Refugee Week

This personhal attack is exactly the reason why it was felt it was best you didn't get involved in the Unity Centre. We try to work collectively here which means working together as a group, sharing information and working out how to provide support for asylum seekers from one day to the next. For you to refuse to work collectively with one or two people (why exactly are you bringing my partner into this?) - founding members of the collective who have committed a large part of their time to making Unity successful - would in deed "bring conflict into the group" and that was why it was felt it wouldn't be a good idea if you got involved.

I haven't spoken to or seen you (except maybe on Mayday or one or two other protests) for over a year - probably two years now. I totally reject your comment that I have behaved unpleasantly towards you in any way and I certainly have not gone out of my way to make you uncomfortable. Why would I waste my time doing this?

For other people who don't know what the Unity centre or Unity - union of asylum seekers is:
The Unity Centre is open from 10am-6pm five or six days a week run completly by volunteers (organised in a collective) and supported entirely by donations from supporters.

About 15 people make up the collective at the moment. At the moment - for the summer vacation, at least, I don't think we are 'desperate' for volunteers, in fact we often don't have enough room for everyone who turns up to help in the centre.

Two or three people are in the centre each day to provide help to asylum seekers going to report at the Home Office and who are in danger of being detained either when reporting or in a dawn raid. Every day between 30 and 50 asylum seeker families come and log in at the centre before going to report.

We have over 1,000 asylum seeker families living in Glasgow who have registered with us over the last 18 months that the centre has been open. In that time we helped stop many families being forcibly removed from the UK and got them out of Dungavel as well as sorted out a whole myriad of problems to do with housing, benefits, lawyers, etc.

The Union started around the same time in March last year. Initially local committees were formed from large public meetings in three areas of Glasgow where large numbers of asylum seekers lived. In other areas members of the union joined local integration or anti-deportation groups so we reckoned we had about half a dozen groups set up in Glasgow.

In October last year over 500 asylum seekers and supporters protested in George Square, Glasgow - making it one of the largest protests by asylum seekers.

In January this year the decision was taken to form a Glasgow wide committee at the Unity conference, the local committees were taking too much effort to maintain. This Committee (who called the demo above) have been meeting almost every two weeks since January in an attempt to build resitance and solidarity amongst asylum seekers in Glasgow.

To be honest the union has not been any where near as successful as the centre mainly because there have been many barriers to building across language, ethnic, religous and gender divisions but we are still working on it. Another factor is that thanks to successful campaigning last year by Unity and other campaigns as well as lots of ordinary Glaswegians, the situation in Glasgow has significantly improved for many asylum seekers - dawn raids are extremely rare now (only a handful isince January that we know about) and to get rid of the back-log of cases the Home Office are handing out Leave to remain to a lot more people than ususal. As folk feel safe then they don't feel the need to attend protests, meetings, etc.

However if you are genuine about wanting to help asylum seekers, Alice, perhaps you would like to join the Galsgow bail circle or the Scottish detainee visitors.

P

vague comments about 'feeling uncomfortable' and 'other women have similar stories' have rather serious undertones, that might or might not be appropriate but are most definately out of order without further elaboration.

if it's a simple matter of you not getting on with someone, or a personal fall out it's most defianately not, if it's something more serious then you should lay it out rather than leaving it in an ambigious limbo.