EU citizens: "Our rights should be granted automatically"

Message from the3million: 

BREAKING: UK's Secretary of State Brandon Lewis confirms that EU citizens in the UK will be subject to full immigration enforcement and liable to removal if they miss the Settled Status deadline.

The deadline is  31st December 2020 in case of no deal, or 30th June 2021 in case of a deal.


> Here is a translation of an extract from the exclusive Interview with Stefanie Bolzen in Germany's newspaper DIE WELT: 

The Secretary of state confirms that there are no specific plans to deal with those EU, EEA, Swiss citizens and their families who miss the EU Settlement Scheme deadline and that they will be "liable to prosecution for unlawful residence". 

THE 3 MILLION reply: 

"It is not too late to stop this madness of turning law abiding citizens into unlawful residents.
The status can still be made automatic, put into law now, and the EU Settlement Scheme changed from application to registration."

Our rights should be granted automatically

​

#RegisterNotApply

EU citizens were promised that our rights to remain in the UK would be granted automatically. Instead, the Government is making us apply to stay in our home. Anyone who does not apply by the deadline (which is 31st December 2020 in case of no deal, or 30th June 2021 in case of a deal) will not have a legal basis to stay in the UK and will face the hostile environment and possible removal from the UK.  

That is the reality of the Government’s position, no matter how many times they repeat the phrase “EU citizens and their families are our friends, neighbours and colleagues and we want them to stay”.

What is the problem?

No application scheme in the world has ever managed to reach 100% of its target audience, and therefore the EU Settlement Scheme, in its current application form, is guaranteed to create ‘Windrush on steroids’. 

​

Whereas Windrush victims were legal but struggled to prove it, EU citizens who do not have settled or pre-settled status after the deadline will not have legal status.

Is there a solution?

the3million has a constructive proposal to address this – a proposal we have been putting to the Government since 2017. 
 

Very simply put, it says that the Settled Status application system is turned into a registration system – where we register simply to gain documentary proof of our status – a status which we would already have because it would be guaranteed by an Act of Parliament. 

Therefore anyone who has not registered by the deadline – and remember there will always be people who will not have done so, for a wide variety of reasons mostly through no fault of their own – will not be illegal, they will merely lack the proof that they have status.  

And when they find out they need that proof - since after the deadline employer, healthcare and other service providers can demand proof - they can simply go and register their status. That’s all there is to it. 

Why is the Government wrong to say this would cause another Windrush?

The Government argues that such a system – known as a declaratory system – created the Windrush scandal. 

This is not true however. It was the advent of the hostile environment that created the Windrush scandal. 

For decades people did not need proof of their status, but suddenly they did. People who were legally in the UK, but did not have a passport or proof of ILR (Indefinite Leave to Remain), struggled to retrospectively prove their legal status, requiring documentation from 40 years earlier. 

That won’t apply in our case – the hostile environment appears to be here to stay, and the Government is simply wrong to suggest that there would be no incentive to register one’s status in a declaratory system. 

EU citizens who haven’t registered before the deadline will find out very shortly after that they won’t be able to access healthcare, jobs, or other services without the registration. 

If the Government rejects our proposal:

=> these citizens will have lost their legal status

​

If instead the Government adopts our proposal:

​

=> these citizens will simply be asked to go and register their status.

For more detailed information:

• bit.ly/Smismans_stopEUWindrush a Free Movement article describing exactly how the combination of automatic grant of rights and registration will avoid ‘Windrush on steroids’
   
• bit.ly/t3m_response_HO_media_rebuttal where we address head on the Government’s assertion that “One of the key lessons we have learnt from Windrush is that declaratory systems do not work.”
   
• Detailed paper by EU Law Academic Stijn Smismans “Protecting EU Citizens in the UK from a Brexit ‘Windrush on Steroids’: A Legislative Proposal for a Declaratory Registration System’
   
• An explanation of the Hostile Environment, including many media articles
   
• bit.ly/t3m_BiE_DeclaratoryConstitutive_v2 explanation of how the Withdrawal Agreement provides a choice between a declaratory or a constitutive system

​​

Finally, our publications library page lists our campaigning and lobbying documents all the way back to 2016.

-

Read more at https://www.the3million.org.uk/automatic-rights

HELL IS ROUND THE CORNER - trailer

BOOK'S OFFICIAL TRAILER DIRECTED BY TRICKY

DJ Mag wrote:

Over the summer, trip-hop pioneer Tricky announced that he would be releasing an autobiography called 'Hell Is Round the Corner'. He's now shared a trailer for the book ahead of its October 31st release.  

