Jomast, the company contracted by the Home Office to provide housing for asylum seekers in the North East of England has finally agreed to repaint the characteristically red doors on their properties in Middlesbrough after reports of years of racist attacks hit the headlines.
Jomast, self-styled ‘urban regeneration specialist and pre-eminent force in the UK property market’, holds assets of more than £250m. Allegedly to cut costs, Jomast bought a lot of red paint to be used mainly on properties housing refugees. The Home Office’s forced dispersal policy means that Middlesbrough is home to 982 asylum seekers, one per 173 of the population, the highest proportion in Britain, breaching government guidelines. Middlesbrough has the second highest unemployment rate in Britain at 14.4%, and the End Child Poverty campaign reports that 35% of children in the city live in poverty. Refugees, after facing huge obstacles to enter Britain, are lumped in one of the most deprived areas of the country and singled out with a bright red door.
It didn’t take long for local racists to cotton on and the first complaints were made four years ago to the Home Affairs Committee, the National Audit Office and Ian Swales, then local Liberal Democrat MP for Redcar. Imagine four years of racist slurs being yelled at you, eggs and stones thrown at your house and dog faeces being smeared on your windows!
Mr Perera, an asylum seeker from Sri Lanka explained: ‘It happens every night. Two days ago, somebody spat on the door. We have two children, one a baby. My wife is scared. She sleeps downstairs and is afraid to go upstairs. They should change the colour of these doors.’ (The Independent, 20 January).
Jomast was subcontracted by G4S, a security services multinational, which didn’t see any need to repaint the doors at the time. One man repainted his door white, only for Jomast to repaint it red again claiming it was company policy, contradicting the argument that the red paint was a cost-cutting exercise. The Home Office did nothing until forced to by the public outcry.
John Grayson of the South Yorkshire Migration and Asylum Action Group argues: ‘The evidence of years of abuse and neglect of asylum tenants suggests that, far from being a callous oversight, the decision to paint asylum seekers’ doors red, and to keep them that way despite all those objections, chimes with the apparent policy to make Britain a hostile environment for asylum seekers.’ The red door scandal was followed by the revelation that asylum seekers housed by Clearsprings Ready Homes in Cardiff, had been made to wear brightly coloured wristbands at all times in order to qualify for food, again singling them out for racist abuse and attacks.
G4S and its subcontractor Jomast have a contractual duty to ‘recognise that the safety and security of asylum seekers must not be jeopardised’. Yet the red door policy and four years of ignoring complaints shows that they and their masters at the Home Office have nothing but racist contempt for asylum seekers.
John Wilson
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! 249 February/March 2016
