The UK's Homelessness Epidemic

A couple of weekends ago I went out in London for some pre-Christmas drinks with some friends from university. It was a rainy evening, but the streets were full of people heading home from Christmas shopping or out to office parties and to catch up with friends. It was hectic. On my way to the pub I crossed from Euston train station to Warren Street underground, a walk of no more than five minutes down just one road. Dodging the mums dragging their bags of presents home and the groups of students laughing and joking as they headed further into town, I passed a total of eleven homeless people sat in doorways attempting to protect themselves from the spitting rain. I, along with everyone else, kept walking past.

Britain is in the middle of a homelessness epidemic. Homelessness charity Shelter estimates the number of those with no permanent residence at 320,000, an increase from 307,000 in 2017 and 294,000 in 2016. Of those 320,000 the charity Crisis estimates that over 24,000 will be sleeping rough, on the streets or public transport, over this Christmas period. According to the same study, the number of rough sleepers in Britain has risen by 98% since 2010, and the number in tents and buses has increased by 103%.

The dramatic rise in rough sleeping is having an impact at local level. In Brighton and Hove, which has the second largest homeless population in England, city councillors are finding themselves heavily divided on the best way to tackle the issue. After the council was asked to apologise for forcing several homeless people out of their tents early this year, the debate over how best to respond to the rising number of rough sleepers has intensified, with Conservative councillor Robert Nemeth claiming that now is the time for “tough love not warm words”. Allowing tents on the street and not doing more to tackle street drinking, he claims, is a “national embarrassment” that is harming both the affected individuals and Brighton’s tourism industry. Green councillor Alex Phillips countered that the city’s decision to spend £10 million on improving infrastructure would have been better spent on housing.

But here lies the problem. Local councils are having to make decisions based on their limited budgets, and in Brighton, which depends on tourism for a large part of its industry and income, it makes sense that better infrastructure will win out in the allocation of funding. Despite the national government’s asserted aims to eliminate rough sleeping by 2027, local councils across the country are arguing that they are not being provided with the funding required to tackle the issue effectively.  Local government is at the pointed end of a spear that has been systematically failing those at risk of falling into homelessness for years.

Individual causes of homelessness (the breakdown of relationships, drug and alcohol misuse, domestic violence – which was listed as a cause in a staggering 6,850 cases of homelessness in 2017/17) are exacerbating factors for large numbers of rough sleepers across the UK, but the rising number of individuals finding themselves without a place to stay in recent years points to underlying systematic factors increasingly making people vulnerable to losing their home. The most frequently reported cause of homelessness is failure to find new accommodation at the end of a short hold lease, followed by increasingly unaffordable rent prices. The housing crisis in the UK continues to worsen, with the average rent price in London now costing 49% of the average monthly salary, and the national average cost of a house standing at 7.8 times the average annual salary for a full-time worker. Home ownership is increasingly unattainable, and renting is increasingly unsustainable as the shortage of suitable property continues to drive up prices. Stagnating wages and the instability of renting also means that 8 million people in the UK are just one pay check away from being unable to pay for their home. The ever-increasing cost of living is reducing consumer spending as more and more money is diverted to private landlords and banks in order to pay for housing.

As living costs spiral upward, austerity measures have systematically broken down the safety nets for those at risk of slipping into poverty. The United Nations’ special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, recently accused the UK government of inflicting “great misery” on its citizens through its austerity policies. He cited a report from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation that found that around “14 million people, a fifth of the population, live in poverty and 1.5 million are destitute”. Poverty on this scale, in the world’s fifth-largest economy, is a political choice, claimed the report. Such statements have seemingly passed under the radar thanks to the overwhelming focus on Brexit, which itself has purportedly cost the average UK household £900, according the Bank of England.

It is unfortunate that the political debacle of Brexit has diverted attention away from Conservative claims that “austerity is over”, because an examination of the limited implementation of these policies would have revealed far more about what we could be doing better to support the millions of people at risk of falling into poverty and homelessness. The Brexit monster has derailed Theresa May’s pledges to tackle society’s injustices, but it remains true that years of austerity-focused policies after the 2008 recession have left us a nation more divided and unequal than we were a decade ago, with more than one-fifth of the population living below the poverty line as wealth inequality continues to grow.

In his report on the UK’s austerity measures, Philip Alston claims that “British compassion for those who are suffering has been replaced by a punitive, mean-spirited, and often callous approach apparently designed to instil discipline where it is least useful...” (p3). As the use of food banks soars, the number deaths of homeless people increases by 24%, and the level of rough sleepers doubles in five years, the richest 1,000 Britons have increased their wealth by £274 billion since 2013. In 2018, the wealth of the richest 1,000 people in the UK is £724 billion which is greater than the poorest 40% of households combined (£567 billion). These figures dwarf the £10 million that Brighton and Hove councillors put towards infrastructure for the city rather than housing for the homeless population. According to a government report from 2012, homelessness in the UK costs the taxpayer around £1 billion. A compassionate approach could solve this crisis. In fact, early interventions that prevent homelessness from occurring could also save the public purse up to £370 million.

The rising number of homeless people are just the most obvious sign of a system of austerity that has been damaging the middle and working classes in this country for years. When those people are imagined as drug addicts and failures, that demonstrates a society lacking in compassion. When tents and sleeping bags on the side of the street are “a national embarrassment”, we’ve lost our humanity somewhere along the way.

