Insurgents in the cul-de-sac
BBC Radio 4's Today programme peddles Home Office rhetoric on child asylum seekers while dangerous new policing proposals go unremarked.
Previously: Concerned looks at the Copa Copaganda
Last weekend, The Observer reported:
Dozens of asylum-seeking children have been kidnapped by gangs from a Brighton hotel run by the Home Office in a pattern apparently being repeated across the south coast…
A whistleblower, who works for Home Office contractor Mitie, and child protection sources describe children being abducted off the street outside the hotel and bundled into cars.
“Children are literally being picked up from outside the building, disappearing and not being found. They’re being taken from the street by traffickers,” said the source.
It has also emerged that the Home Office was warned repeatedly by police that the vulnerable occupants of the hotel – asylum-seeking children who had recently arrived in the UK without parents or carers – would be targeted by criminal networks.
About 600 unaccompanied children have passed through the Sussex hotel in the past 18 months, with 136 reported missing. More than half of these – 79 – remain unaccounted for.
In October 2022, the Home Office admitted that 222 unaccompanied children seeking asylum were missing from hotels with their whereabouts unknown.
Last Sunday’s report included a quote from a Home Office spokesperson…
We are seeing an unprecedented rise in dangerous Channel crossings. This is putting extreme pressure on our asylum system and has meant we have had no alternative but to temporarily use hotels to give children a roof over their heads while long-term accommodation is found.
On average, unaccompanied children seeking asylum are moved to long-term care within 15 days of arriving in a hotel, but we know more needs to be done. That is why we are working closely with local authorities to increase the number of placements available.
Across the week though, the line pushed to reporters has changed and hardened. On the Today programme this morning, the BBC’s Home Editor, Mark Easton, said:
What we’re talking about here. These aren’t sort of nine and ten-year-old little kids who are going missing. What they are — almost entirely — is 16 (or people who say they are 16 or 17) and they are Albanian males. There are people from Afghanistan, Egypt, India, Vietnam, Pakistan, and Turkey, [who] have also gone missing. 13 are under 16 years of age. Only one of all the 440 who have gone missing are female.
I have spoken to someone at the National Crime Agency and what they say is that they, you know, absolutely recognise the issue here. These young people are often trafficked, sometimes willingly to be honest. They come knowing that they are going to be employed by criminal gangs in the UK and they do, they disappear from the hotels — they’re not locked up — they disappear as soon as they are able and then they often are found in car washes or in cannabis farms.
Later in the programme, introducing the topic with a guest, Nick Robinson used the same line:
These are asylum-seeking children who’ve gone missing in quite large numbers. Now, children they are — they’re under 18 — but the Home Office is making the, I think important, point: These are often teenage boys, Albanian in the main — nine out of ten — who either have been trafficked or have willingly taken part in criminal gangs. It’s easy to state the problem, it’s rather harder, isn’t it, to say what you’d do about it?
The argument here is that Albanian children are different to British children: wilder, more wicked, and more lawless. A 16-year-old British boy — well, assuming they were white — trafficked and exploited by criminal gangs would be described as a victim in the Today programme’s script. But both Easton and Robinson talk of Albanian children “willingly” taking part as if there is no grooming or manipulation involved.
Robinson was interviewing the Children’s Commissioner, Rachel de Souza, who said earlier this week:
I am deeply concerned by the risk facing unaccompanied asylum-seeking children placed in hotels from those determined to exploit them. We must treat them as the vulnerable children they are and support them properly from the moment they set foot on our shores.
But Today colluded with the Home Office’s rhetoric today, parroting lines designed — and the word “designed” is important — precisely to dehumanise children. Barely a day passes without a story in the British media about how ‘our’ teenagers are subject to malign influences and vulnerable to dangerous messages; but Albanian kids? Nope. They’re hardened criminals from birth.
The implication that teenage asylum-seekers are not like British teenagers (or often not actually teenagers at all, as Easton nodded to with his “people who say they are 16 or 17” aside) ties into the blanket coverage of an Afghan asylum-seeker who lied about his age and murdered a man in Bournemouth, having previous murdered two refugees in Serbia. The aim of many of those stories is to take a single shocking case and extrapolate it into suspicion about all asylum-seekers.
Lawangeen Abdulrahimzai, 21, who stabbed Thomas Roberts in March 2022, was granted permission to stay in the UK despite having an asylum application refused in Denmark weeks before and his conviction in absentia for the murders in Serbia. It’s a horrific case and one that has been exploited ruthlessly by British newspapers. Sarah Vine wrote in The Daily Mail this week that Roberts’ murder:
[It] causes me considerable distress — and just imagine the pain and anguish of Thomas's loved ones.
The order of her concerns is instructive; so is the way the column shifts from the specific (Abdulrahimzai) to the general (asylum seekers in an uncheckable anecdote):
A few years ago, for example, a woman on my ward committee in London voiced concerns about a group of migrants — all men who appeared to be in their early 20s or 30s — who were being housed by the Home Office in a local hotel.
