I was recently talking to a group of refugees who had been housed for months in a bleak hotel west of London after arriving in the UK in boats across the Channel.
All their stories were different: one couple had escaped imprisonment and persecution in Iran; another three had fled war and starvation in Eritrea and travelled across Europe mostly on foot; a brother and sister had made the journey with middlemen from Albania. They were grateful to be safe in the UK but desperately frustrated by various things, most notably the insane law that prevented them from working while the interminable – presumably deliberately so – process of asylum application ground on.
