Keeping people in hulks and barges. Part of Britain’s imperial history
Update 13th August
The few people who have so far been housed on the Bibby Stockholm have been taken off because legionnaires has been discovered on the barge. This in itself suggests a lack of an adequate safety regime on the barge.
It now appears that the presence of Legionnaires was known on the day the asylum seekers were put on the barge. It was a potentially harmful PR stunt in the Tories small boats week.
The Australian firm who have been paid £1.6bn over 2 years to manage the barge, Corporate Travel Management, has a history of incompetence. It has been awarded Government contracts to run vessels in Scotland housing Ukrainian refugees, covid quarantine hotels and now barges. In each case without a competitive tender. It does suggest safety was not a key issue for the Government
Historically the British State was not concerned about safety and health on the hulks and mortality rates were as high as 30%. The fact that safety is now concern is due to the work of the Fire Brigades Union and refugee campaigners not the Government
In 1848 Black Chartist Prisoners were kept in Prison hulks. In 2023 Asylum seekers are to be kept on barges.
The Daily Mail amongst other hard right media outlets recently headlined Government plans to move asylum seekers from hotels to military bases and possibly a very large ‘barge’. This story turned out to be true. The Government plans to house 500 asylum seekers on a barge in Portland Dorset which was towed into place on 18th July to protests from anti-racists’
On 7th August some asylum seekers were moved on to the Portland barge. The FBU has raised significant safety concerns which have been ignored by the Gpvernment. This week is the Tories small boats action period so this is largely an unsafe media stunt.
Stephen Kinnock for Labour could have said that the asylum system should be sorted out from the deliberate Tory Culture Wars mess and claims dealt with properly and efficiently. He did almost manage to say that but instead headlined that Labour would keep barges. Keeping barges, which is costly,is not the point of Labour policy, Mr Kinnock might perhaps reflect before he ends up down the same imperial rabbit hole as Braverman.
Sunak has announced plans for at least two more barges. The London Mayor Sadiq Khan has already rejected the idea of mooring a barge in the Royal Docks in East London.
The main reason why asylum seekers are in hotels is because the Government has slowed down the process of application to a crawl. Most who apply are genuine and accepted- eventually.
Asylum seekers cannot be detained as prisoners are but in practice they have nowhere else to go as they can’t legally work.
The tradition of keeping people on barges or hulks as they were known dates back to at least 1776. The use of decommissioned ships was authorised by Parliament for two years in the wake of the US War of Independence.
As often with temporary measures the hulks were not that temporary and lasted for 80 years or so.
Conditions on them were appalling and prisons were built. One was at Millbank on the site of what is now that Tate Gallery. It was operational from 1818.
It was to Millbank that the black leader of London Chartism William Cuffay and others were despatched after a trial at the Old Bailey for their alleged part in a Chartist rising at Seven Dials in central London in August 1848.
It’s not known if Cuffay was ever kept on a hulk. He and other Chartist prisoners were at some point despatched to Wakefield Gaol from where he wrote a letter in July 1849 prior to being transported to Tasmania.
However two other black men associated with Chartism David Anthony Duffy and Benjamin Prophett who had been held at Millbank for their supposed part in a riot after a Chartist meeting at Camberwell Green in March 1848, were transferred to the prison hulk York in December 1848.
The York had been built at Rotherhithe in 1807 and was decommissioned at Portsmouth in 1817. It became a prison hulk in 1820 and could hold 500 prisoners, again in appalling conditions. There was a riot on the York in 1848 but before the two above named Chartists moved there.
E P Thompson argued in the Making of the English Working Class argues that in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the class war was often fought out between being imprisoned on a hulk and those who fought back using riots. The conditions on the hulks were described as being like a ‘living death’.
Certainly the British State has never abandoned the use of hulks as places to hold people they want to keep out of the way.
In the early 1970s HMS Maidstone was moored in Belfast just off shore to hold alleged members of the IRA including Gerry Adams. In 1972 seven men managed to escape.
It is reminder that the British Imperial State has a long history of disciplining and punishing those who are seen not to fit. It’s part of Britain’s Island Story but not an episode that those on the right who accuse people of picking and choosing which aspects of imperial history to focus on wish to either remember or have remembered.
An earlier version of this post appeared in the Morning Star
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