We need to push our government to do better by the people it is supposed to serve. And in the meantime, we could all do a little more to show compassion for those that society has failed. We can all try our best to not just walk past.

If you want to find out what you can do to support someone struggling with homelessness this winter, you can visit the Shelter or Crisis websites.

Tear Gas and Tough Talk - The US Border Crisis Escalates

Tear gas, classified as a chemical weapon by the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention, has been banned from use in warfare. It’s effects, which include a “burning, watery sensation in the eyes, difficulty breathing, chest pain, excessive saliva… skin irritation” and, after prolonged exposure, vomiting and diarrhoea, can in some cases also lead to death. Yesterday, it was used to disperse 500 migrants at the US-Mexico border after some attempted to breach the fence between Tijuana and San Diego.

This is not the first time that the US government has used tear gas against civilians. Indeed, somewhat illogically, whilst the use of tear gas in a conflict zone is tantamount to a war crime, it is perfectly legal and standard operating procedure for police forces around the world to use it for the purposes of crowd dispersal and control. It was used in 2014 during the Ferguson protests and the use of chemical agents such as tear gas and pepper spray against peaceful protesters has become so normalised that the UC Berkeley Science Review hosts a handy guide to the difference between the two and how to treat the effects of an attack.

The use by American law enforcement of a chemical weapon to combat civilian demonstrations by US citizens is nothing new, and therefore it should be unsurprising that such force would be extended to the “stone cold criminal” migrants just south of the border. Trump’s inflammatory language following the gas attack and the administration’s previous policy of separating families at the border leave no doubt as to the position of the US government on the migrant caravan, and it seems as though this latest escalation may be only the start of an even tougher response to those seeking refuge in the United States.

Which begs the question, exactly what is this a response to?

Trump has previously described the migrant caravan as “an invasion” that has required the deployment of troops to the southern border. But an invasion is usually identified as an aggressive act undertaken by an organised armed group, which the migrant caravan is not. If it were, and the migrant families at the border could be defined as an enemy combat force, then the use of tear gas against them could potentially be treated as a war crime.

The migrant caravan consists of around 7,000 migrants who have made their way from Central America to the US/Mexico border at Tijuana after fleeing conflicts in their home states. Although additional numbers of migrants continue to make their way towards the US, the notion that this constitutes a major increase in those seeking asylum from Central America is incorrect. As the journalistic fact-checking site Politifact notes: “the recent numbers of people apprehended at the southwest border also aren’t as high as they were in the early 2000s. Border Patrol apprehensions during that time often surpassed 1 million. Total southwest border apprehensions in fiscal year 2018 were below 400,000.”

This is a manufactured crisis. Trump ran on a platform that outright labelled Mexican migrants as criminals, rapists, and animals. His push for a border wall is also designed to stoke anti-immigrant fear in a rapidly fracturing America, and my fear is that the rhetoric, and the response it generates towards immigrants, is going to get worse before it gets better. The day after the tear-gassing, the Associated Press referred to the migrant march towards the border as a “show of force”, again portraying the scenes at the “war-like” border as some sort of battle between US troops and a dangerous invading enemy.

Men, women, and children have been stopped at the border after walking thousands of miles to flee violence and unrest in their homelands. Allowing unrestricted access to the United States may not be a possibility, and that is not what I, or anyone else, is suggesting. But turning them into scapegoats – making them at turns into enemy combatants, criminals, or animals – is a dangerous and deeply worrying development. Now stranded in Tijuana, the migrant families are finding that the Mexican authorities and local residents, themselves being portrayed as rapists and security threats by their increasingly aggressive northern neighbour, are also turning against them.

This is dehumanisation unfolding in real time. This is the most powerful country on earth gearing up to go on the offensive against some of its weakest and most vulnerable people. The anti-immigrant rhetoric that has been festering in the US and Europe over the last few years is now poisoning everything, including, with this latest tear-gas attack, the migrants themselves.

Compassion Fatigue - Fighting Hopelessness in an Interconnected World

In the modern age of 24 hour news cycles and social media, we are constantly bombarded with images of human suffering on an unimaginable scale, argues a recent Guardian Long Read article by Elisa Gabbert. With global peace and security deteriorating and immediate access to the horrors of violence and disasters through social media, we have never been more aware of the trauma of others. With this new exposure to suffering, argues Gabbert, there is a very real risk of becoming numb to the headlines. When there is that much trauma, what can one person do to help? What’s the point in doing anything, if the one person you might help will only be replaced by a million more in an even worse situation?

This sense of helplessness and desire to turn away is clinically referred to as “compassion fatigue”. As Gabbert references, the psychologist Charles Figley defines compassion fatigue as “a state of exhaustion and dysfunction... as a result of prolonged exposure to compassion stress”. The effects of compassion fatigue are particularly detrimental to first responders and carers, individuals who are exposed to trauma every day as part of their job, but with more direct exposure to conflict, disaster, and suffering than ever before, there’s a risk of compassion fatigue manifesting itself in the general public as well.

Throughout the Guardian article, Gabbert wrestles with the consequences of this feeling of apathy that comes from prolonged exposure to compassion stress. It’s hard to watch the news, when, as journalist Susan Moeller puts it, the media careens “from one trauma to another, in a breathless tour of poverty, disease and death”. You can only watch so many such stories before it becomes too emotionally taxing. How many times have you heard someone say that they don’t like to watch the news because it’s “too depressing”?

