Why Scotland is straining to take its place on the world stage

Editor Laura Webster has compiled a series of essays from top contributors including Neal Ascherson, Assa SamakeRoman, Jonathon Shafi, John Curtice, Professor Aileen McHarg and many more.

The book explores where the independence movement has been, where it is and where it’s going, as we look to the future having passed the anniversary. You can buy it for £9.99 from our online shop – just click HERE for more information. 

IT was nearly midnight on November 26, 2013, when the long-awaited “White Paper” outlining the Scottish Government’s proposals for an independent Scotland was published.

I was up late in Aotearoa New Zealand, where I was a visiting professor at the University of Waikato. I quickly jumped to the index to see what was being proposed for detention, deportation and destitution of people seeking asylum, and for a refugee strategy, my heart in my mouth.

That year marked a decade since I’d started visiting Dungavel Immigration ­Removal Centre as a volunteer with ­Scottish Detainee Visitors.

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It was eight years, in 2013, since we’d started ­doing what has since become widespread, ­offering temporary home to destitute ­people seeking asylum. We’d already ­hosted people from China, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Algeria and Eritrea. We’d also come to visit their homes after their ­asylum claims were, of course, settled and become honorary grandparents to their children and new babies.

We’d become foster parents to an unaccompanied minor from Eritrea and campaigned, following in the footsteps of Jock and Margaret, of Glasgow Campaign to Welcome Refugees, of Jean and Noreen in Kingsway, of the “Legend that is Mr ­Girvan” of Clydebank High, and of the Glasgow Girls. Each of these campaigns helped inspire us to prevent the ongoing detention, and then threatened deportation of our daughter.

I’d also joined the board as a trustee of Right to Remain to bring the learning from campaigns in Glasgow to a more structured approach to migration justice. Remember, migrants and refugees have rights, and the UK was, according to its rhetoric at least, “a proud” signatory to the Refugee ­Convention.

My day job at the University of Glasgow involved running research projects considering refugee experiences, not least in multilingual environments, and co-leading Glasgow Refugee Asylum and Migration Network (GRAMNet), with Professor Rebecca Kay.

GRAMNet is still going strong, as a vehicle for connecting the resources and understandings of the academy with the needs of people working at grassroots in communities. Such initiatives enable those who do not have the luxury of time to read to understand what the structural components are to the injustices faced by so many daily, in what, in 2013, had become, UK wide, a very hostile environment indeed.

All this by way of context as to why it mattered to me viscerally and intellectually that Scotland’s Future was a future for refugees; for what in 2014 would be termed “New Scots”.

Chapter seven of Scotland’s Future reads: “In an independent Scotland, we will close Dungavel, end the practice of dawn raids and inhumane treatment of those who have exercised their ­legitimate right to seek asylum. If a failed ­asylum seeker is a risk to the public, secure ­accommodation will be sought while steps are taken to remove them. If there is a need for forcible removals, these will be undertaken with respect for human rights. Independence will also afford the opportunity to address asylum seekers’ access to employment, education and ­accommodation.”

When I’d arrived in Aotearoa New Zealand, 2013, I was curious, coming from a city of dawn raids, detention, deportation and endless destitution, what the pressing issues were for refugees.

My colleagues told me, in all earnestness – which was admirable – that women refugees needed free driving lessons. The idea that this might be a leading priority of a refugee campaign made me simply ­envious of my colleagues in New Zealand. If only this was our number one problem in Scotland.

In the 10 years since the failed referendum campaign of 2014 and the heady, energy of the compelling ways the referendum campaigners addressed the question to the people of Scotland of what kind of a country they might live in if they were to exercise their right to self-determination, I have often thought, with a sickness in the pit of my stomach, of the many lives that would have been saved, in the asylum system and internationally, had we been in a position to implement the ­proposals, which were informed by Scotland’s ­Future.

The decisions made relating to asylum claims in the UK cannot and must not be disconnected from foreign policy. It is here that Scotland’s present situation, as a non-independent country, is rendered exceptionally weak.

While the present-day rhetoric on refugees and migration is forthright and good, it is at the mercy of a foreign policy and a domestic policy of rampant xenophobic leadership, and ­appeasement of xenophobia.

Since 2014, I have lost count of how many home secretaries we’ve had to ­navigate, each with an increasingly ­hostile approach.

The present incumbent is continuing the xenophobic rhetoric of being “strong on …” and proposing “surging” (the new word of choice) deportations.

