Halfway through The Shawshank Redemption, Andy and Red, sitting in their filthy prison yard, discuss hope. Red thinks it’s a dangerous thing, which can lead to despair if not fulfilled. But Andy insists on hoping for freedom, and his hope is finally rewarded.
The astonishing thing about the migrants and refugees Horatio Clare meets in this short, powerful book – Sudanese, Afghans, Iraqis, Iranians, Ethiopians, Pakistanis, Moroccans, Syrians and Yemenis in Dover, Calais, Falmouth and Portland – is that, despite being some of the most helpless and vulnerable people in the world, most have not lost hope. In Calais’s fenced and guarded camps, the soundtrack is laughter. Clare wants to know how this can be, and, specifically, why anyone would want to risk his life on a ‘death-trap dinghy’ to reach, of all places, England.
It is, on the face of it, a mystery. The gulls wheeling round Dover should be screaming ‘Go back! Go back!’ if you consider the monstrous behaviour of some of our politicians, which Clare revisits. Nigel Farage accuses the RNLI of ‘acting like a taxi service for migrants’. (But the lifeboatmen continue their rescue work: ‘Sometimes we’re so busy we don’t even count them,’ a spokesman says.) Lee Anderson suggests that any migrants unhappy once in England should ‘fuck off back to France’. This is the kind of comment that encourages jet-ski teams to plough out into the Channel and engage in ‘pushbacks’, ramming overloaded inflatables crammed with people, some of whom can’t swim. As immigration minister, Robert Jenrick visits a reception centre for unaccompanied children seeking asylum, spots Disney characters on the walls and orders they be painted over because they are ‘too welcoming’.
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