The media, activists, and campaigners have long been aware of the very real effects of dehumanisation, and it’s opposite. Telling someone that one million people are suffering as a result of the latest disaster or conflict rarely inspires action because it is impossible to comprehend that many people, let alone that many people’s suffering. But telling the story of one of those people elicits a much stronger emotional reaction and desire to respond, because suddenly the tragedy has been ‘humanised’, it’s suddenly real. However, if that very human story of personalised trauma appears on our screens alongside twenty other very human stories of personalised trauma, then for many of us, our reserves of empathy and compassion have already been used up and we’re back to square one.

Combating compassion fatigue in this interconnected world is therefore increasingly difficult. A scroll down my Twitter feed shows news reports depicting the latest violence in Yemen and Syria, project updates from Medecins Sans Frontieres detailing the struggle to support refugees in the Mediterranean, and even comedians and actors bemoaning the latest policies of the Trump administration that continue to separate families at the border. If I really want to make a difference, which one of these issues deserves my attention? And even if I picked one, what can I actually do to make any real impact? And, if somehow I managed to do something, anything, will I just have to do it all over again when the next thing comes along? It certainly is overwhelming.

Gabbert struggles with her own conclusion that stepping away from politics is one way of coping with compassion fatigue. There is comfort, she argues, in knowing that if you personally just need a break from the worries of the world, there will be other people to pick up the slack until you’re ready to carry on the fight. However, as she acknowledges, sometimes this feels more like avoidance than a real solution to the problem. Is there anything else we can do to overcome compassion fatigue?

The humanisation of a problem certainly seems to galvanise a response and gain support for humanitarian operations in the immediate aftermath of a disaster or conflict, but focusing only on the human trauma is increasingly unhelpful. Instead, we should be focusing on the whole human experience. Individuals that have lived through war or a major disaster are still individuals, with their own aspirations, skills, family histories, and stories to tell. Those stories are not limited to the trauma. We are at risk, with our current news coverage, of labelling a survivor of conflict or poverty as simply that; another wretched soul in need of assistance. This breeds the apathy and even indignation symptomatic of compassion fatigue. What makes this person more deserving of my help than anyone else?

But refugees, conflict survivors, those displaced by disasters or suffering from poverty, are not defined by their current status. They might need some help right now, but mostly they want to help themselves. And so often, they do. These are the stories we don’t hear. That malnourished, crying child on the news today, if given the right sort of support right now, will have far happier stories to tell in the future. Human stories that don’t drain our compassion, but inspire us. Last year I spent three months living and working in Sarajevo with the Post-Conflict Research Center (PCRC). Sarajevo today is a vibrant, unique city surrounded by the most incredibly beautiful natural environment, and filled with people who do amazing things every day. Just over twenty years ago, it was a burned out husk that dominated our newsreels as a place with little to no hope for the future. Whilst I was there I spent some time covering the still-developing Rohingya crisis, and the burned out homes, displaced populations, and ethnic violence echoed many of the scenes in the former Yugoslavia two decades prior. I found myself wondering what the status of the Rohingya people will be in twenty years time. What will Syria look like in 2040?

Humans are survivors, and even in the darkest times there are sparks of light. Those sparks of light can lift us out of compassion fatigue and inspire us instead. Those are the stories we should be telling. PCRC first opened my eyes to this with their Ordinary Heroes project, which focuses on ordinary people who did amazing things to save lives in the darkest days of the conflict. These people never had their faces on the news. Similarly, UNHCR’s Stories page has been set up to tell the stories of re-homed refugees who are now making an impact in their new societies in various unique and interesting ways. Again, these are the stories that don’t get featured in the headlines.

The helplessness that many people might feel watching the news stems, at least in part, from a sense that the suffering is so severe, so extreme, that there’s nothing we can do to help. It is important to remember that what we see is a snapshot of the lowest point of these people’s lives. Their stories don’t stop when the journalists and aid agencies leave. They pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and carry on. And make many new stories that involve laughter and love. We should seek these stories out, because they can lift us up and inspire us when we might be starting to feel like there’s no hope.

You don’t need to save a life to make a difference, and you should not take that weight with you. You need to give someone a chance to save their own. And if we as socially-conscious citizens can manage that then we are given the chance to see how resourceful and incredible people can be. I found inspiration in the stories I heard of survival in the darkest days of the former-Yugoslav wars, and continue to feel energised by the tales of everyday heroism in today’s conflict and disaster zones.

The world can often seem like a dark and scary place, especially when we are exposed to its darkest and scariest moments. But if we focus on the human stories, the full human stories, suddenly it feels as though things might be a little more hopeful than we first thought.

We Need to Change the Way We Think About Climate Change

The Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) recently gave a 12-year deadline for reducing human-caused climate change. The report suggests that there is now little that can be done to prevent a temperature rise of 1.5°C from pre-industrial levels by 2052, but states more worryingly that if we do not take drastic measures to lower carbon emissions by 2030 then a rise of 2°C will be inevitable. Whilst this difference does not sound like a big jump, the report also highlights that by 2100, global sea level rise would be 10cm lower with global warming of 1.5°C compared with 2°C and that extreme heatwaves will be experienced by over one third of the world’s population at 2°C, compared with 14% at a 1.5°C rise. In short, we will face the consequences of human-made climate change, but we can still mitigate the effects if we act now.

