Why we're ready to open our homes to refugees

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/05/why-were-ready-to-open-our-homes-to-refugees

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In the early hours of one morning on our summer holiday in west Wales, after reading yet another story on my phone about hundreds of migrants drowned at sea, I mentally juggle our sons out of their big attic bedroom and on to mattresses in my study. I’d have to shift my desk into the bedroom. It could work. It wouldn’t be great, but you know, I’m not talking about risking our lives to hide a Jewish family from the Nazis. Could we afford to double our food bill? My mind buzzes. Well, not really. But yes, of course we could.

Next day come reports of more hundreds drowned, children among them. My partner and I walk our two young sons to the beach. I never take my eyes off them. I know a freak wave could take them, tug them under. I’ve bought two expensive DayGlo orange life-jackets for this holiday, for when they go on the inflatable kayak. The boys shriek as they play in the sea. I can’t forget those other children. I don’t sleep well. I’m angry. Uncomfortable.

A week ago, Stroud businessman Christian Dannemann and his family were driving to the ferry in Calais at the end of their holiday. It’s a port I’ve been through many times – as a teenager growing up in Brussels, it offered the shortest hop across the Channel to visit relatives. But I’ve never seen what Dannemann and his wife and daughters saw as they drove past the “Jungle” – the chaotic series of refugee camps on the approach to the ferry and Eurotunnel terminus.

“I’ve lived for three years in developing countries and I’ve never seen anything like the conditions those people were living in,” Dannemann told me, as we sat in his workshop this week. My racking sobs of the previous afternoon when pictures of Aylan Kurdi appeared were barely under control. Dannemann, too, looked shaken. “Families are lining the motorway, caged behind fences,” he said. “There is no human dignity there. And now we have a prime minster talking about ‘swarms’ – that’s a word used for animals.” He pauses, regroups. “It has gone too far. Something has to happen – you can lobby your MP, but really, you can’t tell other people to take in desperate refugees if you do not. It has become plain that we cannot rely on politicians to lead the way.”

Dannemann, who is German – “I’m a migrant myself, I’d point out” – is a quietly spoken businessman who has lived in the UK for 18 years and built two thriving companies in the Cotswolds. He and I live in the same leafy Gloucestershire village near Stroud, and our families are friends. My partner, our two boys and I arrived back the day before them, to find our local paper, the Stroud News and Journal splashing on a letter from the mayor, several councillors and the local Green MEP calling on the town to take its “fair” share of refugees fleeing war and persecution. That, apparently – based on the figure of 40,000 refugees that the EU has said it needs to settle during the next two years – would be 10 people.

It seems doable to me. It seems doable to Dannemann, too. And with help from supporters across this county, he intends to make it happen.

The agonising image of a tiny boy, his body washed up on a Turkish beach as if no more than jetsam, may well have galvanised people who felt terrible about the plight of refugees but had failed so far to oppose the toxic narrative being spewed out by politicians and sections of the media. I count myself among them. But momentum was plainly gathering before Aylan Kurdi’s image swept across the world.

The town of Stroud may have a hippy tinge, but in truth, the hippies here tend to be professional and pretty well off. The constituency was a marginal Conservative win in 2010, but in May the sitting MP Neil Carmichael increased his majority by 3,500. The area has a few solidly Labour and Green pockets, but its Tory character is plainly being consolidated. If the plight of refugees has gained traction in this county – there are two Facebook pages concerned with the Calais migrants, and volunteers have just returned from a trip to take supplies across the Channel – then the nationwide wave of revulsion directed towards David Cameron’s intransigent stance is perhaps not so surprising.

But how do you work out a system for supporting traumatised people and taking them into your home? There is an obvious concern about exploitation and abuse. Do you say only hosts with criminal records checked can offer their spare room?

Stroud mayor Kevin Cranston, who signed the letter to the Stroud News and Journal, believes that taking in 10 refugees is a perfectly practicable proposition, and that such questions can be resolved. “I have no problem helping to find accommodation, there are enough empty properties here,” he said.

Is it legal to accommodate and support undocumented migrants who have no entitlement to public funds?

