Good morning. Yesterday afternoon, Suella Braverman visited the Manston asylum processing centre. The home secretary arrived from Dover, about 20 miles away, by Chinook helicopter. She didn’t speak to the media, instead issuing a statement saying she was “incredibly proud of the skill and dedication shown to tackle this challenging situation”. But the challenges show no sign of going away.
As more than 1,000 people have been removed from the overcrowded centre in the last few days, it has become clear that frantic attempts to clear out the site may be throwing up as many problems as they solve – and the crisis is not limited to Manston itself.
Home Office officials are said to be “sitting refreshing booking.com” for hotels, but those clicks were not quick enough for the 11 asylum seekers dumped in central London without accommodation on Tuesday; there are now reports that a dozen more spent the night at Victoria station on Wednesday (£) after being dropped off with nowhere to go. Yesterday, the Guardian reported another appalling story on the safeguarding of asylum seekers: the alleged rape of a teenage boy at a refugee hotel in east London.
For today’s newsletter, I spoke to Amelia Gentleman, who broke the story of the first group stranded in London, about what happened next – and what those now being moved on from Manston can expect. Here are the headlines.
Five big stories
Manchester Arena attack | An inquiry into the Manchester arena terrorist attack has concluded that John Atkinson, one of the 22 people who were killed, would probably have survived had there not been “inadequacies” in the emergency response.
Economy | The Bank of England has warned the UK risks being plunged into the longest recession in 100 years after it pushed up the cost of borrowing to 3%, the biggest single interest rate rise since 1989. Scroll down for a reading list on the rate rise.
Twitter | Elon Musk will begin mass layoffs at Twitter on Friday, sharply reducing the social media platform’s workforce, the company said in an email to staff on Thursday. Reports have suggested that as many as half of the company’s 7,000 workers could lose their jobs.
Pakistan | Former prime minister Imran Khan has been wounded in the leg after a gunman open fired at a container lorry that was carrying him. Khan was leading a protest march on Islamabad to demand a snap election.
Protest | A group of pupils and parents in east London temporarily blocked the local council from removing their “school street” – a road with traffic restrictions outside schools during drop-off and pick-up times. Children climbed on top of road barriers, shouting and singing as construction workers tried and failed to move them.
In depth: ‘Nobody is really acknowledging how big the problems are’
When I spoke to Amelia Gentleman yesterday, she had just finished a call with one of the Manston detainees who was left in central London without accommodation, warm clothing, or any indication about what they should do next. “I think I have a clearer sense of what happened now,” she said. “But some of the logic is very hard to understand.”
Here’s what what we know about how that situation came about, and what awaits asylum seekers after they leave places like Manston.
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Initial release from detention
After Amelia’s initial story was published, the Home Office said that the “asylum seekers are only released from Manston when we have assurances that they have accommodation to go to”. This is what that looked like, according to a young man from Afghanistan she spoke with: “He had been in Manston for a week and a half, in a tent with 170 people all sleeping on the floor. The roof was leaking, the shower wasn’t working, the loo wasn’t working.
“On Saturday morning, he has an interview with an Afghan interpreter with him, asking if he has friends and family in the UK. He says, yes, he has a friend in the UK he can stay with.”
After that interview, Amelia said, “he’s put on a bus to London – but while he has somewhere to stay, there’s no interpreter on the bus to help check that. People are getting on at the front asking if they are being taken to a hotel, and somebody who doesn’t understand them is telling them yes.”
Another interviewee, also from Afghanistan, told Amelia that the bus driver told them: “Go anywhere you want to go, it’s not my responsibility.” The asylum seeker went on: “I told the driver I don’t have any address or any relatives. He said: ‘I can’t do anything for you.’” Eventually, after charity volunteers contacted the Home Office, the stranded asylum seekers were taken to a hotel in Norwich.
It all sounds like a disorganised disaster. “Poor record-keeping at week 163 of the small boats response is system failure,” a damning report on the processing of people arriving by small boat said earlier this year. It is now week 201.
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Accommodation problems
The exorbitant costs of hotel accommodation for asylum seekers who have moved on from centres like Manston – currently estimated at £6.8m per day, up from £4.7m in January – has generated some anger, exacerbated by stories like this one reporting that one in four of those hotels are four or five star. (The story also says asylum seekers will be denied access to facilities like pools, spas and gyms.)
What that account misses is how dire living conditions are for many of those housed by the Home Office – a reality underlined yesterday by this story from Emine Sinmaz and Jessica Elgot about an alleged rape of a teenage boy and sexual assault of a child under 13 at an east London refugee hotel.
