Come and join us on Monday 21st March, at 11.30am, here at KLS.
We’re taking part in a ‘day of action’ to show our support for refugees and to protest against the new Nationality and Borders Bill currently passing through the House of Commons and the Lords. Our local Battersea MP, Marsha de Cordova, will be joining us too.
Over the last few days we’ve seen the UK’s government intransigent position to make it nigh on impossible for women and children from Ukraine to gain safe passage to these shores. This is not a new thing. It’s been going on for decades, by subsequent governments.
If passed into law, this new Borders Bill will deny many refugees the chance to seek sanctuary in the UK, criminalise many of those who try, isolate refugees in harmful out-of-town institutions, and undermine 70 years of international co-operation under the UN refugee convention. More detailed briefings from Together With Refugees coalition members can be found here.
On 21st March, we’re joining in the Together With Refugees coalition’s day of action to demonstrate support for the fairer, kinder and more effective approach to refugees that we all want to see. Our ESOL (English) adult students and our Love to Learn young people – many of whom are from refugee backgrounds – will be writing and talking about their own experiences of safety: what it means to be safe. We’ll collect these on orange hearts (a symbol of refugees)* and display these on the front of our building on Battersea High Street. We hope this small action will help to raise the importance of refugees in and for our community and protest against the Borders Bill.
Join us
Do join us on 21st March at 11.30am.
*Orange heart symbol: The heart is a symbol that we can all stand behind to express solidarity as a movement. It uses the colours of the refugee nation flag created by Yara Said for the first ever refugee team in the 2016 Olympics. The colours were inspired by a lifebelt, representing hope. The heart was developed with refugee organisations and people with lived experience of being refugees
About Together With Refugees
Together With Refugees is a coalition of over 300 national and local organisations (including KLS), who believe in showing compassion to refugees. Members include refugee-led groups and those representing people with lived experience of the asylum system, faith, student, women’s rights, human rights and LGBT+ groups, trade unions, housing organisations, legal and advice centres, international development NGOs and arts projects, among others.
Together With Refugees is founded on a simple, but powerful, set of shared convictions: how we treat refugees is about who we are. At our best, we are welcoming and kind to those facing difficult times. If any one of us feared for our lives or for the lives of our loved ones, we’d want to know that others would help us to safety.
Together, we are calling for a better approach to supporting refugees that is more effective, fair and humane. This means standing up for people’s ability to seek safety in the UK no matter how they came here, and ensuring people can live in dignity while they wait for a decision on their asylum application. It means empowering refugees to rebuild their lives and make valuable contributions to their communities. And it means the UK working with other countries to do our bit to help people who are forced to flee their homes.