The autobiography takes its name from a track that featured on Tricky's 1995 debut album, 'Maxinquaye'. The book will see him look over his career from its early years until now, and also touches upon his mother’s suicide when he was a child as well as other events that influenced his life and work.

'Hell Is Round the Corner' was written by Tricky in collaboration with music journalist Andrew Perry. Contributions also come from family, friends, industry insiders and similarly rebellious music heads such as Happy Mondays' Shaun Ryder.

Tricky was known as an early collaborator of Massive Attack's whose work was also the subject of a book earlier this year called 'Out of the Comfort Zone'. 

-

The work feature interviews with names including Tricky and members of Portishead, Smith & Mighty, Roni Size. 

The author, Melissa Chemam, charts the development of the band alongside the wider Bristol music scene over a number of decades, tracing roots back to the 1960s and 70s before moving through the outfit's efforts to produce timeless albums such as 'Blue Lines' and 'Mezzanine'. 

In addition to the musical journey and evolution, the book includes sections on Massive Attack's numerous art projects, and the launch was set to involve a conversation between Chemam and journalist Miranda Sawyer at the British Library in London on 14th March. Take a look at what the author has to say about her work, the band and their role in safeguarding a counter-history of modern British and world politics on her blog.

-

Tricky's book is available for Pre-Order Here: http://hyperurl.co/HellIsRoundTheCorner 

Journalism masterclass

I've been invited by UWE Journalism, University of West England, to give a first masterclass on reporting: It will be on Wednesday 16 October, from 1pm, at their Bower Ashton campus, Bristol.

Journalism is at a turning point, let's make it as good as it needs to be for these challenging times...

Introducing our new series of journalism masterclasses for 2019-20 - BBC Radio journalist @melissachemam talks about her book on Massive Attack and a life in broadcasting @UWEBristol.

The climate protest movement and... the rest of the world

As the climate rebellion is about to be relaunched with vigour in London this Monday, 7 October 2019, by Extinction Rebellion...

Extinction Rebellion in London's Oxford Circus in April 2019. Photo by myself

...Here is an interesting point of view.

"The climate protest movement must not alienate Britain’s working classes"

-By Linda Nandy, Labour MP for Wigan

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/oct/02/climate-protest-alienate-britains-working-classes-extinction-rebellion?CMP=share_btn_tw

"Rooting calls for action in the reality of people’s lives is vital if the likes of Extinction Rebellion are not to fuel further division," MP Linda Nandy claims.

-

But environment activists keep forgetting the most important issue of all:

the imbalance & inequalities between the NORTH and the SOUTH of the world...

It's very true that the poorest cannot abandon their wages and worries to spend their days protesting to stop multi-billionaire companies from polluting the planet.

But then think of what it is for a person living with a few dollars a month in a "developing country", as the economists now name what they used to qualify as "the third world", when there was still "two worlds" until 1991, the USA and the Soviet Union. Now this denomination is irrelevant, and some of these countries have become economic powerhouses, like China, India, Mexico, Brazil. But poverty is still incredibly stiff for most of their population.

So, no, nothing can change, and certainly not our system of production and its pollution, if we don't prevent the 7th in the G7 from exploiting the rest of the world for oil/other energies, gold/other metals.

It's been going on since the first years of capitalism.

Yet, it's hardly spoken about these days in the newspapers covering the protests!

The level of inequalities between the richest countries - industrialised, polluting economies - and the rest of the world, the vast majority, is so vast, so deep, that it's almost irrelevant to talk about the gap between the rich and the poor in the UK or in the US in comparison.

I tried to discuss this in Marble Arch on 21 April, when Greta Thunberg joined the XR protesters in London, with the other members of the rebellion, during our attempt at a group discussion and proto-citizens' assembly. People generally agreed that the poorest countries pay the price more than anybody else.

Yet... the "rebellion" is still led by people in the Western, richest countries, and the teenage superstar is still a adolescent from Sweden... Despite the fact that many activists come from the First Nations in North America, Kenya or for instance Brazil.

It is a bit puzzling.

As readers of this blog may know, I've lived in places in East and Central Africa, travelled to 14 African countries as a reporter, north and south of the Sahara, as well as places like Czech Republic, Bosnia, Haiti, India, Turkey, Armenia/Georgia, Mexico and Iraq.

We need to be willing to see global issues from another point of view that is not born in London or New-York-f***g-City.

I've been writing drafts for an essay about these issues this summer, on the point of view of journalism, but publishers and agents already told me they cannot publish this text because it wouldn't sell and is incoherent. Too many ideas...
It might not be perfect for now, but frankly, I've seen many other writers try and get rejected as well, especially African intellectuals, economists, researchers.