The effects of climate change are already being felt. According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center, 2017 saw 18 million new displacements due to weather-related disasters globally. This far surpasses the 11.8 million displacements as a result of conflict in the same time period and the 800,000 displacements due to geophysical disasters.  The UN Human Security Unit estimates over 2.5 million people have died as a result of disasters in the last thirty years, and predict this number will rise as weather patterns become more erratic and severe. Complicating the matter further, and as I have previously discussed, resource scarcity as a result of environmental degradation has led to increasing instability and conflict across human groups.

And it is not just humans that are suffering; in 2017 it was reported by researchers at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México that climate change was causing a “mass extinction” event of a scale not seen since the demise of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Species extinctions will become more common as the planet continues to warm and this may have cascade effects, where one extinction leads to the demise of other species in the same food chain or ecosystem. Reading further into this all starts to sound very apocalyptic. The horrifying “hothouse earth” theory warns that a temperature increase of over 2°C may lead to runaway climate change that cannot be stopped and make parts of Earth completely uninhabitable.

This is both terrifying and difficult to comprehend. So many climate predictions start with “by 2100…” which, to many of us, seems like such a long way off as to be not worth worrying about. By virtue of the problem, research is heavily numbers-based, scientifically dense, and consistently misrepresented in the media (I’m no scientist so don’t trust me either, please check my sources linked throughout). It is a technically difficult subject matter, with globally relevant outcomes that are difficult to wrap our heads around. The effects of climate change are not immediately visible – patterns of disasters and their effects may tell us something about the changing climate, but one-off events often cannot be directly linked to the wider cause. Other issues are often therefore seen as being of more immediate concern.

And yet the climate change threat is very real. And, as the IPCC report acknowledges, our response to the threat should be quite a simple one: cut carbon pollution as much as possible, as quickly as possible. With the increasing capacity of alternative energy sources to support our modern lives, this may not be as difficult a process as we may have first thought. We may constantly be told that renewable energy is too expensive or too unreliable to take seriously as a contender to the fossil fuel industry, but this no longer seems to be the case. Innovations in renewable energy sources are supporting humanitarian actions and increasingly allowing countries to avoid fossil fuels for longer periods. The problem is not the alternative energy sources. It’s us.

So why are we not doing more to limit carbon pollution? It’s not through a lack of understanding. 97% of scientists working on climate change agree that the current climate trend is largely as a result of human activity, and environmental activism is becoming increasingly pronounced in the public sphere. And it’s not through a lack of capacity; the recent success of the Last Plastic Straw movement demonstrated that when there is a will an environmental movement can quickly take hold and spread globally. Whilst the banning of straws themselves has become controversial, the awareness that has been raised around plastic pollution and the legislation to reduce plastic waste it has inspired has been immense. The main issue is that, with the exception of the newly prioritised plastic pollution issue, apathy rules when climate change is mentioned. The effects are seen as being too distant from our own lives, and the inconvenience of making steps to reduce our carbon footprint too unappealing to commit to.

For many, it was the image of turtles and seabirds choking on plastic straws, that galvanised them to make a change. The realisation of humanity’s unwitting destruction of such a large area of our oceans and their wildlife led to a desire to change. For me at least, it made me upset, and incredibly angry. In the US, states have strengthened their support for environmental protection measures in response to President Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement and dismantling of the EPA. The anger of the 200,000 protesters at the People’s Climate March has led to an increased focus on green policies and actions in response to Trump’s perceived irresponsibility on environmental issues. Similarly, other states reaffirmed their commitments and doubled-down on the Paris Climate Agreement after the US withdrawal. People know what the implications of not acting on climate change are, but the haze of apathy stifles action until we are spurred to respond to something that we perceive as a direct threat to our own health and livelihoods. Paradoxically, Donald Trump might be one of the most convincing advocates for environmental protection in the current public discourse.

What this demonstrates is that I’m not alone in being most effective and active in responding to something when I’m pissed off. Clearly, the knowledge of the threat of climate change is there. But it seems to take a major public figure outright denying the reality of the situation to force our hands to respond. So let’s be pissed off.

Let’s be pissed off that our actions now mean we have only 12 years to turn this planet around.

Let’s be pissed off that the current US administration can claim that the climate “could change back again” whilst giving the go ahead for oil companies in Texas to dump their waste into rivers.

Let’s be pissed off that by 2040, almost 600 million children — 1 in 4 children worldwide — will live in areas with extremely limited water resources.

And more importantly, let’s be pissed off that since 1988, just 100 companies have been responsible for 71% of carbon emissions globally, and that, whilst many of their own research divisions acknowledged humanity’s key role in the current changing climate, many donated money to thinktanks manufacturing doubt around the issue.

By all means we should try to change our behaviour, reduce our own carbon footprint, and limit our contributions to environmental degradation. But as a matter of priority we should also hold others to account. Use your anger to vote for those not beholden to the fossil fuel companies. Use your anger to spread the names of these top 100 polluters and demand action. Reduce your use of plastics, turn off the lights, limit your heating usage. Sign the petition, join the march, demand those in power follow our lead. It’s not too late, but it will be soon. Find out what you can do here.

This was a blog I took a long time writing. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say or how to say it. I knew it was an issue I wanted to talk about but it was too technical and in many ways too “boring” and science-y for what I’m used to. Here’s to the songs that finally pissed me off enough to write it.

Light at the End of the Tunnel? - A "Mental Health Emergency" in Lesbos

A disturbing recent report from Medecins sans Frontieres has called for an emergency evacuation of vulnerable individuals from the perilously overcrowded Moria refugee camp on  Lesbos. The reason for this desperate plea is the dramatic increase in self-harm and suicide rates amongst the ‘trapped’ population of the camp, many of whom are being held indefinitely on the island waiting to be given asylum in one of the EU’s member states. As time wears on, the hopes that this passage will be granted are diminishing.

