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A Church of England bishop has said Shabana Mahmood’s comments on asylum seekers had shaken him “to the core” and argued people coming to the UK were being “scapegoated” for years of government policy failures.Mahmood is expected to announce measures under which people’s refugee status would be reviewed every two-and-a-half years and their wait for permanent settlement could be extended to 20 years. It also understood that people granted asylum could be returned if their country is deemed safe. It follows comments in which she said illegal migration was “tearing the country apart”.The Rt Rev Dr Anderson Jeremiah, the bishop of Edmonton and the Diocese of London’s lead for racial justice, said Mahmood’s comments “shook me to the core”.He added: “We are scapegoating asylum seekers for the failures and political divisions caused by successive governments in the last 15 years – the failures of successive governments to address wealth inequality, funding for education, the cost of living and primary healthcare and infrastructure.“Every day I meet homeless people who have fallen through the cracks in our system. And yet in singling out asylum seekers we are laying the burden of society’s problems on less than 1% of the UK population – when the number of millionaires and billionaires is on the rise.Rt Rev Dr Anderson Jeremiah: ‘We can’t isolate one section of people and label them as a problem that can be easily addressed.’ Photograph: supplied“There are politicians who are trying to hold on to compassion in public life. But at the same time there is a pressure to have a singular problem on which all things can be blamed.“But we are a connected society. Our environmental crisis is deeply connected to the conflicts which lead to people to our borders. We can’t isolate one section of people and label them as a problem that can be easily addressed. If one part of the body hurts, it hurts the entire body.”Campaigners also hit out at Mahmood’s proposals. Nick Beales, head of campaigning at the Refugee and Migrant Forum of Essex and London, said the proposals were “desperately cruel, counter-productive, will harm attempts at social cohesion and do nothing to reduce numbers – what they will do, with people having to constantly renew status, is absolutely kneecap the Home Office”.Rivka Shaw, of Greater Manchester Immigration Aid Unit, said the proposals were “a re-run of the worst and failed policies of the last [Conservative] government – to appease those people asking for more and more hate.”Meanwhile Josephine Whitaker-Yilmaz, policy and public affairs manager at migrant charity, Praxis, said the “morally reprehensible” proposals would fill asylum seekers with “terror”, despite ministers’ claims that they would not apply to people already in the UK.She added: “The government always talks about the need for people to contribute and integrate but making them wait for 20 years without some form of permanent status is abruptly contrary to that – the impact of these proposals on children is particularly horrifying.”She added: “People come to the UK based on whether they speak the language and have relatives here – not the intricacies of how they are treated when they get here. This won’t reduce the numbers, this will just make people’s lives more miserable.”Rabbi David Mason, of the charity HIAS+Jcore, a Jewish organisation that supports asylum seekers and refugees, said there were echoes of the past.“As a Jew my grandparents fled Germany and came here because of the kindness of the country, but integration was hard. In 1938 and 1939 people were saying there were ‘too many Jews coming in’.“There are repetitive aspects – on one hand we want to be compassionate, but on the other we find it difficult because of fear of the other. Back then it was Jewish culture which was the other, now its other cultures. Of course we need secure borders, but in today’s Britain we can be compassionate and cohesive – ‘strangers’ can become neighbours.”
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