What is in Kelvin's Head?

Pollokshields – These are our neighbours

14/05/2021

It was impossible not to be moved by people standing around an immigration enforcement van in Pollokshields yesterday chanting “These are our neighbours, let them go”. Many people today are proud of those in this city who stopped this enforcement action.

Every country needs to have an immigration system and every immigration system needs to be enforced in some way. Every such system needs to be fair and just. However the immigration system in this country has ceased to be fair and has ceased to be just. Any government that actively seeks to be hostile to those seeking asylum has already failed the test of being fair and just. The immigration system in this country has not only become hostile to refugees but the government has recently announced plans to make it even more hostile and to limit the possibility of appealing to the Supreme Court in asylum cases.

Every asylum seeker needs access to justice in order that the system itself can be seen to be fair.

Yesterday, the people of Pollokshields came out onto the streets because they believed that what was being done in their name was not fair. With an aggresively hostile system in place as a policy, it is impossible to be sure that any asylum decision is fair.

The police made a wise call yesterday not to try to clear the street and the two men detailed were set free into the community.

We need a fair asylum system. Without a fair asylum system, there will increasingly be successful protests by citizens who will prevent the authorities from being able to act.

If the government believes it can appeal to voters by making an already hostile asylum system even more hostile, the people in the streets of Pollokshields showed yesterday that at least in some places, that policy will fail.

asylum, refugees

10 responses to “The morning after the day before”

Neil Oliver

19/09/2014

Kelvin, I agree with much of what you’ve said here, particularly your paragraph on the merits of the Better Together campaign. I truly hope the energy in campaigning for a socially just Scotland and in the wider UK can continue.

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Rosemary Hannah

19/09/2014

The problem with more powers for local government is that it is the least trusted and most corrupt wing of government, even in many places where one instinctively feels it ought to be a voice and a power for change.

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Derek

19/09/2014

I hope you’re right but given the most recent WM polls from last week a likely outcome for Scotland is that there will be another Tory govt elected next year, and an EU referendum after that – who knows what will happen with UKIP. I wish there were signs for the reforms you mention but I can only sense self interested political party manouvering. I hope there’s a wider movement for local democracy and dispersed power that follows on from the yes campaign. I feel like yesterday was an opportunity missed but am still hopeful.

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Isobel

19/09/2014

Thankyou for this – today seems a little dreich.

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Christine McIntosh

19/09/2014

I shall continue to bang on about the immoral and absurd retention of nuclear weapons by what is going to continue as the UK – especially when the only place to keep them seems to be on my doorstep. There you are – moral high ground and nimbyism in one neat parcel.

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Fiona

19/09/2014

Absolutely Kelvin. I believe that the vast majority of the Scottish electorate agree on the things we want to change. We just have different ideas about how best these changes can be effected. I’m sad that people are still posting on social media that the “other” side are, to paraphrase, numpties.

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Jimmy

19/09/2014

The so called “middle class” turned their noses up at a possible egalitarian state.

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1. Christine McIntosh
  
  20/09/2014
  
  It was also, sadly, people of my generation who overwhelmingly voted to stay in the past.
  
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Kim

20/09/2014

Liked your post.Hope there is no Glasgie “kissin”this w/e.personally I’m glad it’s a No vote so the Queen won’t need Her passport to stay at Balmoral.

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Alan McManus

20/09/2014

Glaesga in Scots. Glasgie in Liverpool (I have no idea why). And it’s not our ” “kissin” ” you have to watch but our smiles. I liked what Kelvin said on Twitter about the need for a commitment for social justice not just reconciliation. otherwise it’s the tyranny of niceness and papering over the cracks. It was “truth and reconciliation” in SA and although our situation is in no way comparable, theirs can still inspire us.
I think Kelvin also put his finger on what’s been wrong with this referendum: odd bedfellows. We’ve had people voting one way out of international socialist solidarity; greed; fear; or not a little sectarianism (I witnessed this at a polling station outside Glasgow and I suspect it was a factor in S. Lanarkshire). we’ve had people voting the other out of think-global-act-local values; community values; Anglophobia; or nostalgia for The Corries (I really hope no-one was influenced by Mel Gibson but I suspect there were some).
Therefore, to be cheery about the turnout is valid but to be complacent that we all voted for social justice in our own wee ways, is not. The referendum didn’t make the choice clear. It was a leap of faith into an unspecified future of going it alone versus business as usual or perhaps unspecified changed with an unspecified timetable – the latter becoming (as YES voters predicted) more and more unspecified as the days go on.
Speaking as a YES voter, this is what helps:
1 young people got involved in politics
2 the majority of people I know, whatever they voted for, voted for noble reasons
This is what doesn’t help:
1 mixing up the Union of the Crowns with the Union of the Parliaments
2 using the USA and ‘secession’ as analogous to the UK
3 the retrospective admission by NO voters of the greed and fear of much of the NO THANKS campaign – admission before the vote may have stopped YES voters feeling so patronised
4 lack of admission by YES voters that Anglophobia was a factor for some voters in this referendum, and continues to be a reality in Scotland
5 political commentators using metaphors of torture for holding people accountable
So, to do my bit for truth and reconciliation, I admit that I was so busy being really angry at people dismissing my thoughtfully worded comments as Anglophobic, that I neglected to publicly take on board that this kind of prejudice is quite real in my native country and that it is especially incumbent upon us as Scots to stamp it out.
I’m sorry about that and I pledge to do better in future. Please don’t hold my feet to the fire. I’m vegetarian and my shoes will quite possibly melt.

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