MSF reports that nearly a quarter of the children (aged between 6 and 18) they observed between February and June this year had self-harmed, attempted suicide or had thought about committing suicide. Others were suffering from panic attacks, anxiety, nightmares or had voluntarily become mute. In a separate report from Moria published in July this year, MSF spoke to Kasim al Salih, who had fled Syria with his family a year prior to the interview for a chance of a better life away from Assad’s barrel bombs. Despite risking everything to get to safety, his treatment in Moria and the lack of support from the European community prompted him to tell MSF “I wish I had stayed in Syria and died”. With 1,500 new refugees arriving on Lesbos in the first two weeks of September alone, the hopelessness of Moria has led MSF to declare a “mental health emergency”.

With around 15 to 18 MSF referrals a week for cases of acute mental health problems in Moria, including in children, something must be done to end this suffering. The period of 1^st January to 22^nd April this year saw 18,939 refugees arrive in Europe via the Mediterranean routes, and 570 die in the process, according to IOM. These people are predominantly fleeing conflict in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, the DRC and Sudan, and are risking their lives to make it to the safety of Europe. Once here they are subject to further violence, dangerously overcrowded living conditions, rampant disease and a sense of hopelessness. As Greece argues that it is carrying the greatest “weight” of the refugee crisis, EU member states squabble over how best to respond, or rather whose responsibility it is to do so. Meanwhile, people die.

Part of the reason that it is so difficult for the refugees at Moria to leave the camp is the unwillingness of the rest of Europe to accept their presence within our borders. The wave of anti-immigrant fervour that shapes attitudes towards the refugee crisis continues to grip much of the Union, with nationalist parties gaining political support in Sweden, Germany, Poland and other states. Hungary’s Viktor Orban has been particularly vocal in passing anti-immigration laws and threatening a backlash against EU immigration initiatives. On the 10^th of September it was announced that the UN high commissioner for human rights, Michelle Bachelet, would be sending teams to Italy and Austria to investigate “alarming” anti-migrant violence in the countries. In Czechia and Slovenia, anti-migrant militias have prompted security fears. In the UK, 58% of people would like to see immigration levels reduced, though anti-migrant, and anti-refugee, views appear to have softened since the Brexit referendum. 

But this negative view of refugees (and immigrants more broadly) is largely unfounded. Reuters UK reported in 2015 that despite claims across Germany that increased immigration from Syria and Eastern Europe was responsible for rising crime in the country, young males from those countries were in fact less likely to commit crime than their German counterparts. A 2013 LSE study found much the same for immigration and crime rates in the UK, even suggesting that increased crime rates in high-migration areas were attributable to crimes committed against the migrants, not by them. In relation to the recent rise in crime in Germany following the influx of refugees in 2015, the BBC reports that whilst the new arrivals do account for a higher percentage of crime than their representation in the population, this is largely attributable to the demographics of the refugees in question. Young, poor, disenfranchised males are often more likely to commit crimes than other sectors of society. In addition, much of this increase in crime was perpetrated against other refugees, not the German population. Such reports match those of MSF regarding violence, theft, sexual assault and other crimes in the camps in Lesbos. Again, in desperate situations crime is more likely to occur, and overwhelmingly it is the victims of the societal inequalities that lead to crime that also become the victims of the crime itself.

Refugees can benefit their new host societies as well. You can read endless stories of successful refugee integration on the UNHCR’s stories page. Immigration more widely can, and does, (contrary to what many tabloid newspapers in the UK might suggest) benefit the economy. It promotes a greater understanding of the world and opens up minds to new ideas, which is something that I believe we should value greatly. More importantly than all of this, and something that transcends the argument over whether immigration and the acceptance of refugees is a help or a hindrance to us as European citizens, is a simple fact: these refugees are human. They are just like us.

And they are dying. Not those that stayed behind in the warzones that were once their homes. Not those that drowned in the deadly Mediterranean crossing trying to reach our shores. Not even those that made it to Europe but were struck down by illness in the camps that were supposed to only be temporary. They are dying because they think they have nothing left to live for. They are dying because they are killing themselves, because they see no end to the misery they have been subjected to through no fault of their own. They are dying by their own hands, after doing the bravest thing imaginable. They are dying because we are failing them.

Find out more about MSF’s work in Lesbos here.

The Bar Stool Preachers - DIY Punk with a Heart

It’s a small achievement, but I like to think that in general I know more about punk music than my mum. However, she made me question that assumption a few weeks ago when she introduced me to a new Brighton-based band called The Barstool Preachers. Blending angsty politically-charged anthems with bouncy ska tunes reminiscent of ‘90s California bands such as Operation Ivy and Rancid, The Barstool Preachers are quickly becoming one of my favourite new bands. And, judging by the number of records and t-shirts they are sending off through the post office my mum works in, I’m not alone.

Their new album, Grazie Governo, is a 13-song powerhouse that grabs you by the throat and doesn’t let go until it’s done with you. Never letting energy levels drop, Grazie Governo delivers both scathing political commentary on angry songs like DLTDHYOTWO (a title that took me a shamefully long time to decipher, despite listening to the lyrics repeatedly), Warchief, and Grazie Governo alongside rock radio-friendly hits like Choose My Friends (with a great guest appearance from The Interrupters’ Aimee Interrupter). This blend ensures that the album never starts to sound preachy (ironically) or self-important; this is still just a group of guys singing from the heart about stuff that matters to them and having some fun with it.

