Hansard

Glasgow, Scotland’s greatest city, is a city built on immigrants. Many folk from Ireland, Italy, the Indian subcontinent, countries across Africa, the rest of Europe and everywhere in between chose to call Glasgow home and helped shape the city across many generations.

My constituency of Glasgow Cathcart is one of the most diverse, multifaith and multi-ethnic parts of Scotland and it is a better place for that. We see that through the setting up of a range of networks that bring people together, such as the Greater Pollok Integration Network, which is based in my constituency and which helps ensure that asylum seekers are housed adequately, represented properly and able to feed and clothe their families and defend their inalienable human rights, as well as becoming an important part of the local community.

That is highlighted by the many voices who shared my dismay at the Home Office rhetoric in its go home campaigns, including the poster campaigns that were mentioned earlier, which were piloted in UKBA centres in Glasgow and London. As Sandra White said, using such phrases as

“Is life here hard? Going home is simple”

and

“This plane can take you home. We can book the tickets”

is not the action of a humane organisation.

A central truth seems to have been forgotten by the Home Office throughout those campaigns: for many people who have to visit UKBA centres regularly, going home is simply not an option, regardless of how hard life might be for them here. That lack of thought or care about the wellbeing of people who have lost everything and had to seek refuge in a safer place is, in my view, the worst part of the campaigns. I do not think that the impact of the word “home” on people who equate home with unimaginable pain and suffering was ever a concern for the Home Office, which appears to know the cost of everything and the value of nothing. Thankfully, the weight of public opinion forced the Home Office into not extending the pilot, for which we should all be grateful.

Listening to the rhetoric from the Westminster parties, people might think that the system is creaking under the vast weight of asylum seekers. That is just not so. The UK receives 8.4 per cent of people who apply for asylum in the EU. Germany gets 23.2 per cent, which is the highest, followed by France, which gets 18.3 per cent. Sweden, which has the same population as Scotland, gets 13.1 per cent, followed by Belgium, which has one sixth of the UK population and gets 8.5 per cent, followed by the UK.

Asylum seekers make up less than 0.5 per cent of the population of Glasgow, where the vast majority of asylum seekers in Scotland live. If all the refugees and asylum seekers in Scotland gathered at Hampden park stadium in my constituency, it would be less than 40 per cent full.

One of the few motions that the SNP group and the Labour group on Glasgow City Council have ever agreed on was the one put forward by my predecessor as group leader and councillor for Langside, Councillor Susan Aitken, which condemned the forced destitution of asylum seekers in Glasgow through changes to the provision of housing, which Bob Doris mentioned. The motion noted the restrictions that had been placed on local authorities, hampering their ability to provide help and assistance to failed asylum seekers, and it called on the UKBA to change its policy to allow Glasgow to assist refugees in danger of destitution. To date, that cross-party call has not been heeded.

That perfectly encapsulates all that is wrong with the UKBA and our asylum system. Even when the UKBA is given the opportunity to make life better for people and when local authorities want the power and responsibility to help, it refuses to delegate that power. The UK system would rather keep asylum seekers and refugees in a state of destitution than give the power to those who would use it to help, because that would not fit into the narrative that it is creating, whereby we need to be strong on asylum and immigration, whatever the human cost.

I suspect that I speak for the majority of people in Scotland when I say that I do not want to encourage people to go home without any thought for the consequences. I do not want any truck with such a xenophobic, regressive campaign. I want an asylum system that is fair, just and humane and which takes each case on its merits. I want a system that works for people and which says, “For as long as you are here, we will treat you with respect and dignity.” Given the record and rhetoric of both Labour and coalition Governments over the past few generations, that is not going to happen under a Westminster Government.

When the people of Scotland vote yes in three months, we can work to ensure that the Scottish asylum agency that we will create to oversee asylum applications will be robust, fair and socially responsible and will clearly adhere to human rights, equality principles and the rule of law.

I greatly look forward to the day when our hopes for a Scottish asylum system that is fit for Scotland’s needs and the needs of those who need our support come to fruition.