by Lamiat Sabin

AN EMERGENCY demo will be held to protest against calls made yesterday by Calais citizens to demolish the Jungle refugee camp.

The event, organised by Trade Unionists for Calais and Stand Up to Racism, will take place outside the French embassy in central London at 7pm tomorrow.

Calais shop owners, lorry drivers, dock workers and farmers are planning a blockade of the A16 motorway out of the port town to try to force French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve to close the squalid camp, home to some 9,000 people.

Mr Cazeneuve visited the semi-demolished site on Friday and said that the rest of the demolition would proceed with “great determination.”

But he has yet to announce plans about the future of the refugees. Eight hundred of them are children, 700 of them unaccompanied, according to a census by Help Refugees.

British Home Secretary Amber Rudd was urged yesterday by MPs on both sides of the Commons to tackle the issue of unaccompanied children at the camp seeking asylum.

Mandy Brown of Trade Unionists for Calais said: “Instead of offering security to the victims of war, poverty and oppression, the British and French governments — along with the right-wing press — are colluding to scapegoat them.

“They are blaming the refugees for many ills of our societies, so it’s no surprise that some ordinary French people also draw the mistaken conclusion that refugees are the problem.”

The British government should live up to its responsibilities and act on Lord Dubs’s amendment to the Immigration Bill that would grant asylum to unaccompanied children, the campaigners said.

Demolition of the camp without provision of alternative accommodation for the refugees would be a “recipe for disaster,” said Refugee Information Bus, which offers free wifi, access to technology, legal information and workshops for refugees at the camp.

Rowan Farrell of the charity said: “The jungle is a squalid shanty town. It breaks every humanitarian standard going, largely because the French state refuses to acknowledge that it even is a refugee camp.

“The conditions here are deplorable — but there is no alternative offered.”

The flow of refugees from the world’s trouble spots continues. Thousands of refugees, including five-day-old twins, were rescued in the Mediterranean last week having set out from Libya on 20 tiny overcrowded wooden boats as they made a desperate attempt to reach Europe.

The haunting images came just over a year after a shocking photo was published of three-year-old Alan Kurdi, who drowned off the Turkish coast after his family decided to flee Syria.

Stand Up to Racism joint secretary Weyman Bennett said: “One year on from the heartrending discovery of tiny Aylan drowned on a beach, the situation for refugees is deteriorating fast.”

Grassroots organisation Help Refugees launched a campaign called Refugenes yesterday to highlight the contributions refugees make to society.

An online short film features pop-culture figures whose families arrived in Britain as refugees or were refugees themselves. They include singers Rita Ora and Jamie Cullum, writer Ben Elton and fashion designer and novelist Bella and Esther Freud.

Help Refugees co-founder Lliana Bird, whose grandmother was a refugee from Russia, said the campaign seeks to “show refugees in a different light” because “too often they are portrayed as a burden on society.”

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