The views expressed by the columnist do not represent the views held by The Llanelli Standard.
I would like to state before I continue with this article that I feel very sorry for the Ukrainians suffering in their war fighting against Russia. It is very hard for them, I know, and we should give support as we should to all immigrants.
However, I watch all the support for them and I feel very shocked by the double standards that this government and our own people are showing.
A Tory MP, during a TV interview, said that we should help them as they are like us (understood “white” ) and the interviewer did not challenge him on this. Before Brexit, Britain was seen as a tolerant country and I was proud of that. There has always been racism in this country but before Brexit people had a sense of shame to express their racist feelings in public. Now people feel that they have permission to say what they think of people of colour with no shame. The attitude this government has towards black immigrants or the boat people is “send them back”
Other wars have been taking place, meanwhile, such as in the Yemen and Syria. These may look like civil wars but in the Yemen, it is Saudi Arabia versus Iran with the UK selling arms and making a profit over the bodies of dead children. The civil war in Syria is between Russia and Iran with the Syrian government versus Turkey and the Western Powers. The UK has been carrying out direct military action in Syria and Iraq.
Suddenly, because everybody hates Putin, this government is offering £350 a week to people to take in Ukrainian refugees.
With the Yemen and Syria, the main trouble is Saudi Arabia but because they have the oil, we are going cap in hand to gain their support.
Nazanin Zagari-Ratcliffe has only been released because we need Iran’s oil now so we paid the money we owe Iran. The horrible side of this is that she has been abused because she is not grateful for being released. She lost 6 years of her life because this government refused to act honourably.
In the Yemen, 10,200 children have been killed or wounded. There have been 377,000 deaths and 60% of these are due to hunger, lack of healthcare and unsafe water.
In Syria, there have been 610,000 killed which is 2% of the population. 25,286 children and 15,237 women have been killed.
The thing that is of concern is that so many people are rallying around the Ukrainians because they are white but very little help and support is given to the Syrians, the Yemenis and the asylum seekers at Calais. For the asylum seekers they are now going to be sent off to Rwanda, so black people can be sent off to a black country where in fact there is extreme poverty and human trafficking is rife. But we can forget about them now. After all, they are nothing to do with us anymore. They are out of our hands.
Oxfam has come out to show their continuing support for the people of Yemen. They have written an email entitled:
FROM YEMEN TO UKRAINE WITH LOVE
Underneath they have written:
“Make sure the people of Yemen are seen and heard “,“TAKE ACTION FOR YEMEN”.
The head of the World Health Organisation has criticised the attitude of the world’s focus on the war in Ukraine. He questioned whether “ the world gives equal attention to black and white lives given that emergencies in Ethiopia, Yemen, Afghanistan and Syria had garnered only a fraction of the concern for Ukraine”
The UK government continues to sell arms to Saudi Arabia and these are used in the war against the people of Yemen. The UK government only thinks about profit when people are suffering in horrendous situations.
It is so easy to put up yellow and blue balloons as we have to support the white Ukrainians, and, of course, we should, but we have done so little for the people of colour who are suffering in a worse way in the war in the Yemen. This war has been going on for 7 years.
However, even the Ukrainians can suffer as refugees here. The UN refugee agency has asked the UK government to stop single British men from being matched with lone Ukrainian women seeking refuge from the war, following claims that British predatory men are using the UK’s Homes for Ukraine scheme to target the vulnerable. We look around our society today and it is no longer the tolerant Britain that we used to know. It is a great shame.
Let us now look closer to home. Let us look at the Windrush scandal. The Windrush ship, on the 21st June 1948, brought over 492 Caribbean migrants, many of them veterans of the Second World War. They were invited here by the UK government to work here, many of them in the NHS. In fact, without people coming to Britain, the NHS would have been in trouble earlier. In 2018, many of these people were wrongly detained, denied legal rights, threatened with deportation and in at least 83 cases wrongly deported from the UK by the Home Office.
In 2016, the UK government erroneously classified thousands of legal residents, many of whom arrived here as children in the 50s and 60s, as immigrants, living in the UK illegally.
An example of this was Anthony Bryan who was wrongly held for 5 weeks in immigration removal centres, which are like prisons and was booked in 2017 on a flight to Jamaica, the country he left in 1965 when he was 8 years old and had never seen again. The Home Office has since agreed that he was in the UK legally but they have still not sorted out his compensation.
Whenever it comes to people of colour, there is no longer the keenness to help and a fight for their rights.
I am deeply sorry for you, Ukraine, for all the horror that you are seeing every day. However,there are people of colour going through equal pain and suffering and very little support is coming through.
The UK government, in fact, is making it worse by selling arms and grovelling to Saudi Arabia. We are profiting from these children dying and suffering in the Yemen and Syria.
We have to face up to the racism in this country linked to immigration. I have already signed a petition against this disgusting plan of using Rwanda as an immigration site.
We have to stand up and be counted and see justice in our immigration system.
