not all detainees are from minority ethnic backgrounds – but the vast majority are, and the manner in which detainees are treated cannot be separated from other stories of institutional racism. According to Bella Sankey, director of the pressure group Detention Action: “In 2020 black people are detained in wildly disproportionate numbers and for longer periods than white people.”

Why detain refugees? The government claims it is merely a bureaucratic step that precedes deportation – but this claim is given the lie in a recent report by the National Audit Office that showed that in 2019, 62% of detainees were released back into the community. So why do it? All questions of humanity aside, why the vast expense of detention centres? According to the Migration Observatory the annual cost of detention for the year ending March 2019 was £89m, but through the years of austerity you never heard the government talk of cutting those costs. Cut legal aid, yes, but don’t cut the cost of detention centres that fail to serve their alleged purpose, and where so many are wrongfully held. That costs the government, too. For the year ending March 2019 there were 312 proven cases of wrongful detention, for which the government paid £8.2m in compensation.

Amelia Gentleman writing in the Guardian about the Windrush scandal spoke of “the exhausting humiliations of a system that is designed to grind people into submission”. That humiliation and grinding down is the primary purpose of a system of detention that is costly, inefficient and unjust. It is part of Theresa May’s hostile environment, it exists to send a message: if you’re seeking to escape an unbearable life, don’t come here; we’ll treat you terribly. If you are already here, leave.

I first became involved with Refugee Tales some years ago when I was asked to write a story based on my meeting with a former detainee. The man I met asked that I did not reveal the name of the country where he had been tortured and from which he had fled. He didn’t want anyone from that country reading my piece and tracking him down. But he did want me to use his first name – it was his story, he wanted to have his name in it. At the last minute he changed his mind, and asked me to use a pseudonym. This wasn’t because he was worried about the country he’d fled; it was because he did not want to be identified by someone from the UK government.

This was a man who had gone through a period of detention before his asylum claim was accepted, on appeal. He was legally entitled to be in Britain. But he had to reapply every few years to maintain his legal status, and his experiences had taught him that an act as straightforward as recounting his experiences – a story told in a markedly factual way without analysis or commentary – could result in his next application being turned down. This is the face the UK government shows to those who come here looking for refuge. It is not accidental that this man ended up feeling this way; the hostile environment, of which detention centres are a part, are designed to give rise to such feelings. And let’s be clear, May might, as home secretary, have given a name to the hostile environment, but she was only naming something that had been taking shape for a very long time and which wasn’t in any way dismantled when her successor Sajid Javid stopped the official use of the phrase.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Once, this country had welcome centres for refugees. Morton Hall in Lincolnshire was one such centre, set up for refugees arriving from Vietnam to help them make the transition to life in the UK. Morton Hall is now an immigration removal centre, and last year the government was ordered to pay £82,000 to a Vietnamese teenager, a victim of modern slavery, who was illegally held at Morton Hall, and sexually assaulted during his time there. Morton Hall encapsulates the trajectory of the story of how Britain treats its refugees – from welcome centres to places of violence and illegal detention.

The way forward is clear: the government must shut down the detention centres, and in their place give us, once more, ways to welcome those who see Britain as a place where they can lead a better life. It sounds like a dream, I know, but in truth the reversal of that narrative – the shift from welcome to detention – has been a nightmare that we’ve lived with too long. It is time to wake up, and in our wakened state dream an even bolder dream than the one of welcome centres in the far-from-unproblematic 1970s. It is time to dream of justice and humanity.