Get the T-shirt

Last Tuesday a small group of people in Oxford started organising a ‘Refugees Are Welcome’ demo for today. They expected that maybe 20 people would turn up. 25 tops. Last Wednesday a picture like many, many others*, of a dead refugee child, somehow caught the public imagination worldwide and the Facebook event page started to get visitors. 70 said they were coming, 135, 217, 543, 864, 1,201... The organisers contacted the police. The demo was moved round the corner where it would not block the roads. There wasn’t time to organise stewards so the Facebook page asked people willing to steward to turn up in a hi-vis vest for a briefing an hour before the demo.
 
During my six years working for a local charity supporting refugees and asylum seekers we often used to discuss how we could publicise what they face: making the desperate decision to leave their homes, friends and families; confronting appalling danger on their way to who knew where; enduring homelessness, unemployment, poverty and possible imprisonment once they arrived in the UK. We produced reports, booklets, stories; we held public meetings and organised events. We issued media releases and published photos. We talked about the sorts of images we could show and should not show.
 
I don’t know why an image of one 3-year-old has changed the mood so dramatically. Activist groups have recorded the deaths of 232 Syrian 3-year-olds since the war started in 2011 and many are not counted. But Aylan has swept the world. My MP says he has never before received so many messages on one subject in so few days.

About 2,000 of us assembled this afternoon in Oxford, the first (I think) of many similar demos to be held across the UK over the next couple of weeks. Afterwards someone suggested walking together to the town hall. We didn’t have permission for a march but that is what we did.
 
That, of course, was the easy bit, especially on a beautiful sunny day like today. The next part is to stop our shameful politicians telling everyone that borders are more important than people, to stop our media aping them, to reassure our neighbours who have been taught to be frightened and, most important, to find ways to do what we would hope others would do for us if we were driven by violence and fear out of our homes, neighbourhoods or – imagine – country.
 
* if you have a very strong stomach some are here but I don’t recommend them


And I took loads of photos without an SD card in the camera!