Add to this Brexit, the Covid pandemic, when New Scots integration was suspended and emergency humanitarian aid was ­needed, Park Inn – the first ­extrajudicial killing of a person by the police in Scotland since devolution – Baroness Kennedy’s ­Asylum Inquiry on asylum ­accommodation ­provided by the UK ­Government in ­Scotland, Operation Pitting, the ­disastrous British military operation to evacuate British nationals and eligible Afghans from Kabul (spoiler alert – the latter was a miserable failure from which we are still trying to find routes to safety for Afghans), the Tigray war with an estimated 800,000 dead and not a single safe route established to the UK or a bespoke Scottish humanitarian visa scheme.

If only Scotland could have stepped in, worked with regional partners, the UNHCR, used the international instruments of the United Nations, on behalf of refugees worldwide, as well as developing schemes which are implementable and not going to cause a nightmare of torn social fabric from hasty operations imposed from Westminster and with much crisis thinking happening in a vacuum.

Little of asylum policy has been mature or has managed to work internationally since Little Britain and Brexit protectionism was imposed on a population in Scotland who rejected it roundly in the Brexit referendum of 2016.

Since 2018, in my role as convener of the New Scots Refugee Integration Strategy – a partnership of Scottish Government, Cosla and Scottish Refugee Council – I’ve felt the powerlessness acutely as we either mitigate, with a non-existent budget and a lot of exhausted and exhausting good will, or resist – an equally exhausting strategy in the long term.

This was acutely the case in 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine.

The UK Government rushed to invent a safeguarding nightmare of a Facebook-run hosting scheme which, after much campaigning, eventually led to some safeguards being put in place. Scotland advocated successfully for a bespoke Scottish humanitarian visa, with the liability on the Scottish Government, not individual hosts, as in England. But Scotland could not act easily or autonomously in concert with European Union, or even UNHCR.

Across Scotland, generous people opened their homes to the largely white, European population that were granted safe routes and humanitarian visas to come to the UK.

Predominantly women and children arrived on what was an uncapped scheme at the start. A major housing crisis exposing the fact that Scotland does not have any social housing available to sustain a mass foreign evacuation led to the successful, temporary use of cruise ships in Leith and on the Clyde, and more use of hotels.

Resettlement this was not, however, and it is only now, in 2024, with the launch of the refreshed New Scots Refugee Integration Strategy, that the Ukraine programme is aligning with New Scots.

Meanwhile, those who were, for example, studying in Ukraine from Africa, who were caught up in the invasion, were denied visas into Europe or the UK. The ethics and optics require no explication. The racism inherent in the asylum system is all too well-documented and systemic.

For those of us working in the asylum and migration sector, and those of us volunteering or activists hoping for a break, or at least a chink of light, it’s been unrelentingly grim. War in Sudan broke out in April 2023, followed quickly by another botched evacuation also, as with Kabul, stranding many eligible for evacuation and settlement.

According to the United Nations, eight million people are now at risk of famine. This barely registers in the mainstream media. Again, a foreign policy, an ability to enable international aid beyond the small bespoke schemes – effective as many are – that Scottish international development can offer, could have co-ordinated refugee relief and emergency efforts with longer term resettlement schemes and ended the “small boats” nightmare with relative policy ease. Humanitarian evacuation visas remain a key pillar in any internationalist refugee policy worth its salt.

On October 13, 2024, Israel ordered a ground invasion of the Gaza Strip, the fifth since the illegal blockade of Gaza, and following 76 years of occupation.

(Image: Jane Barlow/PA)

The parents-in-law of the then First Minister of Scotland, Humza Yousaf (above), were visiting family in the Gaza strip and were trapped for several weeks. The calls from the First Minister for a ceasefire, for evacuation, for medical evacuation visas to Scotland, all fell on deaf ears. Refuge denied, even when offered.

I watched and advocated in what at first was a very lonely place, as colleagues were murdered and 15 years of continuous research projects focused on building sustainable peace in Gaza were razed to the ground.

A legal advisory opinion by the International Court of Justice determined that the occupation of Palestine is illegal and constitutes apartheid. Israel is now embroiled in an ongoing case at the International Court of Justice, under the so-called “Genocide Convention”.

At the time of writing, 11 months have been spent following the livestreaming of unimaginable violence and killing by Israel, and the rise of a popular movement across Scotland and the world, concerned but powerless to prevent the carnage and the flagrant disregard for international law.

I read the reports from human rights organisations into the violence, including sexual violence, in Tigray. I threw up after reading.