Some of them were hanging out in the local park, smoking drugs; a number of women had said they felt anxious walking past. One claimed she had even been propositioned.
On one occasion, several residents had witnessed one of them flying into a rage, kicking the door of the hotel, smashing the glass and screaming abuse at the staff. He was angry, apparently, because his Home Office application had been delayed. Her concerns were immediately dismissed by others in the group, who all but accused her to her face of being racist. They were all, we were informed, 'lovely people'.
When I raised the issue privately with a local councillor, he told me it was simply impossible for him to pursue the matter.
In other words, he was too scared. And I can see why. If that had been a group of white scaffolders, no problem. But asylum seekers? No way.
Fortunately, in that case nothing serious ever came of it. But the errors surrounding Lawangeen Abdulrahimzai ultimately cost an innocent man his life.
The knotting together of rumour, innuendo and gossip (“…nothing serious ever came of it.”) with a case where something fatally serious came of it. Vine hijacks the grief and trauma of Thomas Roberts’ family for a cheap rhetorical trick.
Lawangeen Abdulrahimzai did not commit murder because he was an asylum seeker. He committed murder because he is a violent man. The UK has plenty of ‘homegrown’ murderers and exported a great deal of murder to Afghanistan. In July 2022, Bereket Selomun, who came from Eritrea as a teenager and was granted asylum in the UK, was killed in Stevenage. His death was covered by the local press and ITV News, as well as in a single short Daily Mail story.
Selomun’s death is a complicated story — the men accused of his murder also come from the town’s small Eritrean community — but it hasn’t led to same level of coverage because it wasn’t a story of a British person killed by an asylum seeker. That Abdulrahimzai lied about his age adds to the case’s appeal to columnists and news editors; it strengthens the idea that large numbers of unaccompanied children seeking asylum are nothing of the sort.
But the facts don’t bear that out; even looking at the Home Office’s own notoriously dubious data, roughly 19% of those who said they were children when claiming asylum in the UK between January 2018 and March 2022 were deemed adults. Writing in The Daily Telegraph this weekend, former Home Secretary, Priti Patel, used the murder of Thomas Roberts to argue:
… our generosity has also been open to egregious abuse. The ages of asylum seekers are disputed in many thousands of cases. Worse yet, during the 2016-2020 period, some 54 per cent of disputed cases who claimed to be a child were found to be adults.
Notice that Patel talks about the percentage of disputed cases rather than the total of all cases. She knows that “over 50%!” is a much more tantalisingly terrifying figure for Telegraph readers than under 20%. It’s also a fact that many asylum seekers simply do not know how old they are; for instance, in 2008, Afghan government figures suggested under 1% of the population had a birth certificate. I doubt it’s improved much under the Taliban.
At the same time as the BBC is helping push the Home Office’s dehumanising lines on children seeking asylum, the government is proposing to bring more of the military tactics used in Iraq and Afghanistan to the streets of England and Wales. On Tuesday’s edition of Today, the BBC’s Home Affairs correspondent Daniel Sandford explained:
The phrase ‘clear, hold, build’ comes from the counter-insurgency concept of clearing territory, holding onto it, and then building resilience into an area to stop the insurgents from returning. In the British policing context, it refers to disrupting organised crime, and clearing criminals from an area, holding it with extra policing, and then working with partners like councils to build a better community that will resist the return of drug dealing and violence. A pilot in West Yorkshire saw substantial reductions in burglary, drug offences, and anti-social behaviour.
That isn’t a brief quote from the report; it’s the entirety of the report. Sandford’s piece — part of a news round-up — was broadcast before the Home Office published the press release about the scheme on its website. While the initiative was mentioned in a TV news bulletin there have been no further BBC News stories on it; Sandford’s short summary — which gave no time to challenge or analyse the Home Office’s assertions, much less explore the “counter-insurgency” context — was all the audience got.
Still, at least the BBC mentioned it. The announcement was not covered in any of the newspapers on either Tuesday or Wednesday. Having married into a Northern Irish family, I’m not surprised by the ease with which the British media accepts the idea of incorporating military tactics into domestic policing. But the focus on ‘shocking’ cases while ignoring or, more charitably, failing to find the space for stories on strategic moves is striking.
‘Clear, Hold, Build’ has its roots in the counter-insurgency tactics used by the British in Malaya and against the Mau Mau rebellion, which were then picked up and expanded by the Americans as “pacification” during the Vietnam War. Condoleeza Rice ‘refreshed’ the idea for the 00s in 2005 with the declaration that:
In short, with the Iraqi Government, our political-military strategy has to be to clear, hold, and build: to clear areas from insurgent control, to hold them securely, and to build durable, national Iraqi institutions.