“I’m assuming that if we can persuade the government that we will take in and support 10 people in Stroud, the government would allow them in and give them leave to stay,” said Cranston. “The government is perfectly able to send officials over to where refugees are and ensure they can come in legally. It’s all a question of will. If they want to, they can. After all, they found £7m six weeks ago to put more barbed wire round Calais. Cameron is scared of Ukip, but really he ought to be more concerned about the greater number of voters in this country who aren’t racist bigots.”

In and around Stroud, there is a growing swell of opinion that people fleeing atrocities in their home countries must be given sanctuary. And there is something very powerful about stating that you would be prepared to open your home that is clearly making an impact on politicians: people – voters – are not expressing grudging acceptance of a duty. The spirit is one of active welcome.

Katie Jarvis, chief writer for the magazine Cotswold Life, says she would offer a room in her home in Minchinhampton. “It’s so easy to look at the past and judge other people for what they didn’t do, for not standing up, for not helping when help was needed,” she said. “But who knows what I’d have done in their situation? I can easily imagine I might have looked away, not done the right thing. But we know and see so much of what people are suffering today, we can’t pretend we don’t know, and that brings a responsibility that feels impossible to ignore. I see fellow human beings who are desperate.”

Across the Stroud valley in Bisley, Emma Howard, a doctor and mother of four boys under seven would also welcome a family. “It’s a humanitarian crisis and you want to respond to that. It is increasingly frustrating that the government does not seem to understand that people need help,” she said. Howard readily acknowledges that a strategic political response is needed to address the forces compelling people to flee. Although not everyone has a spare room, everyone can contribute, she says: a range of skills will be needed to successfully settle refugee families in towns and cities across the UK. But Howard says that first, people’s acute needs must be addressed.” If I see someone who is hungry or poorly, I want to help. If people need shelter and food, then we would love to have a family to come and live with us.”

In Stroud itself, project manager Jamie Baldwin says he would happily take in a refugee to live with him and his daughters. In North Woodchester, Anna Kay, her husband and three sons would “gladly” have someone to stay in their home. And Kate and Norman Kay in Nailsworth, whose letter calling for people to help refugees has been published in local paper Stroud Life, says they are “very committed” to offering a refuge or supporting someone in need. The Kays’ letter was prompted, says Kate, “not just by that terrible picture [of Aylan Kurdi], but the culmination of everything that’s happened in the last few weeks, and our feelings of immense sadness and anger.”

She felt that “there must be something we could do at a local level, even if our government won’t. So we are standing up and saying very publicly that we would welcome people into our community.”

Neil Carmichael points out that it was the Conservative prime minister Ted Heath who took the decision to allow Ugandan Asians into Britain in 1972. While he emphasises that a political solution must be found to the mass exodus of people from the Middle East and north Africa, he also believes in practical moves. “I can see how steps could be taken to expedite this if there was a will, and clearly there is a will,” he said. While details such as the likely length of stays are yet to be worked out, my impression from talking to people is that they will be opening their homes for weeks or months, not just a weekend – in the expectation that local councils will step in to offer alternative arrangements afterwards.

“If you look through the archives in the 1930s, what opened the doors to refugees was when the call came from the ground up, and there was also a push from key people in government, such as the MP Eleanor Rathbone,” says Trisha Kessler, who is researching a PhD on Jewish refugees in the 1930s.

Kessler, together with her husband and friends, last year co-founded the website TenThousandHomes, which invites people to sign up to a commitment to open their homes. It was inspired, says Kessler, by the 10,000 rooms given to children who arrived in the UK on the Kindertransport. Her mother was one of them. “It’s a grassroots campaign; we were just a group of ordinary people asking ourselves, ‘How do we say to the government that it has a people’s mandate to do this? How do we convince them? The answer was: we offer our homes.’”

“Taking action from the bottom up can propel change very fast, and when people are dying, fast matters,” Dannemann says. “If we manage to do this, other towns and cities in the UK will follow. We take 10, other places take their share, and by Christmas the Jungle can be empty.

“At the moment, the government don’t think we care,” he continues. “But that’s not true. It’s just that those who think migrants in trouble shouldn’t enter the UK have shouted loudest. We now have to raise our voice.”

My boys won’t care about giving up their bedroom. They always get in with us anyway. We will care a bit at the beginning. And then we won’t. Come to Stroud. Fellow humans welcome.