The Preachers are at their strongest when they tackle topics closer to the heart, and the tortured love songs dotted throughout Grazie Governo are the ones that have kept me coming back. Songs like 2:22, (8.6 days) All the Broken Hearts, and Raced through Berlin – my personal favourite song on the album – tell the whiskey-soaked tales of against-all-odds love that manage to be at-times melancholic but also mostly hopeful. The album works because of this dynamic. The energy levels are never allowed to drop throughout the 45-minute run-time and this leaves the songs that could otherwise be depressing instead feeling impassioned and defiant.

The lyrics, the musicianship, and the feel of the album is desperate and relentless, and in that way, it engages the listener throughout. Personally, I have not heard an album that has kept me enthralled the way Grazie Governo has in a long time. It captures the attitude and feel of the old-guard punk and ska groups (and the nod to Madness in the lyrics to All the Broken Hearts – “she doesn’t know why she likes him, she says it must be love” – hint at this inspiration) with a youthful exuberance that heightens the intensity driving the record.

You can tell that this album was a labour of love by a group doing it all on their own. This is DIY, and that passion shines through. You get the feeling that they would still be doing this even if nobody was listening. Fortunately, for us as much as for them, more and more people are. The success of Grazie Governo and their excellent live shows will undoubtedly keep their profile growing and put them firmly on the map as a band to watch out for. Here’s hoping that as they grow they keep that relentless energy pushing them forward.

On top of this, my mum says they’re really nice people too. So make sure to check out the video for All the Broken Hearts here and give Grazie Governo a listen. You won’t regret it.

From Complicity to Consent - The Role of Myanmar's Civilian Government in the Rohingya Crisis

In November last year, at the height of the Rohingya exodus from Myanmar, I wrote a piece for the Post-Conflict Research Center examining Aung San Suu Kyi’s role in the military’s ethnic cleansing in Rakhine State. In it, I argued that whilst she absolutely deserved international condemnation for her refusal to speak out against the actions of the military, she in fact had little power to prevent General Min Aung Hlaing from continuing his violent crackdown. Myanmar’s military is a force that is both independent of the civilian government, and extremely influential in the politics of the country. Suu Kyi’s complicity in what is now being referred to as a genocide by the United Nations was, and is, reprehensible, but until now she has not actively contributed to the suffering of the Rohingya, merely stood by and allowed it to happen.

However, on September 3^rd 2018, two Reuters journalists, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, were sentenced to seven years imprisonment for their role in uncovering a massacre of 10 Rohingya men by the Myanmar military and Buddhist villagers in September 2017. They were convicted for a supposed breach of a colonial-era law, the Official Secrets Act, despite the fact that a key witness (and member of Myanmar’s police force) testified that senior police chiefs had in fact framed the defendants in order to suppress the story. The decision was immediately condemned as a brazen attempt to discredit and suppress journalism critical of the regime, with several civil society organisations from Myanmar taking to Twitter to declare the case “neither free nor fair and… completely manipulated”.

For Aung San Suu Kyi’s civilian government, this arguably marks a step away from disinterested accomplice in the anti-Rohingya violence and into the realm of explicit supporter. As Ye Htut, a spokesperson for a previous administration, told Reuters: “If you arrest and punish the journalists who are doing their job in Rakhine it means you have something to hide”. In response, Deputy Information Minister Aung Hla Tun told the same journalist that the government was simply following the rules the law had laid out, and that they were aware that these were unfair and were trying to change them. However, this statement ignores the fact that the Official Secrets Act is often left unenforced due to its status as an out-of-date law that no longer applies to the modern situation in Myanmar. Rather, Suu Kyi’s government, at first a supporter of press freedoms, has gradually taken steps to discredit the media throughout her tenure as de facto leader of the country.

Around 20 journalists were prosecuted in 2017 under dubious ‘defamation laws’ and one US official claims that when he confronted Suu Kyi about the now-convicted Reuters journalists when they were awaiting trial, she angrily referred to them as “traitors”. Meanwhile, she has also vehemently denied other reports of ethnic cleansing in Rakhine as “fake news”, at the same time that evidence has emerged that the Myanmar military has released faked images of Rohinyga refugees in a “sinister re-write of history”. Suu Kyi denounces the free press whilst the military cover up their crimes. As a result, support for both the civilian and military arms of the government remains relatively strong in Myanmar.

Any aspiring genocidaire will tell you that in order to get away with murder you must first gain the support of the people by moulding them to conform to your agenda. A free press prevents the party line from becoming the only line, and that is why it is instrumental in securing a healthy democratic system. Without it, alternative opinions melt away and all that is left is the voice that silenced the others. In Myanmar’s case, this is the voice of the military. Suu Kyi continues to be outside of the decision-making element within the military brass – Min Aung Hlaing remains the architect of one of the greatest humanitarian crises of our time – but she is an integral, and increasingly important, cog in a machine that allows the killing to continue.

On August 21^st of this year, Suu Kyi asserted that the biggest threat to Rakhine state remained terrorism, and that violent Rohingya factions posed a major threat not just to Myanmar but to the region. The implication here is that the military crackdown in Rakhine is not only necessary but should be actively encouraged. In the August 25^th 2017 militia attacks on police checkpoints in Rakhine that sparked the military response and the start of the crisis, around 71 people were killed. The suspected figure of 43,000 dead Rohingya, and well over 1 million displaced, suggests either an overreaction on the scale of absurdity, or a planned-out military operation for which Aung Hlaing and the military brass simply needed an excuse.

