Trade unionists, politicians, and other activists told the crowd outside the UK Border Agency (UKBA) that such plans were a disgraceful attack on the most vulnerable. The demo culminated in the burning of potential eviction letters received by hundreds of families.
Many asylum-seeking families have been living in Glasgow city council accommodation for several years and have settled well in their local communities.
However, UKBA has recently cancelled its accommodation contract with the city council. Earlier this month UKBA wrote to all the 600 or so asylum-seeking families housed by the council on its behalf, telling them that as the local authority would no longer be providing accommodation, they might be required to move elsewhere.
They were told that it was hoped to give them between three and five days’ notice of any move that would take place before February 2nd, 2011.
Mario Conti, the Archbishop of Glasgow said: “The human cost of this decision is horrendous, and will involve children being uprooted from schools where they are flourishing, a return to the anguish of the unknown for people already bearing a heavy burden of fear and the wanton destruction of communities which have grown up in recent years as Glasgow has successfully welcomed asylum seekers and refugees.”
According to Positive Action in Housing (PAIH), Scotland’s ethnic minority housing agency, the council homes that the UKBA is trying to forcibly remove refugee families from were empty and unwanted before refugees lived in them. If the clearance plans go ahead, they believe the housing will lie empty. “Refugee families face being uprooted from the communities they worked so hard to become a part of, to satisfy the UK border Agency’s ‘integration test’,” PAIH’s director said in a recent letter to Scotland’s First Minister.
Some are concerned families face being transferred to poorly regulated and substandard accommodation run by unscrupulous private landlords whose sole motivation is profit.
As the campaign builds, a growing number of influential voices in Scotland - including that of the First Minister himself - are condemning the actions of the UKBA. Following the presentation of a 1,000-signature petition at the Scottish Parliament on November 18th by pupils from Lourdes secondary school, First Minister Alex Salmond issued a statement calling for the renegotiation of UKBA’s contract with the council, adding: “I condemn in the strongest possible terms the nature of the letter that the asylum seekers received. I have constantly made it clear that asylum seekers should be welcomed and treated with respect and dignity in Scotland.”
He said that he would make these views known to the Home secretary, and stated that “I must confess that I have never found the UK Border Agency to be among the foremost advocates of the respect agenda between Westminster and Scotland”.
Echoing such sentiments, Robina Qureshi, director of PAIH - prior to the burning of letters at the protest - had a message for the UKBA: “You may think you can get away with this in the ‘England region’, but not in the ‘Scotland region’.”
Linda Dempster, deputy director for the UKBA in Scotland and Northern Ireland, told the BBC: “We share the city council’s wish that these changes are handled sensitively taking full account of individual circumstances.
“We will continue to work closely with the council, who we met this week, to ensure the transition is handled as smoothly as possible and disruption is kept to a minimum.”
