Refugees coming to Europe, Britain or the USA don't have a hope in hell of mercy from Macron, Starmer or Biden.

Not so long ago, before my body stumbled into the unhealthy wilderness of cancer, I took the Dover ferry to Calais. It was 2019.

I was retracing the steps I took with my dad on his tour of refugee camps in Europe- that he made before he died in 2018.

Photo by Sam Mann on Unsplash

When you take a ferry from England to France and look out from the observation window onto the deep water around your vessel that is bitterly indifferent to your passage upon it- a sense of forlorn supremacy laps into your consciousness. Seeing it, you realise its utter desperation that drives refugees to come to Britain in rubber-overcrowded dinghies.

It’s too lonely out there, too dangerous, and the body of water too enormous for one to take this risk unless it is one's last hope to find sanctuary.

You won't take a perilous journey like this if you are safe and have a life worth living in the country of your birth. You would only wager your life and the lives of your children, your spouse, or anyone else you may love- if this is one of the last options left to stave off a miserable death from a bullet, torture, starvation or a life whittled away by eternal poverty.

When I went to Calais in February 2019, I visited a refugee held in an immigration detention centre awaiting deportation to Italy.

At the entrance to the immigration detention centre, located near a shopping mall on the outskirts of Calais, a guard checked my passport,

The guard let me pass through the gates, and inside, I was physically searched. Afterwards, I was ushered into the detention centre's basement- where a meeting room was located.

In there waited a 23-year-old man from a sub-Saharan country. He greeted me like an old friend even though we had never met. I handed over some cigarettes that a refugee organisation had purchased for him.

The young man then told me his story about how he was detained by French immigration authorities.

"I walked all the way from my prison in Africa to this prison in France." The previous year he journeyed from his home country to Libya because he was young, his life was shit, and his country’s govt corrupt.

In Libya, he was arrested for illegal entry because the EU pays a bounty to that country’s kleptocratic rulers for every refugee they catch and detain to prevent their arrival on European shores.

At a concentration camp in Libya, he was raped and beaten by his guards. The young man escaped his captors and found passage on a raft to Lampedusa.

In Italy, he learned that European hospitality for black refugees is racism and physical violence. “Dogs are treated better than refugees like me."

With other refugees from Africa- he upped sticks and walked to France as he hoped to get to England, where a family member of his lived legally.

Life had other plans for him because before he could make his journey to English shores on a raft, French police raided an encampment in the woods outside Dunkirk, where he and other refugees subsisted on the kindness of strangers.

Perhaps, the young man pissed off the police, or they needed to fulfil their quota of "illegals." But he was arrested on the spot and put before an immigration judge who ordered the man deported back to Italy, the first EU country he arrived at during his odyssey for refugee status.

After this young man finished his story, a guard- who stood watch outside our interview room told me our time was up. I wished the refugee luck, and we hugged.

I don't know what happened to him, but I suspect his ending wasn't happy.

In the five years since I met that young man, held in a French immigration detention centre, the EU has become more draconian and cruel towards refugees and migrants- as has Britain. It will get worse. It will not get better for a long while- if ever- because fascism is the dominant political ideology of the times we live in.

I am under no illusions a Starmer Labour Government will show the same level of mercy as the Tories have to refugees.

For those reasons, I will never endorse voting for Labour. I encourage anyone able to vote to find suitable alternative candidates to vote for.

As individuals, we must never surrender to the nihilism of neoliberalism that treats ordinary humans as disposable when they can no longer turn a profit for the wealthy.

The fate of refugees in 2024 is probably worse than it was for many refugees in the 1930s. Our 21st-century reality is to exist under total digital surveillance by the state or its corporate actors that are sometimes benign but other times malevolent.

For me, rent day approaches like the headlights from a truck with an unsteady load on its trailer. It leaves me stuck in the middle of the road, transfixed by it, or perhaps I am too tired to react this time and jump out of its way. Today is the last day before the 1st and I am still a bit short..

A yearly subscriptions will cover much of next month’s rent because all I need is 8 to make June’s payment. But with 3 days to go, it is getting tight.
Your subscriptions are so important to my personal survival because like so many others who struggle to keep afloat, my survival is a precarious daily undertaking. The fight to keep going was made worse- thanks to getting cancer along with lung disease and other co- morbidities which makes life more difficult to combat in these cost of living crisis times. So if you can join with a paid subscription which is just 3.50 a month or a yearly subscription or a gift subscription. I promise the content is good, relevant and thoughtful. But if you can’t it all good too because I appreciate we are in the same boat. Take Care, John