While the use of hotels is increasing because of the sheer number of people waiting for asylum claims to be processed, “the majority are in hostels or Home Office-run accommodation,” Amelia said. “We’ve run any number of stories over the years showing how poor the conditions are in some of these places.”
Meanwhile, Amelia added, the Home Office has a hard time finding the accommodation in the first place. “A Home Office source told me that almost every place they identify triggers complaints from local MPs, and they move on.” Councils make similar complaints, as this Matthew Weaver story explains. On Tuesday, LBC reported a government source claiming that Suella Braverman refused to approve hotel bookings for those at Manston because “they were in Tory voting areas”. (The Home Office denies this.)
All of that may explain why, whether or not a minority of asylum seekers are staying in hotels with a swimming pool they aren’t allowed to use anyway, in many other cases basic checks appear not to be carried out on accommodation. Last year, Mohammed Munib Majeedi, a five-year-old Afghan boy, fell to his death through an open window on the ninth-floor of a £33 per night hotel in Sheffield. There were reports that some windows on high floors had no latches and could be opened wide from the bottom.
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Poor standard of living
The group taken to London by coach were left without money, train tickets, or warm clothing. “They weren’t even told where they were in the city,” Amelia said. “They were given mobile phones, but with no charge or no credit. The person I spoke to had to ask a passerby to explain where he was, and borrow his phone.”
Even outside these extreme circumstances, provision for asylum seekers is spartan. Those in hotels, who have food provided, receive £8.24 per week to buy essentials. Those living in the community and buying their own food get £40 a week.
They are not allowed to work, but also have “no recourse to public funds”, meaning they are ineligible for benefits. Charities often have to provide clothes, especially in the cold winter months. Mobile phones which are confiscated when people first arrive are sometimes never returned (and have been illegally seized in the past).
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How is this crisis resolved?
“That huge backlog of cases is disastrous for the smooth running of the Home Office, but it’s also disastrous for the people caught up in it,” Amelia said. “They’re left with this profound sense of stagnation. They find it very hard to see how they’re going to rebuild their lives.”
With no end in sight to the crisis, Aubrey Allegretti reports that Conservative MPs are becoming restive at a growing sense that the government has failed to grip the problem. The Home Office source Amelia spoke to was not optimistic about resolving any of this soon.
“They were saying that there’s this very fundamental issue,” she said. “Ministers feel the pressure from the public, and they talk like they just want the officials to fix it. But nobody is really acknowledging how big the problems are – and that until you change the system on a deep level, all of this is going to keep happening.”
What to read about the UK’s interest rate rise
Rupert Jones explains how the 0.75% interest rate increase will affect loans, mortgages, credit cards and savings.
Polly Toynbee argues that Britain needs to spend its way out of the downturn. “It’s as if John Maynard Keynes had never proved the needless damage done by cutting during a recession, causing a long depression,” she writes.
Larry Elliott’s analysis says that the Bank of England appears unlikely to push rates higher. “Already, some members of the MPC are getting nervous about squeezing a fragile economy too hard,” he says.
The Guardian’s editorial from Wednesday views the rate rise as a mistake: “Doctors no longer believe that bleeding the sick will make them healthy. Unfortunately, economic policymakers still do.”
The FT’s Chris Giles explains (£) that while the Bank’s headline forecast is for interest rates rising further and a two-year recession, it has given more prominence than usual to an alternative scenario where rates stay constant - and usefully explains the difference between the two.
What else we’ve been reading
Rory Carroll writes movingly about Alison Millar’s documentary film about journalist Lyra McKee, who was shot dead at a riot in Derry in 2019. Carroll looks at the seismic impact McKee’s life and death had on Northern Ireland and the rest of the world. Nimo
Pulp had some bangers, didn’t they? You know you want to read Alexis Petridis’s Ranked! to see whether or not he put Common People at #1. Off you go. Archie
Daniel Radcliffe, Harry Potter star turned one of Britain’s kookiest actors, has answered Guardian readers’ questions. Topics include how he keeps his eyebrows under control, his new Weird Al film, and what he would take to a desert island. Nimo
Daniel Boffey has a fascinating piece on the growth of crowdfunding for weapons and kit for the Ukrainian army – focused on a set of 50 British armoured personnel carriers bought after £4.8m was raised within nine hours from donors including World of Mattresses. Archie
The US midterm elections are fast approaching as the country heads into recession and the economic crisis leaves more and more people destitute. Dani Anguiano reports from Sacramento on the city’sstaggering homelessness problem, which has grown 70% since 2019. Nimo
Sport
Europa League | Arsenal beat Zürich 1-0 to secure top spot in group A. Manchester United also won 1-0, against Real Sociedad, and progress to the knock-out stages but could not finish top of their group.
