Four Chancellors and a Funeral by Russell Jones

Author:Russell Jones [Jones, Russell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781800183094
Publisher: Unbound
Published: 2024-03-24T00:00:00+00:00

Manston

In February 2022 a centre was opened in Manston, Kent, where newly arrived migrants could be held while awaiting processing.

Manston had been designed to hold a maximum of 1,600 people for just 24 hours while initial identity checks were made. But due to the vast backlog, people were soon staying for weeks rather than hours, and within months there was pressure to move residents at Manston into hotels to prevent dangerous overcrowding. More than 20 serious cases of gastroenteritis erupted at the centre in September, and in words that should concern everyone who remembers Covid – which surely means everyone – local health officials wrote to the Home Office, warning of the ‘many new emerging pathogens’ at Manston, and highlighting the risk of something ‘potentially more serious’.79

‘Duly noted,’ replied the ludicrously named Clandestine Channel Threat Commander, and then everybody at the Home Office acted surprised when 50 cases of diphtheria cropped up weeks later, implicated in at least one death.80

Five separate sources reported that Suella Braverman had been given legal advice that the situation in Manston was a lawsuit waiting to happen, and that detaining people there in such numbers was illegal.81 Five separate sources said she ignored that advice. Chinchilla the Hun was counselled to move asylum seekers into hotels, but she had ‘deliberately’ chosen not to sign off the plan, apparently to avoid demented Daily Mail headlines implying we were housing immigrants in something like a suite at Claridge’s.

Braverman denies all of that, as you would expect.

The numbers living in Manston rose to over 3,000 – almost twice the capacity it was designed for. There were scant amenities for helping vulnerable families, which often included young children. They were kept for weeks in overcrowded tents in the middle of winter, sleeping on the floor among outbreaks of diphtheria, scabies, MRSA, and Covid.82 When the independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration visited Manston he was left ‘speechless’ at the sight. ‘No prison in the country holds that many people’.83

As the crisis grew Braverman, keen to be seen as a woman of action, immediately raced to Manston via the only sensible mode of transport: a Chinook helicopter, at a cost of £3,500 per hour. Fortunately she wasn’t in the air for long enough for it to cost more than a week’s wages: she’d only travelled from Dover, about 30 minutes’ drive away.84 Looked good on telly, though. Determined. Forceful. Only slightly like a deranged hamster cosplaying General Patton.

The situation became even worse following a petrol bomb attack on another migrant centre in Dover.85 The incident was shocking, but entirely unsurprising: government ministers and noisy backbenchers appeared to dedicate their lives to vilifying asylum seekers, and even went so far as to target specific nationalities. The Albanian prime minister’s response to the political malevolence directed at his compatriots was that it ‘doesn’t sound very British, it sounds more like screams from a madhouse’.86

I don’t know why this was news to him. It was well known that here in perfidious Albion

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