British - to be or not to be?

In the battle against Covid, we are unprotected

Praxis runs peer-led groups where people with lived experience of migration can seek support and campaign to get their voices heard on issues that affect them. The WINGS group is for mothers with young children. In July 2020, they spoke in parliament at the All Party Parliamentary Group on No Recourse to Public Funds, chaired by MP Kate Osamor and organised by Just Fair and Project 17.

Here they speak out in their own words against the No Recourse to Public Funds (NRPF) provision in a series of blogs, denouncing the many ways it impacts them.

As the number of Covid-19 cases keeps increasing and more than one million people worldwide have died of the virus, we will all agree that we are currently in a medical war and the Government should be protecting everyone in this country.

However, people like us who have No Recourse to Public Funds are not protected even though we are here, in the UK. This is discrimination and it is unsafe for everyone. Many of us are frontline workers, the foot soldiers who are working tirelessly to protect this country in the battle against Covid-19, and yet many of us are discriminated against and denied access to support when we need it ourselves.  

“We are the key workers”

It is a known fact that BAME people are twice as likely to die from Covid-19, yet we have to work more, are exposed more, and often have to live in cramped conditions because we can’t get any help from the government when we are in crisis. It’s painful to hear people like MP Craig Wittaker say that black and minority ethnic people didn’t take Covid-19 seriously.

The letter sent by the Prime Minister to households in the UK shortly after the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic with a leaflet telling them to stay at home.

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

Portraits of doctors, nurses and other NHS staff who responded to the COVID-19 pandemic were captured by photographer Rankin to celebrate the NHS birthday.

Photo by John Cameron on Unsplash

We are the key workers - in many BAME and migrant families there is a key worker or key workers who could not isolate properly because they were needed on the front line. Others could not isolate because they could not afford to - without some kind of welfare support, to keep a roof over your family’s head and food on the table, could you go into lockdown? We often live in cramped conditions in private rented accommodation, often sharing with others because we can’t afford anything better. Comments like that aren’t only far from the truth, they are another way to discriminate against us.

“Right now it is 100 times harder on our mental health and we struggle to provide for our children without a safety net during this pandemic”

Our children are not left out of this discrimination. They have been unable to do schoolwork or meet with friends online because we don’t have access to computers and the internet. This was not provided to them in the same way it was provided to other children during this pandemic. They are falling behind and it is impacting their wellbeing.

We often couldn’t access food vouchers, which meant our kids were not fed properly or healthily. The rates of obesity are increasing in our community, and to say the government is launching a campaign to fight obesity to reduce the rate of fatalities, then where are we as a community? If children aren’t eating right they cannot build and enhance their immune system, and it affects them psychologically. It can also lead to increasing complications of Covid-19, and this is putting us at increased risk. Right now it is 100 times harder on our mental health as we struggle to provide for our children without a safety net during this pandemic.

We need to be safe. We need our children to be safe. And let’s remember that if some of us are not protected during this crisis, then no one really is-after all, we are part of this community and don’t forget that we are contributing to it.

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