SPEECH BY BILLY PYE TO THE BENEFIT EVENING FOR THE FAMILIES OF THE COCKLE PICKERS

Gregson Centre, Lancaster. 2 April 2004

Sisters and Brothers,

No words of mine could possibly express the depth of the sadness we feel for the victims of the tragedy that occurred in Morecambe Bay.

At this event our thoughts are quite rightly with the families and loved ones of those who perished. It is right that over the past weeks we have expressed our collective grief and sadness. It is right that in this moment we do all we can for the families of those who were lost.

However, I feel that we as a community, as a society have a duty to do more than this. We must strive to build a fitting memorial to those who died. And there could be no more of a fitting memorial than to set ourselves the collective goal of making it impossible for such a tragedy to ever happen again.

If these words, this goal, are to be more than just words, expressed today and then forgotten tomorrow, we have to ask ourselves how this catastrophe happened. How did these men and women from the other side of the world come to be on the sands of Morecambe Bay?

Someone once said that the longest journey begins with a single step. The reasons that people take the first step on the long journey from China to Britain are not difficult to understand. To those who question the motives of people who come to this country to seek refuge or simply to seek a better life I have posed this question, and I pose it again today:
'What would your conditions, your life have to be like for you to leave the country of your birth behind you, for you to leave behind everything you have and everyone you love to embark on a perilous journey, sometimes with your children, half way around the world to a country where you will not be welcomed, to a place you are not wanted?'

If one considers this question honestly for just a few moments one begins to get an inkling of the desperation of many who arrive here from the far flung reaches of the world with nothing save themselves and what they can carry. Simply put, the reasons that people set out on their journeys to this country are to be found in the conditions in which they live. But this in itself does not explain how people end up here in Britain.

The Far Right inside and outside parliament propose an answer to this question. They do so in sections of the media every day. They do so in the preamble paragraphs to more and more anti asylum and anti immigration legislation. The BNP does so in the leaflet it pushed through the doors of the Ridge estate a few weeks ago. It seems to me that sections of the media, government ministers, Conservative oppositionists and fascists all sing from the same hymn sheet on this point.

They say, almost in unison that people come to this country because Britain's immigration and asylum laws are not tough enough. 'Britain is a soft touch,' they say. 'What other explanation could there be for people travelling through other countries to come here?' they ask; not really demanding or wanting to hear and answer to their own question.

But there is an answer that no one can seriously dispute and it is twofold.

Firstly, making it more and more difficult for people to come here, by ever more stringent deterrents in law is driving people in ever-greater numbers into the hands of people traffickers and gangmasters.

Every new restriction, every new obstacle to immigration or to claiming asylum drives more people into the clutches of those who would abuse them, those who will, for a fee, bring people here to be treated like slaves.

I, no doubt like many of you, despair every time I hear government ministers talking about ever tougher immigration and asylum laws to keep more people out of this country, or to keep people from the clutches of organised crime, or even ridiculously to protect racial harmony on our streets. Every time I hear such things I have a mental image of a complete incompetent trying to put out a fire that they themselves have started, trying to douse the flames of racial hatred by using copious amounts of petrol in order to try and do so. It can never work.

Is it not glaringly obvious that one of the principle ways that we can save desperate people from traffickers and gangmasters is to make it easier not harder for people to come to our country? To have a situation where people can come to this country under the full protection of the law, instead of coming here in fear of the law as they do today?

Secondly, there is an obvious reason why people traffickers target Britain. Why they lie to their victims about the life that they will have here as they take from them the money they have managed to scrape together in order to escape. They know, as the Prime Minister often boasts, that Britain has one of the most deregulated labour markets in the world.

They know that in this country a group of labourers in a factory, on a farm or on a building site, without the necessary safety equipment, without proper training, working for a pittance, afraid to complain would not stand out as a group so much from the majority of workers in those industries. Not so much as they would stand out in France or Germany or Spain or any other European country.

In 'modern Britain' we have what proved to be a lethal combination of laws in the case of the Morecambe Bay tragedy. We have laws designed to keep people out of this country coupled with laws that give employers a free whip hand over those they employ in a casual way.

This is the real why and how of those twenty men and women losing their lives on that terrible day.

I firmly believe, and I realise that this is a strong claim, that if Britain honoured in deeds its commitments to human rights under international law, if we had laws that freely allowed people to come to this country under the protection of the law and if we had laws that actually protected workers from their employers, then the tragedy in Morecambe Bay could not have happened. It could not have happened because in the first place there would be no profit in trafficking people to Britain and in the second place slave labour would be impossible in this country.

It is just such a situation under the law that we must strive to achieve as a truly fitting memorial to those who died. I know that when we think about this we can see at one and the same time the simplicity and yet the enormity of what we must try to achieve. However, I firmly believe that we can achieve it, that we can make things different from the way they are today. For the sake of those who perished, for the sake of their families and loved ones and for our own sakes we have no choice other than to believe that we can make things different. There is nowhere else to go. There is no one else to look to other than ourselves.

As a final thought I want to leave you with a poem. It is a poem that has been an inspiration to me in difficult times when the tasks that face us seem to dwarf us, when those that stand in our way seem all powerful and seem to hold all the cards. It is a poem by Edward Bond entitled:

'Song of the Old Woman'

Shall I tell you who is weak?

The weak buy men for riches and sell them for famine.

They paint flowers on the desert and call it a garden.

They smile like the torturer and bow like the judge.

They lead armies into hell so that they shall have a kingdom to rule in.

Shall I tell you who is strong?

Child, you are strong.

You have nothing and your hands are small.

But the world spins like clay on a potter's wheel and you will shape it with these hands.

Sisters and brothers. Sometimes we are stronger than we realise.

Billy Pye
2 April 2004