World Cup 2022 | It’s just a fortnight until the tournament begins, and our expert network has kicked in to gear, with a brace of team guides appearing daily. The first one is on Ecuador, whose squad has been ravaged by injury, a pattern we’ll see repeated across a number of nations as the consequences of sandwiching a tournament in the middle of a club season are felt.
World Cup 2022 | Barney Ronay’s column is on claims that criticism of Qatar is fundamentally racist. Racism may well exist alongside legitimate criticism, he notes – but he asks: “Are the only non‑racist people out there Adidas, McDonald’s, Budweiser, Coca‑Cola and Visa, which have wisely kept their counsel on Qatar’s World Cup?”
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The front pages
“‘Failed at every stage’ – family’s anger at Arena bomb response”. That’s the Guardian splash this Friday 4 November. On its front the Times has “Chaotic response cost two Arena lives” though its lead story is “Bank rates rise to head off spiralling inflation”. In response to the Manchester Arena findings, the Daily Mail asks: “What on earth has happened to our 999 services?” “Saffie fought … but she was let down” – that’s the Daily Mirror referring to the bombing’s youngest victim, Saffie-Rose Roussos, 8.
“This will hurt” – the Metro leads on the interest rate rise, about which the i says “Britain faces longest ever recession in ‘toxic shock’”. The Daily Express says “Stormy times ahead as UK faces longest recession” while the Telegraph focuses on the budget black hole: “Hunt set to launch capital gains raid”. The top story in today’s Financial Times is “Bank of England takes dovish stance despite biggest rate rise for 30 years” – reporting that the governor, Andrew Bailey, has played down the prospect of future sharp increases.
Something for the weekend
Our critics’ roundup of the best things to watch, read and listen to right now
TV
The Horne Section TV Show (All 4)
If a scripted comedy about Alex Horne’s real band, which performs all the music on Taskmaster, sounds a bit too much like a snake eating its own tail, there is good news. It’s a riotous, good-natured sitcom that sits somewhere between Flight of the Conchords and The Goodies, and is a delight to watch. Stuart Heritage
Music
Daniel Avery – Ultra Truth
Avery (above) has had a rich and varied career since the release of his 2013 debut album Drone Logic. On Ultra Truth, he variously evokes old-fashioned hardcore, Selected Ambient Works-era Aphex Twin and the sonically gorgeous but abysmally named sub-genre of “intelligent” drum’n’bass, for a perfectly balanced cocktail of euphoria and disquiet. Alexis Petridis
Film
Living
In Kazuo Ishiguro and Oliver Hermanus’s gentle, exquisitely sad remake of Akira Kurosawa’s 1953 film Ikiru, Bill Nighy plays a buttoned-up civil servant who works joylessly in a town planning department. Approaching retirement, he receives a terminal stomach-cancer diagnosis, and realises there is one thing he might still achieve: forcing the city authorities to build a children’s playground. Peter Bradshaw
Podcast
Pop Culture With Chanté Joseph
Episodes weekly, widely available
Chanté Joseph is here to feed you an essential weekly pop culture fix with the Guardian’s newest podcast. Each episode, she takes a juicy deep dive into a talking point with her guests – starting with the career of R&B phenomenon Rihanna, with guests Afua Hirsch and the Guardian’s Shaad D’Souza. Hollie Richardson
Today in Focus
Cop27: was this the year climate progress unravelled?
The war in Ukraine has led to soaring energy prices, political enmity and instability. Can the meeting of global leaders re-focus the world’s attention on the climate catastrophe?
Cartoon of the day | Martin Rowson
The Upside
A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad
Jamila Afghani has been a refugee six times. She most recently fled Afghanistan in August 2021, as the Taliban were retaking the country. Afghani now lives in Canada with her husband and children. As a young woman, she went to university, where she gained an undergraduate degree and two master’s degrees. Education had changed her life, she said, and so she set up a centre in Kabul to help schoolchildren.
By 2021 Afghani had opened dozens of literacy centres – more than 100,000 girls were enrolled. Upon receiving pushback from local imams about her work, she founded a project to persuade them that women’s rights are within the teachings of Islam and has supported victims of domestic violence. Recently, her office in Afghanistan was invaded by the Taliban – it was a reminder that she still lived in exile and that women’s rights were being eroded. But Afghani remains optimistic: “I’m hopeful that no darkness is for ever; no cruel, abusive regime can remain. The dark-mindedness of the Taliban will collapse.”
Sign up here for a weekly roundup of The Upside, sent to you every Sunday
Bored at work?
And finally, the Guardian’s crosswords to keep you entertained throughout the day – with plenty more on the Guardian’s Puzzles app for iOS and Android. Until Monday.
