New Londoners usher in Refugee Week

OneWorld UK

By Daniel Nelson

Labour activist Tony Benn recalls a trip to Nottingham for a meeting, many years ago, at which someone complained, The trouble here is all these immigrants.

Benn could not recall seeing any immigrants in the city: the immigrants turned out to be Scottish miners - Theyd been sacked in Scotland and sent to the Nottingham coalfields.

He also recalls a party meeting in the West Country at which a participant who made a comment was told, We dont want all these newcomers interfering.

Says Benn: The guy [who made the comment had been born five miles away and had moved into the ward and was therefore a newcomer.

The memories are part of an interview in The New Londoners, a newspaper being given away in the capital as part of Refugee Week (18-24 June). They were quoted by the head of the UN refugee agency in London, Bemma Donkoh, at the papers launch in City Hall on Monday.

Deputy Mayor Nicky Gavron told the 120 guests that she took a special interest in refugee issues because, as a Jew, her mother fled persecution in NAZI Germany, and was subsequently barred from working in war-time Britain because she was German.

Other stories highlighted in the newspaper include:

a UK national, Reginald Kargbo, who is suing the Home Office for false imprisonment, loss of earnings and stress after he was stopped at Heathrow airport and held in a detention centre

a yet-to-be-published study carried out by the Cardiff University School of Journalism and Media Studies, with funding from Oxfam, that says the media use the word asylum as synonymous with illegal immigrant", bogus, scrounger, criminal and terrorist

an article by Angelina Jolie in which she says that investment and more thoughtful international politics in the 1980s and 90s might have changed the course of history Osama bin Laden, for example, thrived on our neglect of Afghanistan

a description of life on vouchers by a 50-year-old Eritrean asylum-seeker (Shop staff really make us suffer. They look down on us. But they dont realise what we have been through.)

a report on ethnic food outlets that says Thai and Japanese are the fastest growing sectors but Britains 9,000 Indian restaurants account for 47 per cent of all ethnic food sales

how Peter Paduh has turned the £10 with which he fled Sarajevo into an award-winning multi-million-pound business

George Mwangis campaign for a limit to the time people can be held in immigration detention centres (One man I met in Harmondsworth has been there five years. That is longer than people have been held in Guantanamo.)

news of a competition to design a British sari

and why British Olympic hopeful Mo Farah thinks football is ruining athletics.

* Refugee Week events in London