Refugee Champion Lord Dubs Slams U.K.’s Offshore Asylum Proposals

(Bloomberg) -- A Labour member of the House of Lords who arrived in the U.K. as a child refugee from the Nazis condemned proposals to process asylum seekers in offshore holding centers.

Plans being examined by Boris Johnson's government are “ridiculous” and would “stir up tensions in the community,” Alf Dubs said in an interview. “It makes us seem to be a very nasty and mean little country. I thought we were better than that.”

Ministers are looking at whether to hold people seeking asylum or refugee status in the U.K. on disused ferries moored off the coast, according to a person familiar with the matter. Policy officials have also looked at sending people to Moldova, Morocco or Papua New Guinea, and to the Atlantic islands of Ascension and St Helena, which are overseas British territories more than 4,000 miles (6,400 kilometers) away.

Johnson Mulls Holding U.K. Asylum Applicants on Ships Offshore

“They're flailing about, they've gone completely mad,” Dubs said. “Moldova, Ascension Island, ships' hulks, complete nonsense. I just think they've lost it, this isn't coherent awfulness, it's incoherent awfulness.”

Dubs, who traveled to the U.K. at the age of six from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia in the 1930s as part of the Kindertransport rescue mission, has long campaigned for the U.K. government to offer sanctuary to hundreds of unaccompanied child refugees.

‘Stirs Up Racism'

“It's very nasty because it stirs up tensions in the community, it stirs up racism,” Dubs said of the latest proposals. “It has a very nasty effect on people, on the country, because if the government hates asylum seekers that much then there must be something to hate.”

Johnson's spokesman, James Slack, said ministers and officials are examining a range of different options and the work is continuing. The government wants to deter people smugglers and criminal gangs bringing people across the English Channel, often in dangerously overloaded boats, he said.

“We are developing plans to reform our policies around illegal migration and asylum to ensure that we are able to provide protection to those who need it while preventing abuse of the system and the criminality associated with it,” Slack said in a conference call on Thursday. “That includes looking at what a whole host of other countries do. But that work is ongoing.”

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