Passion, bureaucratic violence, and the language of asylum
Early one November morning in 1983, 75-year-old Hilda Carr, described by onlookers as ‘a very typical straight-forward Lancashire woman’ with no known political affiliations, marched into her regular parish church in Ashton-under-Lyne armed with her kitchen knife, especially sanitised for the purpose. The church was hosting a ‘sanctuary fast’ for one Vinod Chauhan in public appeal of his imminent deportation to India. Without warning, Ms Carr unveiled her knife and used it to prick Mr Chauhan’s thumb and her own. Collecting the blood on a blotter, she raised it before the crowd and exalted: ‘Blood from Vinod Chauhan and blood from a white woman member of Welbeck Street Baptist church – which is which?’ She intended to send the blotter to the Home Office in protest, as testimony to the common humanity of Britons and immigrants, and as an embodiment of the passion she felt over the justness of the cause. Ultimately, however, it came to rest as a rather macabre archival relic, one which has come to symbolise the conflicts over asylum in the UK in the 1980s.
At the start of the decade, the UK was receiving around 4,000-5,000 asylum seekers per year. By the end of the decade, the numbers were over 10,000. The British government clearly regarded this rise in applications as a problem and responded by enacting several important changes in UK policy, particularly aimed at obstructing access to those in unsettled former commonwealth countries. The 1981 British Nationality Act abolished the category of citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies, and introduced a definition of citizenship exclusively for the United Kingdom. This effectively circumvented the rights of many black commonwealth citizens to enter Britain, constructing the question of nationality along racial lines. From 1985 onwards, successive home secretaries introduced visa requirements for countries where a rise in asylum applications was observed. In 1987, the Carriers Liability Act introduced punishments for carriers, international airlines and shipping companies that transported people to the UK without valid documentation.
In the opinion of Home Secretary Douglas Hurd, ‘the number of people seeking asylum in the United Kingdom has tripled’ because many simply ‘leave their own homes in the Third World and seek greater security, comfort and prosperity elsewhere.' This fear of the ‘bogus refugee’ or ‘scrounging foreigner’ gained significant traction in the media and public discourse in the 1980s. Nonsense stories, evoking pictures of “floods” of “swarming” immigrants and refugees were regularly invented, repeated, and dramatized across the press circuit. Immigration, asylum and race coalesced into a ‘magnetic’ issue. Yet the data did not support such claims that the system was being widely abused. The majority of asylum applications came from Turkey, Sri Lanka, Somalia, and Uganda – all countries that were associated with poor human rights records and civil or political upheaval at the time.
In response to this endemic prejudice/anti-asylum rhetoric, allied anti-Thatcherite and leftist organisations organised resistance across a spectrum of anti-racist and anti-deportation campaigns, the most prominent of which were the sanctuary campaigns. Invoking the ancient tradition of sanctuary, these campaigns saw a growing number of those facing deportation evading the authorities by seeking shelter in places of worship. The Home Office then faced the dilemma of either publicly barging into a place of worship and dragging those in sanctuary out by force or bowing to pressure group tactics and red-facedly backtracking on their orders.
As sanctuary campaigns escalated across the nation, with varying degrees of success, the debates between campaigners and the government as to Britain's national role as a 'leading liberal democracy' grew more frequent and more polarised. While activists and supporters, such as Hilda Carr, deployed a language of moral urgency and passion, the discourse of civil servants was deliberately depersonalised, dry and soaked in the language of due process.
Religious leaders appealed to ministers on a mixture of humanitarian sand theological grounds. The British Council of Churches wrote to Douglas Hurd asking him to reconsider his position on specific anti-deportation cases in ‘the spirit of justice, and certainly of compassion’ felt ‘amongst informed members of the churches and of wider society.’ At times, those ‘informed members’ became increasingly impassioned by sanctuary campaigns. The case of Viraj Mendis garnered massive support across Manchester and further afield. His defence campaign organised the participation of thousands of people in rallies and marches, petitions, and 24-hour vigils. From the balconies of the flats surrounding the sanctuary banners read: ‘Kick out the cockroaches, not Viraj Mendis’. Crowds chanted in chorus: ‘Viraj Mendis is our friend’. This support even manifested physically with supporters forming a human blockade when, after two years, dozens of police officers broke into the church at dawn, dragging Mendis out in his pyjamas, and bundled him into an armoured van straight to Pentonville prison.
In contrast, the Home Office responded to these challenges with professional platitudes and emotionless rationality, invoking the apparent support of Britain’s 'silent majority'. In a characteristic press statement following the final deportation of Mendis, Minister of State Timothy Renton asserted, ‘I am sure that the great majority of people in Britain, regardless of their ethnic origin, will see our action as being fair and reasonable’. In written responses, ministers assured campaigners that their claims were being ‘very carefully considered’ and pointed to the importance of adhering to due process. They claimed that Britain remained unwaveringly committed, as ‘one of the first signatories’, to the 1951 United Nation Convention on the Status of Refugees. This flat language served to hide not only the violence of action – the denial of individuals refugee status and enforced deportation – but also of intent – to reduce immigration generally and asylum applications specifically.
The illumination of sanctuary campaigns thus highlights the practices of subjectivity and unaccountability which work against those under threat of deportation, serving as a reminder of the ongoing importance of seeing through veils of democratic humanitarianism and facades of justice which so easily disguise the mistreatment of society’s most vulnerable. In light of the recent international outpourings of solidarity towards the Black Lives Matter Movement, continuous demonstrations of outrage against police brutality in America, or spreading ‘kill the bill’ protests in Britain, all of which have sparked polarising media reactions, it also perhaps warns us of on ongoing disjuncture between passion and bureaucracy which remain seemingly unreconcilable today. How do we protect our most precious rights while keep-calming-and-carrying-on throughout? Can we really afford to sit back and hope for the best in order to find out? If anything, much like the recent events in Glasgow, sanctuary campaigns teach us the power of public pressure when it achieves the moral high ground – the barometer for which we all play a role in setting. Yet simultaneously they highlight how exceptionally sustained and supported campaigns must be from those at all levels of society – vicars, students, politicians and elderly parishioners alike – in order to prevail.
Further reading:
Janet Batsleer, ‘The Viraj Mendis Defence Campaign: struggles and experiences of sanctuary’, Struggles Two, (1988), pp. 72-79
Tony Kushner, Remembering Refugees: Then and Now (Manchester, 2006)
Nancy Murray, ‘Anti-racists and other demons: the press and ideology in Thatcher’s Britain’, Race & Class, XXVII (1986)
Timothy Renton, ‘Refugees: The Responsibility of the UK Government’ in Vaughan Robinson, The International Refugee Crisis: British and Canadian Responses, (MacMillan, Basingstoke, 1993), pp. 26-35
Dallal Stevens, UK Asylum Law and Policy, (London, Sweet & Maxwell, 2004)
Stuart Turner, ‘Refugee blues: a UK and European perspective’, European Journal of Psychotraumatology , Vol.6, Iss. 1., (2015)
The header image shows a large piece of paper bearing the words ‘‘Blood from Vinod Chauhan and blood from a white woman member of Welbeck Street Baptist church – which is which?’ Not shown, but sellotaped to the original below this message, are a piece of blotting paper bearing two splotches of dried blood and a passport photograph of Mr Chauhan. Photo taken by the author at Tameside Local Studies & Archives.
