Make Borders History Tour (Sunday)
As we collected yesterday for the "Make Borders History" tours, we split ourselves into six groups, which worked out about about, ten cops, two vans, and a helicopter a piece. We then set off around town to visit the various institutions and businesses involved or connected to the deportation from this country of human beings who are deemed unworthy of asylum. Paranoia runs high, there was even police, guarding Borders, book shop, Which wasn't on the list, while British Airways, closed shop for the day and was boarded up, out of sight.
There were folk from all parts of the world on the tours. At each location on the map the assembled group would discuss the association of the places we stopped in front of, with kicking people out of the country. Topics included; the secrecy involved, the misrepresentation of asylum seekers, to no representation at all, to how peoples fate lies in the hands of insensitive bureaucrats, and of people whose jobs, through administrative change, and no fault of their own, have been converted from, helping asylum seekers - to simply processing people on paper, through cold government legislation
What my tour represented, was an example of social education, unfiltered by media and spin. An international conference on the street, by peoples of the world and expressed mostly through the words of an asylum seeker.
If you were on the tour you would have discovered, how far we have drifted from our roots as caring people, to one of passive onlooker. I couldn't help thinking of this as I listened to the words of a speaker who has been through the trauma of seeking asylum in Blair's, Britain.
Glasgow has received Millions of pounds from the government purse to deal with asylum seekers and has acted in the classic, landlordist, fashion - we want your rent but we don't want you. The court proceedings for asylum read like a GHA questionnaire, you will lose out no mater how you answer the questions.
We are being lied to and constantly mislead in almost every aspect of immigration and the plite of those seeking asylum in Britain. Why. Because the last people we will consult are the asylum seekers themselves. Unfortunately there were few representatives from the working classes of Glasgow, on these tours. For if there had been, perhaps they would realise how much in common the government policies concerning asylum, have, with the ones designed to restrict their own domestic and international freedom and opinions.
However the importance of these events is the learning process and finding people with the same common interests and goals. What I took from this event was the same type of inspiration that drove the idea of City Strolls. Get people outside, walking and talking, looking and listening - we learn.
If we are to learn anything we need to, like the asylum seeker, to seek freedom and to fight the tyranny's and propaganda that confine our liberty and our wish to live as happy, human beings.
The summer is still here and hopefully many fine days ahead with plenty of opportunity for walks, tours, talks and outside events. And as there is still freedom in the streets of Glasgow, perhaps we should start to exercise it a bit more and bring debate once more into the public realm.
As usual I am up for ideas