Sink or swim for the UK’s harsh asylum seeker accommodation policy as it opens a barge on the Dorset coast

Throughout the day at a quarter to each hour, a blue coach marked “private” chugs down the narrow street in the Dorset village of Castletown towards the entrance of the port on the isle of Portland on England’s southern coast. To pick up its passengers, it goes through the tight security cordon into the port, where the British government’s new barge housing asylum seekers, the Bibby Stockholm, is moored away from view.

Authorities have moved the first of what will eventually total 500 single men on to the barge, sparking protests of many hues in the hilly little town.

Some decry the barge as a “floating prison”, while others vent claims that the arrival of so many single young men from other cultures could cause issues for Portland’s women.

Two main protest groups compete with placards at Castletown. Local opposition is led by No to the Barge group while the trade union-backed Stand Up To Racism group offers support for the asylum seekers. Both criticise government policy.

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“We have a rogue government with contempt for this rural community,” said Alex Bailey, a leader of No to the Barge. “The asylum seekers are just a political football.”

Post-Brexit, it profits the UK government politically to go in hard on asylum seekers. The Bibby is deliberately no floating palace. The televisions in its 222 cabins are disconnected. There is little to do in the industrial port, and no garden.

As if to underline how difficult conditions on the barge could become, 39 migrants were temporarily removed from the vessel on Friday as a precaution, after Legionella bacteria was found in its water supply.

At the top of every hour, the bus re-emerges to trundle back up the street past the tired old hotels of Castletown and its D-Day museum. It drives past the new Ocean Views apartments being built by the Irish developer brothers, Brian and Luke Comer, through Portland’s marina and on to the Lidl supermarket.

‘If [the asylum seekers] don’t like barges then they should f*** off back to France,’ said the Tory party’s bellicose deputy chairman, Lee Anderson

The bus then takes the road along the golden Chesil Beach linking Portland Isle to the mainland and to Weymouth, a marine resort town of 56,000 people about 10km from the barge. There, it stops at the New Bond Street shopping centre before retracing the route back to the port, repeating this tedious carousel all day long.

Staunching numbers

The British government has made staunching refugee numbers a top priority. It insists the barge policy is to shift some of 51,000 asylum seekers out of hotels where they cost taxpayers £6 million per day. The Conservative Party is under pressure to show it is tackling the issue, which vexes its voters. They would need 100 Bibbys to solve the hotels issue.

Debate kicked off again this week. The first tranche of 15 men boarded the vessel on Monday, but the next day 20 men refused to board amid talk of legal challenges backed by a refugee charity. That appeared to stall the onboarding process this week – the blue shuttle bus was completely deserted for the two trips tracked by The Irish Times on Wednesday.

Mooted legal challenges over the Bibby Stockholm’s austere and isolated living conditions have infuriated government politicians. “If [the asylum seekers] don’t like barges then they should f*** off back to France,” said the Tory party’s bellicose deputy chairman, Lee Anderson.

Portland, an isle that is semi-detached from the rest of the Dorset coast, is pretty but not affluent. Its health services are strained. Some residents worry that it doesn’t have facilities to cope. Carralyn Parkes, a town councillor and the mayor of Portland, said she has never heard anyone, “other than the government or the businesses involved”, say the barge is a good idea.

“When the Home Office first put forward the idea in April, the one thing everyone said is that there is no infrastructure for them,” she said. “We have no hospital. There is only one road in and out. We don’t have any of the services they would need such as lawyers.”

She said the barge moored at the port is “inhumane” as a living space for 500 men.

She was among a group of councillors allowed on board to inspect it this summer. “It’s really small. The cabins will house two people but they were clearly made only for one,” she said. “The bunks were cheap, the mattresses were too short for taller men to stretch out with the metal frames. I measured the cabins as 10 foot by 12. The barge is meant to house 500 but there are only 150 spaces in the dining room.”

The Home Office said it wants to send a “forceful message” that asylum seekers will get “proper accommodation, but not luxurious”.

‘Recipe for disaster’

Glasgow Scottish National Party councillor, Ruairi Kelly, lived on the Bibby Stockholm years ago when it housed workers for a Shetlands oil rig. He says it was hard enough then, spending 10 hours a day on it only to “eat and sleep” while on the job.

“I assure you it was not luxurious and [now] with two to a cabin and all day on board, it’s a recipe for disaster,” he said.

Journalists tailed the blue bus this week hoping to spot asylum seekers. The BBC, camped in a car park on Castletown, nabbed a few Afghans in Weymouth. Some said the vessel was fine but one said its security checks made it feel “like Alcatraz”.

As the political circus around the Bibby rolled on this week, it was clear locals and businesses were becoming irritated by the disruption brought by the press attention. Bars said takings were down. Local cafes put up signs banning filming

Parkes has launched judicial review proceedings against the government, acting in a personal capacity and not as a councillor or mayor. She alleges the barge breaches planning rules by mooring at the port, which is owned by a local business family, the Langhams, who also make sparkling wine in a vineyard up the road. Parkes is crowdfunding the cost.

Bailey says his No to the Barge group may also launch its own legal action, but it is not ready for this yet. Aged in his early 30s, he moved to the area with his family last October from near Dover in Kent, another area associated with asylum seekers.

“We moved here because of what was going on over there [in Dover]. It was changing.”

He repeatedly criticises the alleged “corruption” of government’s handling of the refugee issue. Bailey dismissed officials as “sewer people” for not consulting with the local community, but insisted he has no ulterior political agenda.

He said he has spoken to the parents of a local young woman with learning difficulties, who he claimed was warned by a job centre that she would have her benefits cut if she didn’t take a job on board the Bibby Stockholm as a cleaner.

Dystopian parallel

No to the Barge, which has been to the fore in highlighting the supposed dangers to local women, will hold another protest on Sunday that aims to be visible to cruise passengers who dock at the port before being bussed on to Weymouth – a dystopian parallel with the asylum seekers.

[ UK begins moving migrants to Bibby Stockholm residential barge ]

[ The Irish Times view on the UK’s latest plan to house refugees: just another sticking plaster ]

The vessel may raise safety concerns among some and be criticised by others as an open prison, but it is moored in the shadow of a real prison: HMP The Verne, which houses sex offenders and whose inmates included Gary Glitter. The best views of the barge can be had from atop the Verne’s citadel overlooking the town.

As the political circus around the Bibby rolled on this week, it was clear locals and businesses were becoming irritated by the disruption brought by the press attention. Bars said takings were down. Local cafes put up signs banning filming. Many residents at the local Co-Op supermarket refused requests to give their views.

Meanwhile, the blue bus kept on rolling in. The driver, too, was clearly sick of the attention. As the bus approached the port on Wednesday for one of its runs, a local freelance journalist filmed it, hoping to sell a snippet to national news.

Afterwards, he disappointedly showed others the footage, now unusable. In it, the bus rolled past while the driver held his arm out the window, giving the media the middle finger.