Fred Kaplan, who examined US counter-insurgency strategies in Afghanistan and Iraq in his 2013 book The Insurgents, says:
The premise of counter-insurgency is that insurgents arise out of sociopolitical conditions and, therefore, the point of a counterinsurgency campaign, or the goal of it, is not just to kill and capture insurgents, but to change the living conditions to help the government provide basic services for people so support the insurgency dries up.
I can understand why a corrupt government that cannot provide basic services might look to the disaster it helped deliver in Afghanistan for inspiration. But journalists should question the implications of applying counter-insurgency tactics to domestic policing and what they say about the state of Britain, specifically England and Wales.
The ‘improving people’s living conditions’ bit is absent from the Home Secretary’s bombastic rhetoric. In the Home Office press release. Suella Braverman says:
Clear, Hold, Build is a common-sense policing approach. Taking out these gangs will prevent violence, stem the flow of harmful drugs poisoning our communities and cut down on antisocial behaviour. That will, in turn, create a brighter future for young people in those areas.
Famously, flooding the streets with police always guarantees a “brighter future for young people”.
Had journalists engaged with the Home Office’s claims in this case, they might have asked why “areas of the country [are] blighted by organised crime” and asked for data to prove the assertion that the strategy has led to “a significant drop in burglaries, drug offences and antisocial behaviour” in West Yorkshire Police’s pilot area.
They could also have questioned the Home Office’s exploitative mention of 9-year-old Olivia Pratt-Korbel, who was killed in Liverpool last year, and whose death prompted Priti Patel to throw £350,000 at Merseyside Police to expand its ‘Clear, Hold, Build’ pilot. Earlier this month, the Liverpool Echo reported that £47,000 will be spent on more CCTV for “key hotspot areas” with a further £50,000 going to a ‘Clear, Hold, Build’ participatory budget that community groups can bid for.
In a post for War on the Rocks about ‘Clear, Hold, Build’ as a military tactic, Dr David Ucko says:
Whereas clear-hold-build suggests a linear path toward success, what is really at stake is nothing less than reversing societal breakdown, all while in the midst of ongoing war… Wherever this approach is to be tried, its implementation must be suffused with an understanding of the political economy of armed conflict: the patronage networks, the functions of violence, and the distribution of privilege and power, both at the local and state levels.
…each locality [is] heaving with activity, intrigue, and politics, all of which must be understood and factored into the planning and conduct of operations. Specifically, as it is the counterinsurgents’ intention to address violence, locating the drivers of conflict will be critical and should guide ensuing activities.
In the same week that the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police admitted two or three of his officers will face criminal charges every week for months to come, the Home Office is proposing to give forces more power and pretending that the police themselves are not “drivers of conflict” or heavily involved in “intrigue and politics”.
The only publications to have reported on the Home Office announcements are the policing trade titles Police Professional and Police Oracle; unsurprisingly neither offers much in the way of critical analysis. Perhaps people living in what the Home Office calls “highest-harm hot-spot areas” aren’t interested in how the police will deal with the ‘insurgents’ in their town centres and housing estates.
The Home Office press release also announces a consultation — ending in March — on a raft of new proposals. Without newspapers and broadcasters telling them, how will the public know about that? They won’t unless they’re dedicated browsers of the news releases section of the Home Office website.
The proposals include expanding which agencies can use serious crime prevention orders (SCPOs) — which are currently limited to terrorism cases — to include every regional police force, the National Crime Agency and the British Transport Police. An SCPO can restrict who you ‘associate’ with, limit your travel, and oblige you to report your financial affairs to the police. You don’t need to have been convicted of anything and the new proposals include a plan to allow Crown Courts to grant an SCPO even after someone is acquitted.
All that boils down to the police having the ability to place huge restrictions on you even if they haven’t proved wrongdoing; suspicion is enough. And if you go to court and are found not guilty, they can still request and be granted the legal right to limit your liberties. The proposals also include a plan for “[improved] monitoring and enforcement” so forces can “enable closer management” i.e. greater surveillance.
Part of the climate of copaganda that I wrote about in the wake of the David Carrick case is the failure to analyse and challenge authoritarian measures until they are much further down the line. The same pattern happened around the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Act 2021 (aka “the Spy Cops bill”) and the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 (the bill which was categorically not killed). ‘Shocking’ individual cases make for more exciting copy and are an easier sell to news editors; there’s a sense that audiences require ‘human interest’ to care coupled with a taste for culture war angles.
This is all typified by Today peddling the Home Office’s evil lines about asylum-seeking children from one briefing while barely glancing at another press release. It and the newspapers are engaged in a failure of reporting because telling stories is so much easier, especially when the villains are written for you.
Thanks to Dr Kate Devlin and JPJ Hill for reading today’s draft.
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Thanks for writing about the Today programmes reporting on clear hold build. I briefly heard it and felt like I was going mad- “developed in Afghanistan” but… but…but?!
Sigh.