For how long? People, rebels, friends, for how much longer?

Because if you really want to keep on trying to change the world, at some point you might have to realise that you will have to include the ACTUAL WORLD.

And so just do the maths: world population at this stage of history is around 7.7 billion people.

How many in the UK? 67,5 million people.

In the US of A? 330 million.

The rest of the EU? 450 million.

That leaves us with... Exactly: almost 7 billion people!!

-

One good place to start the discussion would be among the African and Asian diaspora in the Western world... We're here and "unlistened-to" and most of the time part of the "unlistened-to" working class anyway.

But we could also be part of a bridging strategy between you here middle/upper class people in the UK, worried about climate change and global warming, and the people who are actually affected by it. In Malaysia, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Brazil, in the Sahara desert, in Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Kenya, Uganda, etc.

Otherwise, you're going to see more of these articles:

Does Extinction Rebellion have a race problem?

Critics say group is not doing enough to involve people of colour, or expose links between climate crisis and inequality

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/04/extinction-rebellion-race-climate-crisis-inequality

And most of all, like this letter:

An open letter to Extinction Rebellion

"The fight for climate justice is the fight of our lives, and we need to do it right." By grassroots collective Wretched of The Earth.

Extract:

"For those of us who are indigenous, working class, black, brown, queer, trans or disabled, the experience of structural violence became part of our birthright. Greta Thunberg calls world leaders to act by reminding them that 'Our house is on fire'. For many of us, the house has been on fire for a long time: whenever the tide of ecological violence rises, our communities, especially in the Global South are always first hit. We are the first to face poor air quality, hunger, public health crises, drought, floods and displacement."

"XR says that 'The science is clear: It is understood we are facing an unprecedented global emergency. We are in a life or death situation of our own making. We must act now.'  You may not realize that when you focus on the science you often look past the fire and us – you look past our histories of struggle, dignity, victory and resilience. And you look past the vast intergenerational knowledge of unity with nature that our peoples have. Indigenous communities remind us that we are not separate from nature, and that protecting the environment is also protecting ourselves. In order to survive, communities in the Global South continue to lead the visioning and building of new worlds free of the violence of capitalism. We must both centre those experiences and recognise those knowledges here."

-

This are absolutely vital arguments.

There cannot be any system change implemented by 1% protesting among the 1% who are the richest in the world!!

Or it's a misunderstanding of what "system change" means.

Because what is wrong with this polluting, destructive system is mainly that it has left the vast majorities of living people out of the global discussions about how our global resources should be used.

So if you keep on making these decisions in between you inside the upper/middle class in the capitals of the stock-exchange world, you are still part of the system.

-

Many thanks for listening to this written rambling.

And have a good first day of this new phase of rebellion.

-

NB. I fully support the Extinction Rebellion, have protested myself, and have offered to work as a volunteer. But these are key issues.

-

Here are the rest of the world's demands:

Wretched of the Earth, together with many other groups, hold the following demands as crucial for a climate justice rebellion:

• Implement a transition, with justice at its core, to reduce UK carbon emissions to zero by 2030 as part of its fair share to keep warming below 1.5°C; this includes halting all fracking projects, free transport solutions and decent housing, regulating and democratising corporations, and restoring ecosystems.
• Pass a Global Green New Deal to ensure finance and technology for the Global South through international cooperation. Climate justice must include reparations and redistribution; a greener economy in Britain will achieve very little if the government continues to hinder vulnerable countries from doing the same through crippling debt, unfair trade deals, and the export of its own deathly extractive industries. This Green New Deal would also include an end to the arms trade. Wars have been created to serve the interests of corporations – the largest arms deals have delivered oil; whilst the world’s largest militaries are the biggest users of petrol.
• Hold transnational corporations accountable by creating a system that regulates them and stops them from practicing global destruction. This would include getting rid of many existing trade and investment agreements that enshrine the will of these transnational corporations.
• Take the planet off the stock market by restructuring the financial sector to make it transparent, democratised, and sustainable while discentivising investment in extractive industries and subsidising renewable energy programmes, ecological justice and regeneration programmes.
• End the hostile environment of walls and fences, detention centers and prisons that are used against racialised, migrant, and refugee communities. Instead, the UK should acknowledge it’s historic and current responsibilities for driving the displacement of peoples and communities and honour its obligation to them.
• Guarantee flourishing communities both in the global north and the global south in which everyone has the right to free education, an adequate income whether in or out of work, universal healthcare including support for mental wellbeing, affordable transportation, affordable healthy food, dignified employment and housing, meaningful political participation, a transformative justice system, gender and sexuality freedoms, and, for disabled and older people, to live independently in the community.