Meanwhile, clearing operations in Rakhine continue as 48 investment projects in the state, many backed with Chinese and Indian money, are given the green-light. Despite international condemnation, both the Indian and Chinese governments continue to support Myanmar’s stance on the Rohingya ‘terrorists’ in Rakhine.

Whatever the reasons for the violence perpetrated against the Rohingya population, the Myanmar military now undoubtedly has the blood of thousands of innocent civilians on its hands. No longer content simply to bury her head in the sand, Aung San Suu Kyi instead has doubled down on her support for the military operations and hardened her rhetoric against the Rohingya. This is a very slippery slope and the bottom is a long way down. As the UN calls for military generals in Myanmar to be summoned to the International Criminal Court to face charges of genocide, Suu Kyi, the peace icon and Nobel Laureate, plants herself firmly on the wrong side of history.

Slave: The Dark Spectre of the Modern Sex Trade

Slave tells the true story of “Anna”, a Romanian girl who was snatched off the streets of London in 2011 and forced into the darkest corners of Ireland to work as an unwilling prostitute for her captors. The book is a difficult, often harrowing, read that reveals some of the inner workings of a global enterprise, the international sex trade, as seen from the perspective of one of its innumerable victims. As Anna herself explains, she was the product of the trade, the victim of the crime, and – in the eyes of many of the ‘respectable’, naive public – a complicit criminal in an extremely lucrative business.

How does one become a victim of human trafficking? In Anna’s words, “they took me because I would not be missed”. Women, and men, like Anna are targeted for trafficking because they can be disappeared without drawing attention from authorities or friends or family members that might raise the alarm. A few carefully constructed Facebook status’ supposedly from the victim, a new name (or several new names), a new country, and enough beatings to break the person’s will to fight, and one more individual has simply ceased to exist. Now they can be taken anywhere, made to do anything, bought and sold on the black market and forced to work constantly until their bodies are bruised and beaten enough that they are no longer desirable to the hardworking, respectable family men – the ‘assholes’ as Anna refers to them – who frequent the underground brothels present in major cities all over the world. If, after all that, they wind up dead then nobody investigates because they never existed anyway.

The secrecy of this world allows the cogs to keep turning in a global machine. This is no small enterprise; the UN Office on Drugs and Crime estimated in 2012 that human trafficking accounted for around $32 billion in the shadow economy every year. This is a conservative estimate, with the International Labour Organisation placing the global forced labour economy at $150 billion. Although this includes those trafficked for labour, child trafficking, and the organ trade, by far the most lucrative business for traffickers is sex. Anna tells in Slave of how she was personally valued at £30,000 when she was first taken. By the end of her captivity her traffickers, Ilie Ionut and Ancuta Schwarz, considered her their “million-pound girl”. The true numbers that traffickers and pimps make per victim will never be known, but it is clear that through systematic abuse, torture and manipulation, they are making a killing.

Following Anna’s ordeal, Northern Ireland passed the Human Trafficking and Exploitation Act, Europe’s strictest anti-trafficking law, which not only tightened existing laws on traffickers but also introduced a new offence that made it illegal to pay for sexual services. Now the “assholes” would be criminals too. The Act was controversial at the time of its inception, with police arguing it would be impossible to enforce, and some sex workers arguing that it would only force the trade further underground and make things more dangerous for them. Anna supports the Act, arguing that criminalising those who pay for sex may drive them away from the trade. If the demand dries up and the business becomes less lucrative, maybe the traffickers will have to find new ways to make their money.  

Again, due to the immense secrecy of the business it is difficult to tell how successful the Act has been since it was passed in 2015. In 2017 the National Crime Agency reported that modern slavery was a “significant problem” for Northern Ireland. However, as Anna’s story demonstrates, the nature of modern slavery is international. The issue may simply be more visible in Northern Ireland due to its stricter laws. The National Crime Agency also warns that human trafficking affects every major city in the UK, and the true scale of the industry continues to elude the authorities.

The uncomfortable truth of the sex trade is that it is only as lucrative as the level of demand allows. And the level of demand is extremely high. Some estimates suggest that as many as one in ten men in the UK have paid for sex at least once. In the US, this figure rises to around 15-20% of men. In the Netherlands, where prostitution is legal and regulated, the figure also hovers between 13 and 22% of men. This would suggest that laws governing prostitution do not significantly alter the percentage of men who are willing to pay for sex. As was argued in Northern Ireland, this is perhaps because laws that make prostitution illegal criminalise the sex worker, not the customer. Arguments surrounding the legalisation of prostitution argue that a legal and regulated system can help to protect the women and men engaged in sex work, but as Anna argues, this does nothing to protect those who are trafficked. Instead, some activists are now calling for a new change to prostitution laws, where the selling of sex is legalised but buying it is illegal. Criminalise the trafficker and the buyer, not the seller. This arguably would reduce demand and therefore dismantle the shadow economy built around the trade.

Debates around the best ways to combat the modern sex trade will continue, and the nature of the industry means facts, figures, and evidence will always be hard to come by. The sex trade makes us uncomfortable, and that is why it has been able to operate in the darkness for so long. It is this darkness that allows girls like Anna to be disappeared in order to be used as a slave for people in positions of power, whose actions may never be revealed. There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of men living their lives today who paid to use Anna, who contributed to her trauma, and who will never be forced to face up to that.

