Man who reached UK in lorry in despair over lack of safe route for Afghan family
A refugee who reached the UK on the back of a lorry after fleeing Afghanistan has voiced his despair that there are no ways he can safely bring his family over.
Sabir Zazai told an audience at the Labour Party Conference that he is increasingly alarmed at the way asylum seekers are spoken about and hostile policies brought in by the Tories. Mr Zazai, chief executive of the Scottish Refugee Council, said: "If I came today on the back of a lorry I'd be threatened with Rwanda, I'd be housed on a barge, I'd be treated like a criminal.
"I wouldn't have the chance to rebuild my life in safety with dignity." Mr Zazai, who arrived in 1999, said he was "horrified" by Suella Braverman's call for UN protections for those fleeing persecution to be torn up. He said the Home Secretary instead needs to focus on fixing the asylum system, which has left tens of thousands of people living in limbo.
He said: "What she needs to focus on is the broken asylum system. What's happening is we've no safe alternative routes provided to those people who need our protection. We don't see people fleeing the dreadful situation in Ukraine arriving in small boats because an alternative route has been established."
And Mr Zazai said he is distraught that he has been unable to bring his father and brothers to safety in the UK following the fall of his homeland to the Taliban. He said: "I've got my own family stuck in Afghanistan, there's no safe way of bringing them to the UK. If my father came to Britain in a small boat he may end up in Rwanda.
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"There's no way to bring my own family to safety. When you arrive in the UK you end up in this sense of limbo."
The refugee rights campaigner pleaded with politicians to tone down the "toxic" language around people like him. He stated: "The conflict that I fled and that others are fleeing didn't start with bullets, they started with words. Words matter.
"We need to make sure that people are treated as citizens and not as strangers. When refugees prosper we all prosper."
Labour peer Lord Alf Dubs, who arrived in the UK as a child fleeing the Nazis in 1939, said: "In my experience human beings can put up with an awful lot when there's hope for them. Where there's no hope, it's hard for them to carry on."
Lord Alf Dubs said things would improve under Labour, but he would continue to speak up (Ian Vogler / Daily Mirror)He said he was confident there would be improvements under a Labour Government, but vowed he and like-minded campaigners would not settle for small change. He said: "I have a lot of respect for (Shadow Home Secretary) Yvette Cooper, the next Labour Government will be a lot better.
"But from our point of view, probably not good enough." Lord Dubs vowed to continue making his voice heard standing up for refugees. Voicing his alarm at rhetoric from the Government, he said: "When you get senior people in Government abusing refugees, criminalising them, saying they're invaders, it's much harder for local communities to go on being supportive."
The remarks come after a scathing report ruled Rishi Sunak has allowed the far-right to take root in the Conservative Party. The study by campaign group Hope Not Hate singled out comments by Home Secretary Suella Braverman, Tory deputy chairman Lee Anderson and London mayoral candidate Susan Hall as evidence that the Conservatives are lurching further to the right. The watchdog accused the Tories of mounting a "concerted and organised" attempt to "use far-right rhetoric and tactics to court votes".
Dr Joe Mulhall, director of research, told a fringe event at the Labour Party Conference: "The Conservative Party now appears to be increasingly willing to adopt far right rhetoric in the belief that it will be politically advantageous, and there's a block within the party that we can comfortably call indistinguishable from the European far-right."
In November last year Ms Braverman sparked an outcry when she referred to an "invasion" of migrants, and in the past fortnight launched a vicious tirade claiming multiculturalism had failed. Dr Mulhall said: "This is rhetoric that we'd see on a daily basis monitoring the far-right and small fringe organisations. Hearing it from the Home Secretary was originally shocking and now it feels normal in just a matter of months."
In its report into the "dangerous transition" of the Conservative Party, Hope Not Hate said: "There is now a conscious strategy to adopt radical right and conspiratorial language to generate fear and anger amongst sections of society in order to win electoral support." It branded Ms Braverman's Tory Party Conference speech - in which she claimed a "hurricane" of immigrants are on the way - "one of the most inflammatory speeches by a Tory MP since Enoch Powell's infamous 'Rivers of Blood' speech in 1968."
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It cited Mr Anderson's claim that migrants should "f*** off back to France" and Ms Hall's praise of an "Islamophobic rant" against London Mayor Sadiq Khan as examples of "dog whistles". It also said that the Rwanda deportation plan is "arguably more extreme than the immigration policy of the BNP in its heyday in the late 2000s".
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