Government ministers warned of an influx of migrants overwhelming public services. Newspaper headlines declared war on imagined armies of welfare cheats invading Britain through easily penetrated borders. Plans to build accommodation centres for asylum seekers were abandoned in the face of local hostility. The year was 2001, but the level of publicly expressed animosity towards migrants and asylum seekers was much like that of 2023.
Along with other activists, I travelled around Britain that summer as part of what we called a Civil Rights Caravan, aiming to counter the country’s latest anti-immigrant turn. On the Sighthill housing estate in Glasgow, tensions were especially high. A fifth of its 6,000 residents were asylum seekers, relocated there by a government ‘dispersal’ programme that sought to move them away from more expensive locations in London. With regular acts of racist violence perpetrated against them, asylum seekers were fearful of venturing out of their homes. Then, on a hot night in August, a local man, Scott Burrell, set upon Firsat Dag, a Kurdish refugee from Turkey living on the estate. Dag was chased and stabbed to death.
But local activists also recounted another story that, to them, held important lessons on how positive change can be brought about. They spoke about one of the young white men living on Sightill who was among those who regularly harassed the asylum seeker residents. Living in poverty and struggling to find work, he was irate that people from Africa, Asia and the Middle East could turn up, get housed, and be provided for – no matter how paltry that provision actually was. He was powerless to change the way the system worked but, at least on Sighthill, he and his friends held another kind of power – the ability to inflict violence on darker-skinned newcomers.