But it was nothing on the eye-witness reports and daily briefings I receive from Palestinian academics and artist colleagues living in the Gaza Strip. And I watch myself, and others, as we “set aside” other plausible genocides – in Tigray, in Sudan, in Myanmar – and focus our energy on what has become a symbol.

Palestine is the litmus test for protection of refugees.

It is where an accommodation was found through the setting up of UNRWA as an organisation separate to UNHCR, to allow for Jewish refugees to settle in Israel after the Holocaust and Second World War. Palestinian refugees claim a right to return and the majority live as refugees in their own land, subject to regular breaches in their human rights, and have done for 76 years.

The war on Gaza is an intensification of genocidal acts, according to Francesca Albanese, in her magisterial legal report, entitled The Anatomy of Genocide and presented to the 2024 meeting of the United Nations Human Rights Council.

This report finds that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating the commission of the following acts of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza has been met: Killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to groups’ members; and deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part. Genocidal acts were approved and given effect following statements of genocidal intent issued by senior military and government officials.

In the unrelenting gloom of what characterises the present and the unrelenting pain of the past 10 years, there have been two important streams of hope and action.

Firstly, the politicians – and this applies to many, if not quite all, of the parties in Holyrood – have consistently held the line rejecting racist and xenophobic policies and rhetoric. Could they have done more? Yes.

Does rhetoric and leadership make a difference to the welcome people experience? Yes, and this is proven in many an academic article pointing to such positive leadership as critical in preventing the sowing of seeds of genocidal thought or action.

Does such rhetoric and leadership enable and encourage welcoming behaviour? Yes. But only when coupled with the social conditions that sustain it.

The second and arguably most internationally important stream of hope has come from the solid sense of social justice in the Yes movement and the building on anti-deportation campaigns in the city of Glasgow, into a Scotland-wide movement.

While the Black Lives Matter protests were nationwide, steady and well-researched measures – such as the Apology and Reparative Justice for Enslaved Peoples that was made in 2019 by the University of Glasgow – have allowed for progress.

Much remains to be done but equally, the campaigns in Glasgow alluded to at the start of this chapter – the Glasgow Girls, the thwarting of dawn raids – all showed their metal on May 13, 2021, in Kenmure Street, when the people of Glasgow came together to prevent the deportation of their friend. This protest went viral worldwide and caught the imagination of many.

It was not controlled or controllable by politicians and instead showed that latent and yet active understandings of how to resist xenophobia through direct action are present.

When, in August 2024, race riots broke out in England, including arson attacks on asylum accommodation in hotels, Scotland did not experience the same violence. Every such sentence must be followed up with necessary re-statement of the fact that there is no room for complacency or belief in Scottish exceptionalism.

This did not happen because Scots are somehow more compassionate or less likely to resort to violence against others – crime statistics don’t exactly bear this out – but it does point to these two parallel streams of hope and action, present in Scotland and subdued in England, as being critical.

There is little prospect ahead, realistically, for Scotland to be able to determine its own foreign policy or even its asylum policy. Devolved powers and the budgets to sustain even positive initiatives, like New Scots, are under such threat in 2024 that death by a thousand cuts seems inevitable.

An increasingly burned-out third and public sector try to ensure safeguards, protection, kindness and statutory delivery of services but it’s a gale-bitten struggle. Many colleagues have left the sector, unable to handle the utter horror and levels of despair. And these were the strong of heart.

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So, what we have to take us into the future is “Kenmure” as verb, some strong rhetoric and a framework for New Scots Integration based firmly in ­human rights. It’s not much, but it’s more than many a people straining for ­self-determination or to throw off oppressive politics.

What was written in ­Scotland’s ­Future is even more important in the ­polycrises ­worldwide which threaten us. ­Respect the ­international frameworks, ­develop their reach and justice, work for ­equitable futures for all residing in our ­country, ­protect those needed additional ­protections because, through no fault of their own, they were caught up in the schemes of violent leaders.

Professor Tim Ingold, ­professor ­emeritus of anthropology at the ­University of ­Aberdeen, speaks of “­ontogenesis” – the bringing into ­creative existence through the acts of living and being. We need ­resource and ­autonomy to be able to fully act justly towards ­ refugees, ­nationally and ­internationally, but we must never put off the action ­because the ideal is not yet achieved.

Kenmure it. Put into practice a belief that there is indeed a goodness at the heart of humanity, planted more deeply than all that is wrong.