Newham and Calais have both reinvented themselves and both host asylum seeking communities, whose only crime was to be born in the wrong place at the wrong time.

By Simon Shaw

Two people stand at a vigil — Simon Shaw reads Warsan Shire’s “Home”at a vigil to remember refugees who died whilst trying to cross the Channel in August. Photo: Care4Calais.

Newham and Calais have things in common. Both have had to reinvent themselves as the industries that created them have disappeared. The docks here and the lace trade there.

They are now both hosts to asylum seeking communities. In Newham in hotels and in Calais tent communities. None of them want to be here or there, like all of us they want to be at home, but war (Syria and Sudan), persecution (Iran) and a boiling planet (everywhere) have forced them to move.

In mid-August I read parts of the poem ‘Home’ by a young Somali-British poet Warsan Shire to about 250 people at a vigil in Calais to remember the latest deaths in the Channel, this time of eight Afghans:

‘You have to understand that no one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land’.

Many journalists covered this event, but none of them got the back story, that just prior to these deaths, an evacuation by the French paramilitary police, the CRS, had taken place in Dunkirk.

Three hundred tents were destroyed. This was possibly behind a hasty decision to take to small boats that led to tragedy.

Care4Calais made an emergency decision to replace the tents of those whose canvas homes and possessions had been taken from them. Their only crime was to be born in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The murder of these people – for this is in reality what it was – was engineered by the European and British governments. It took place during what Prime Minister Sunak called ‘Small Boats Week’.

I would argue that the problem is really the Big Boats and what they represent – the privilege of those who own super yachts, and the private planes which cross international frontiers with impunity. Please continue to support Care4Calais.

As Warsan Shire says ‘No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark’.

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