Northeye: Back to Lock and Key
HUGH SULLIVAN
As anticipated in HIP 232 (Changing of the Guard?), the Home Office are now proposing to use the former prison site at Northeye, Bexhill for detention of people arriving illegally in the UK under the recently enacted Illegal Migration Act.
That’s at least according to Government Minister and MP for Battle and Bexhill, Huw Merriman, who issued a statement last Thursday that “following discussions I have held with my colleagues across Government over the last few months, it is now proposed that the centre, if it proceeds, will only hold those who have arrived illegally in the UK and are awaiting removal from the country. This means the centre will be a close, detained and secure site and that those staying will not be expected to remain longer than 45 days.”
It is not clear what this stated maximum period could be based upon. Mr Merriman must be well aware that the Home Office’s record of arranging deportations over recent years has never remotely matched its rhetoric, and labelling migrants as “illegal” will hardly change that. Moreover, the MP acknowledges that the existing buildings at Northeye “will require total demolition and rebuild” before they can be reused as intended.
In this, Mr Merriman sees an opportunity for local enterprise. “I will work with our local business community and JobCentrePlus to ensure local businesses and residents benefit from this work,” he said. He promised to host a meeting in Bexhill “in the coming weeks…in order to explain what this means for the town”.
He also added that he would in due course “represent residents of the centre to ensure welfare and care requirements are met”.
SUTR OPPOSITION
However, the Home Office policy change which Mr Merriman reported as positive has outraged local pro-refugee campaigners. Daniel Rushby, of Bexhill Stand Up To Racism (SUTR), said: “This is terrible news. Northeye will become a centre for the mass deportation of asylum seekers and migrants. Since the initial announcement in April we have been campaigning in defence of refugees, and we know that the people of Bexhill are compassionate and caring. People seeking asylum are not criminals and should be welcomed into our community, just like Ukrainian refugees. The government should demolish Northeye and build affordable houses, not a prison camp, bringing jobs to Bexhill without relying on cruelty to refugees. SUTR opposes the Northeye detention centre, and we will organise to prevent deportations to Rwanda or anywhere else.”
Simon Hester, chair of Hastings and District Trades Union Council, said: “Tory politicians are desperately trying to save their careers by scapegoating refugees and stirring up racism. The cost-of-living crisis faced by millions of workers is not caused by people seeking asylum but by the government’s own policies. The NHS and schools are collapsing because of years of cuts and privatisation. Migrant workers have been central to all that is best in Britain. Gary Lineker was right. The creation of a new detention camp at Northeye has echoes of the 1930s. The trade union movement in Rother and Hastings will stand with refugees and migrants and oppose Tory racism.”
The quite separate ‘No to Northeye’ campaign group are also unimpressed, albeit for rather different reasons. Their co-founder, Bexhill town councillor Nigel Jacklin, said on Monday: “When I last checked, the Home Office fact sheet had not been updated and said people would be free to come and go; this was what the Home Office said in Scampton [another site previously proposed for mass accommodation of asylum seekers] when we were there last Thursday.
“Whilst this use is less bad than the original proposals (to use the site as an open accommodation centre) we will continue to oppose it.
“LACK OF TRUST”
“Having visited and spoken to fellow campaign groups in Wethersfield and Scampton, it is clear that local people lack confidence in the Home Office’s ability to plan anything, communicate with people or take local residents’ concerns into account. The use of emergency legislation to ride roughshod over local planning and consultation procedures is wrong, and is of deep concern to fellow local councillors in the Independent Network to which I belong.”
Mr Jacklin said that his group do welcome “any measures that will stop illegal arrivals” and that “bringing arrivals by boat to an end is what virtually everyone wants”, so as to eliminate the need for large-scale accommodation centres. But he was on that day handing in to Rother District Council the group’s petition (with over 1,500 signatories from Rother and 500 others from Hastings, St Leonards and Eastbourne) asking them to “oppose asylum seeker centre proposals”.
“We collected the last 200 signatures yesterday,” he said. “Opposition remained strong, as did a lack of trust in the various authorities.”
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