Action group to tackle Nick Clegg over refugees

Representatives the South Yorkshire Migration and Asylum Action Group group are to lobby the Deputy Prime Minister over what it claims are potentially damaging cutbacks.

SYMAAG also plans to campaign against cuts to voluntary sector services and to hold local politicians to their pledges to back sanctuary for refugees and asylum seekers.

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The move follows a talk by Jim Steinke of the Northern Refugee Centre to SYMAAG, when he outlined recent cuts in Government programmes for advice work, employment services and mentoring with local asylum seekers and refugees.

Programmes aimed at vulnerable women asylum seekers and refugees would also have to end and asylum teams in local authorities set up to organise dispersal of asylum seekers were likely to face more cuts.  

The NRC, founded in Sheffield in the 1980s, is one of only two remaining regional independent voluntary sector organisations working with refugees in the whole of England.

The meeting was told that the cuts appeared to contradict the Government’s stated support for volunteers and the voluntary sector, as volunteers would be unable to contribute if the co-ordinating staff were cut so drastically.

SYMAAG members at the meeting, many of them refugees and asylum seekers from local agencies, faith groups and campaign groups, challenged the way the  coalition policy was directed at hitting poorer working class families and vulnerable minorities.

It was pointed out that many economists challenged the way the Government was dealing with the deficit and there was widespread rejection of the idea that destroying vital public services and jobs in voluntary organisations, local councils and regional organisations had anything to do with reducing the deficit.  

Members feared that what was really going on was a dogmatic “destruction and privatisation” of public and voluntary sector services vital for everybody as well as asylum seekers and refugees.

The coalition seemed willing to hand out vital services for refugees and asylum seekers to multinational corporations, such as Serco, which were already involved in running detention centres, the group claimed.