{"id":352,"date":"2025-10-24T14:37:40","date_gmt":"2025-10-24T13:37:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/housing-rights.info\/news\/?p=352"},"modified":"2025-10-24T14:38:10","modified_gmt":"2025-10-24T13:38:10","slug":"flags-families-and-home-secretaries","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/housing-rights.info\/news\/flags-families-and-home-secretaries\/","title":{"rendered":"Flags, families and home secretaries"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This is a shortened version of a blog by <\/em>Helen Charman<\/em><\/a>, reproduced with permission from the <\/em>London Review of Books<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The new home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, said in May (in an interview with Michael Gove for The Spectator<\/em>) that she has a \u201cnatural affinity for the faith, flag and family element of Blue Labour\u201d. Her predecessor, Yvette Cooper, now foreign secretary, told Times Radio last week that she has Union Jack bunting hanging up in her garden shed. \u201cPeople should be coming together around our flags,\u201d she said. When asked if people should be putting them up on motorway gantries, she replied: \u201cI would put them up anywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The flags that have been appearing on motorway gantries, lampposts and roundabouts across the country are part of a campaign, \u2018Operation Raise the Colours\u2019, organised by known far-right extremists<\/a>. The BBC <\/em>asked Keir Starmer if this was racist or patriotic. \u201cI\u2019m a supporter of flags,\u201d the prime minister said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Flags are prominently displayed at the demonstrations outside hotels in which asylum seekers are being housed by the private companies Serco, Clearsprings and Mears, along with signs declaring \u2018protect our girls\u2019, \u2018protect children from rape gangs\u2019 and \u2018we stand together for our children\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mahmoud is said to be considering using military barracks to house asylum seekers. Starmer told the BBC last week that he intends to \u201cempty\u201d asylum hotels. When asked if he would be comfortable with his daughter having to \u201cwalk past\u201d a hotel, he responded that he \u201ccompletely\u201d understands people\u2019s \u201cconcerns\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Invoking \u2018our girls\u2019 is a familiar tactic. Starmer\u2019s evasive response endorses the narrative that the mere presence of asylum-seeker hotels in a community endangers women and children. According to this account, racially motivated violence, both at the hands of the state and of the kind that characterised last summer\u2019s riots<\/a>, can be committed without being named as harm, since it claims to be a defensive \u2014 and therefore morally defensible \u2014 act. Gavin Stephens, the chair of the National Police Chiefs\u2019 Council, has criticised politicians for stoking \u201ca climate of increasing tension and polarity\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All this has little to do with the realities of the sexual exploitation of children or with violence against women and girls. \u201cThere is no evidence that people seeking refuge are more likely to commit acts of sexual violence,\u201d as a recent open letter<\/a> from Women against the Far Right points out. \u201cMany are themselves survivors of violence, war and persecution. Blaming them distracts from tackling the deep-rooted causes of abuse and from holding those truly responsible to account.\u201d A Guardian<\/em>\u00a0investigation<\/a> published in July, on the other hand, found two-fifths of those arrested after taking part in last summer\u2019s anti-immigration riots had been previously reported to the police for domestic abuse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The protesters\u2019 claims also have little to do with the realities of life in the asylum hotels, where many women and children are housed. The conditions in the hotels are very bad: most residents share rooms with complete strangers, have no laundry or cooking facilities, no choice about when or what they eat, with any visits strictly policed by security. (The companies responsible for these conditions turn a tidy profit<\/a> from public money: \u00a3383 million between them over five years. In 2019, Serco had its contract renewed by the Home Office, despite having been fined \u00a36.8 million for its various failings in housing asylum seekers.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Glasgow, where I live, I volunteer as a birth companion, which involves spending time in these hotels. I have accompanied new mothers, often recovering from major abdominal surgery, when they leave hospital with their babies to return to small, hot rooms that haven\u2019t been cleaned, windows that can\u2019t be fully opened, with no fridge, no kettle, no microwave, no capacity to sterilise bottles, nowhere to unpack, nowhere to put the baby bath. Organisations such as Amma Birth Companions<\/a> (the charity I work with), the Scottish Refugee Council and the Children and Young People\u2019s Commissioner Scotland have been saying for years that housing mothers and babies in such unsuitable conditions breaches their human rights, including the right to adequate housing. The right, in other words, to safety.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One slogan used to promote the hotel protests on social media, often emblazoned over a Union Jack or St George\u2019s Cross, is \u2018Safety of Women and Children before Foreigners\u2019. There is a clear distinction being made here between British women and children and \u2018foreign\u2019 women and children. The category of the vulnerable already excludes the marginalised group being targeted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The figure of the single man, meanwhile, is demonised. As Starmer was joining the chorus of concerned fathers, Cooper announced the suspension of all new family reunion applications for refugees. Enver Solomon, the chief executive of the Refugee Council, condemned this punitive measure, pointing out \u2014 as Cooper herself has said in the past \u2014 that \u201cthese changes will only push more desperate people into the arms of smugglers\u201d. In response to the \u2018concerns\u2019 about young men crossing the channel and entering the country without the allegedly ameliorating influence of a family, the government has removed the possibility of these men, who often undertake the dangerous journey alone, being reunited with their loved ones. Including their own daughters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is a shortened version of a blog by Helen Charman, reproduced with permission from the London Review of Books. The new home secretary, Shabana…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":386,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","slim_seo":{"title":"Flags, families and home secretaries - Housing Rights","description":"This is a shortened version of a blog by Helen Charman , reproduced with permission from the London Review of Books . The new home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, s"},"_slim_seo_primary_term_category":0,"_slim_seo_primary_term_post_tag":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-352","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-guest-articles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/housing-rights.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/352","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/housing-rights.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/housing-rights.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housing-rights.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housing-rights.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=352"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/housing-rights.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/352\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housing-rights.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/386"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/housing-rights.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=352"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housing-rights.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=352"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housing-rights.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=352"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}