Dover Bishop warns giving money to France to tackle small boats crisis is ‘killing people’

Exclusive: In a wide-ranging interview with The Independent, former speaker’s chaplain now Bishop of Dover Rose Hudson-Wilkin talks about her new autobiography, blasts Brexit and the immigration debate, demands ‘restorative justice’ for countries scarred by slavery, and defends the role of the Church of England in politics

The Bishop of Dover has warned that the millions of pounds being handed to France by the British government to stop migrants crossing the Channel on small boats is “creating more death”.

Rose Hudson-Wilkin, the UK’s first black female bishop, spoke to The Independent as she temporarily takes over many of Justin Welby’s duties as he steps down as Archbishop of Canterbury on Monday.

Her interview comes as she publishes her autobiography, The Girl from Montego Bay, which traces her early beginnings in absolute poverty in Jamaica, her struggles and rise in the Church of England and being the Commons chaplain in the toxic Brexit era.

Bishop Rose Hudson-Wilkin criticises political parties for talking too much about ‘immigration, immigration, immigration’ (PA)

She talked about her first-hand experience of the consequences of Brexit and the immigration she sees near the Kent coast. In a forthright conversation, Bishop Hudson-Wilkin did not hold back with her views:

• Defending the “compassionate” legacy of Justin Welby and arguing the next Archbishop of Canterbury needs to be like him
• Defending former speaker John Bercow, arguing he is “a good man” who was “a casualty of Brexit”
• Discussing the “shameful” way MPs conducted the Brexit debate and the dire consequences of leaving the EU
• Demands “restorative justice” for slavery from the UK, but not reparations

Speaking in her office in the picturesque medieval Old Palace in Canterbury, Bishop Hudson-Wilkin is angered by the harsh realities faced by those caught up in the immigration crisis not many miles away.

In particular, she is highly critical of the UK’s attempts to “stop the boats” by paying hundreds of millions to France.

“The millions of pounds that we’re giving to the gendarmerie [French military police] is actually creating more deaths,” she said. “I’m going out to Calais shortly. I was there in April this year, and I saw first hand.

“When people say Calais is a safe place, it is not safe. No, France is not a safe place for those who are trying to find a place to go to. Why? Because they destroy the tents. Every few days, they go into these areas and they destroy the tents of the refugees.

“The refugee area that I went into was the BMX camp. There were children in that camp. Now, what is going through your mind when you destroy the tents that are a shelter for those children? Yet that’s what we are giving money [for].”

She vented her frustration over the tenor of the debate in the West and the way all parties are focusing on “immigration, immigration, immigration”.

Justin Welby will cease to be Archbishop of Canterbury from midnight on Monday (PA)

“I want to see our government, Europe, the West, including America, look at this differently. Instead of saying, ‘We don’t want these people’, building walls, saying ‘we’re going to break the business model of the small boats’, nonsense rhetoric, I want them to ask ‘why are people leaving their countries of origin? Is it war? Is it famine? Is it climate change? Is it civil unrest? Is it economic?’”

She notes how the language used about slaves has transferred to asylum seekers.

“This thing that we hear often, ‘oh, they’re just economic migrants, they’re not real asylum seekers.’ Yeah, I remind the British that they were economic migrants when they went all over the world [with the empire]’”.

For the bishop, the issue is related to the question of reparations demanded by a number of Commonwealth countries from the UK for the slave trade. Under Archbishop Welby, the Church of England has led the way in paying reparations but she has a different perspective.

“Instead of reparation and the connotations that reparation has, I want to think of it as restorative justice. That’s the terminology I would prefer to use.

“The damage has been done, the damage of the enslavement of a people, of Black people. You cannot repair the damage, but you can at some point become engaged with the process to ensure that there is restorative justice.

“People here in this country, white people here in this country, do not know why they think Black people are subnormal. They do not know why they think it’s OK for Black people to sweep the office, clean the office, but not to sit around the board table and be part of the decision-making process.”

Her experience in the Church itself highlights a culture of “ingrained racism”. In her book, she describes in painful detail the process of her selection as the speaker’s chaplain with the resolute but unexplained opposition of Westminster Abbey leading to the job being split. The title of her autobiography comes from an article at the time that described the white male who got the Abbey job as “Oxford-educated” and her as “the girl from Montego Bay”.

Former speaker John Bercow became great friends with the bishop (PA)

“It is deep,” she says. “It’s not that somebody wakes up one morning and says, I’m going to be racist or I’m going to be prejudiced against Black people or pink people or blue people. It is deeply ingrained and they don’t even know it.”

As Bishop of Dover, she has seen the chaos wrought by Brexit and the departure from the EU, with the queues of traffic from the ferry port and sometimes struggling to get through the lines of vehicles to get to a church service.

But her most brutal experience was as Commons chaplain during the Brexit referendum and in its aftermath. Bishop Hudson-Wilkin is still convinced that the Brexit debate caused the death of the Labour MP Jo Cox.

It was during this time that her friendship with speaker John Bercow became so strong, she says she did not want to move on from parliament while he was still there and leave him alone with his enemies. The accusations about his alleged bullying were partly linked to her appointment, something that clearly angers her. “I knew him to be a very kind, caring, compassionate individual,” she adds.

But she feels little sympathy for the MPs who complained of the sharp end of his tongue in the chamber.

“The childish and bad behaviour of parliamentarians was at fault. My thing was if you behave like a child, then expect to be treated like a child and to be told off like children.”

Bishop Hudson-Wilkin would sometimes attend debates because it forced MPs “to behave themselves”. Since leaving parliament, Mr Bercow has been isolated but the bishop sees him as “a casualty of Brexit”.

It is this approach to defending others that shapes her views on Dr Welby and how his successor needs to be like him despite the reasons for his departure.

“Our Church leaders must be compassionate, and that’s what we had in Justin – someone who is compassionate and caring, someone who loves the Lord and wants to talk, wants to represent, to speak truth to power whether power likes it or not, someone who is confident in the gospel. We had that in Justin. I want an archbishop that is not dissimilar in terms of loving the Lord and loving the people that they’re called.”

Although as a suffragan bishop, she does not have a seat in the Lords, Bishop Hudson-Wilkin defends their place in parliament at a time when some MPs are pushing for the 27 Lords spiritual to be ejected along with hereditary peers.

“The Lords is a bit of a joke, because you get anybody who’s given you some money to sit there who has no idea about what poverty is like. Our bishops in the Lords, they know about that, and they can speak about it. They know their dioceses. I have no problem with them sitting there.”

Bishop Rose Hudson-Wilkin’s book The Girl from Montego Bay is on sale from 16 January.