Modern slavery thrives because ordinary people do not want to discuss it. It is a dark and scary world, and it should be brought into the light. Only then can we begin to make a change.

He Said, She Said: Corbyn and the Media

Jeremy Corbyn has had a difficult few weeks as far as his media image is concerned. Firstly, following the emergence of evidence that he was present at a wreath-laying event in Tunisia that supposedly (if you choose to believe certain sources) commemorated the terrorists responsible for the Munich massacre (he claims that he was present to commemorate Palestinian victims of Israeli violence and to promote dialogue as a path for peace, not to memorialise the Munich attackers), he was then dogged by reporters seeking to confirm or disprove his prejudices, and a barrage of news articles were published claiming he was present, he wasn’t, he laid a wreath, he didn’t lay a wreath, the ceremony was to commemorate the Munich attackers, the memorial to the attackers just happened to be nearby, Corbyn’s stance on Israeli aggression against Palestinians is anti-Semitic, it isn’t, he should resign, he shouldn’t, and so on. Throughout it all, Corbyn flopped and floundered and seemed largely unable to cope with the media storm that had descended upon him. Then shortly afterwards, he was found apparently unable to answer a simple question put to him by Channel 4 reporters regarding whether or not he thought the UK would be better off outside the EU.

This is just the latest trauma in a long and rocky relationship between Corbyn and the media. A 2016 report by LSE asserts that “Jeremy Corbyn was represented unfairly by the British press through a process of vilification that went well beyond the normal limits of fair debate and disagreement in a democracy”. The report goes on to suggest that Corbyn was delegitimised by the media through personal attacks and systematic ridicule (p12). A report from Loughborough University showed that negative press coverage of the Labour Party far outweighed positive in the run-up to the 2017 general election (figures 3.1, 3.2, 3.3). Interestingly, the same report revealed that all newspapers, regardless of political leaning, devoted more time to attacking their opponents than to supporting those they endorsed. You could therefore perhaps forgive Corbyn for his comments made on the 23^rd August on Twitter that whilst a free press is essential for democracy, “much of [the UK’s] press is not free at all”.

His argument, that press freedom in the UK is inhibited by it’s ties to business and the state, certainly holds weight. For example, a 2015 report by the Media Reform Coalition found that just two companies, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp UK and the Daily Mail Group, account for nearly 60% of newspaper circulation in the UK. At the local news level, the 3 largest distributors have a 52% share of circulation. On television, Murdoch again looms large, with Sky (of which Murdoch owns 39.1%) dominating the news programming. It is undoubtable that corporate interests shape what stories make the headlines and it is certainly possible for those in power to push agendas that suit their needs. The dominance of a few news corporations in the UK has enabled outlets to be more aggressive in their campaigning than in other European countries, and the tabloid press in particular is often portrayed as amongst the most unforgiving in the world.

Corbyn’s media treatment may have been unfair, but his response has also raised eyebrows. In his speech in Edinburgh on the 23^rd August he evoked the now unanimous idea of “fake news” in his call for media reform. Whilst this was used to point towards the issues of the “billionaire domination” of the media, and the rapidly-declining trust in respected institutions like the BBC, it also, quite clearly, draws comparison to Donald Trump’s attacks on mainstream media that fails to support his agenda. Almost immediately The Independent responded to Corbyn’s speech saying effectively that. Somewhat ironically, the use of the phrase “fake news”, constructed to discredit the media, has in this instance been used by the media to discredit Corbyn’s argument.

Whether you agree with Corbyn’s stance on media freedoms or not, the case of his treatment and response raise important questions about the role and responsibility of journalists globally. Donald Trump’s increasingly aggressive diatribes against the media are harmful to a free press and a threat to democracy. Globally, press freedoms are shrinking, and this is a very scary trend that threatens peace and stability everywhere. But the flipside of this is that the media should take responsibility for what they publish. Due to declining sales of newspapers, a free, corporate press is increasingly consolidating into larger entities in order to stay afloat. It is becoming the only way to survive – and turn a profit – in the media. When subject to corporate interests and/or reliant on advertising revenue, a free press isn’t always that free. Social media, far easier and cheaper to produce, comes with even less oversight than the mainstream media. It’s growing influence fuels the phenomenon of “fake news”, both imagined and real.

Corbyn is right that journalistic freedoms should be protected. He is also right that the current state of the media in the UK is poor. But this debate goes beyond him. If anything, his performance in responding to the anti-Semitism accusations and his inability to respond to questions regarding his personal opinions on Brexit simply reinforce that he, like any other politician, should not be relied upon to tell the truth. Telling the truth is the job of the journalists. It seems that somewhere along the line that sentiment has been lost. Personal attacks, unfair coverage, click-bait headlines and a lack of real, investigative journalism only make it easier for the enemies of the free press to attack it.

It is tempting to write the story you want to write, not the one that is true. This is also true of the media that we consume. We accept what we agree with and attack what we do not. But this makes political discourse almost impossible. Corbyn is not a terrorist-sympathising communist. Nor is he a benevolent saviour of the poor and disadvantaged. He is a political leader with an agenda that you may or may not support. We as the public are owed the right to make our own mind up about that by knowing his policies and his actions.

The free media should do its best to ensure it is protected against these claims that it cannot be trusted. It is too valuable to be lost.