- Bus dropped off a group of 11 asylum seekers at London’s Victoria Station.
- They were “cold, hungry, stressed and disorientated,” an aid agency says.
- The bus left them stranded in the middle of the city; they were eventually found emergency hotel accommodation.
On a frigid Tuesday night at crowded Victoria Station in London, a bus dropped off a group of 11 passengers, some of them were not wearing coats and were wearing flip flops, and then it left.
“They were cold, hungry, stressed and disorientated,” according to homelessness charity Under One Sky, whose team spotted the group and provided assistance. The individuals had “nowhere to go” until a Home Office employee was alerted, and found the group emergency hotel accommodation.
The group was made up of asylum seekers who had been residing at the Manston migrant processing center in Kent, southern England. Charities and lawmakers accuse the facility of becoming overcrowded and of having turned into a place where people must endure appalling living circumstances.
Officials believed that the 11 people had accommodations set up in London, according to the Home Office. They were left in the middle of the city, according to London Mayor Sadiq Khan, which he called “a catastrophic failure of duty and leadership.”
However, the incident serves as a metaphor for how severely overburdened Britain’s system is for handling illegal immigration and asylum applicants.
An unresolvable argument about Britain’s borders has been fueled by the recent decline in the number of asylum requests processed in the UK, which has left people in limbo for months or years while they wait to be processed or housed in temporary lodgings.
“The system is broken,” Britain’s Home Secretary Suella Braverman told Parliament on Monday – an inarguable but jarring admission after 12 years of Conservative rule, which has seen an unending line of ministers promising and failing to clamp down on illegal migration.
Braverman blamed a rapid increase in small boat crossings across the English Channel, organized by people smugglers on mainland Europe. The beleaguered minister described the crossings in highly charged terms as an “invasion” of Britain’s south coast. “Let’s stop pretending that they are all refugees in distress,” she said.
However, a decade of political decisions have also contributed to the chaos faced by immigrants and asylum seekers in the UK, with funding and action falling short of the harsh language advocated by succeeding Conservative governments.
“It’s shambolic and it’s cruel,” Ben Ramanauskas, a research economist at Oxford University and an adviser to Liz Truss while the previous prime minister was secretary of state for international trade, told media about the country’s system to deal with asylum-seekers.
“Part of that is due to the culture set by the Home Office, which views most immigrants with suspicion and treats them like potential criminals,” Ramanauskas said. “It’s a deeply unfair and unjust system.”
When contacted by media about that accusation, the Home Office declined to comment directly but issued a statement instead, saying: “The number of people coming in the UK who require shelter has reached record levels and has put our asylum system under enormous strain.”
[embedpost slug=”civilians-flee-eastern-ukraine-after-deadly-railway-station-attack/”]
