What we saw in Glasgow was people power in action – the very best of British values

Two men detained by immigration officials were released on Thursday after crowds packed the street to block the van from leaving – community spirit will always defeat any ‘hostile environment’

We have heard plenty of dissent over the past few days about the Home Office’s New Plan for Immigration, mentioned in the Queen’s Speech, that includes proposals to refuse any asylum seeker who has passed through a safe country before reaching the UK the right to refugee status in Britain.

Enver Solomon, chief executive of the Refugee Council, called the reforms “cruel and unfair”, while the United Nations’ refugee agency (UNHCR) also hit out at the move, saying that it risks breaking the UK’s international legal commitments.

This all feeds into a picture of a Home Office that is far too callous in its attempts to reform the country’s immigration policies and create a “fair but firm” system. This picture was only reinforced by the images coming out of Pollokshields, Glasgow, on Thursday, with police – under a public safety remit – releasing two men detained by immigration officials after crowds packed the street for hours to block the van they were inside from leaving. According to the government the men had been detained over “suspected immigration offences”.

As ever with an issue as complicated as immigration, context is everything. I have no knowledge of any potential offences – but to conduct such a raid during Eid al-Fitr, in the the centre of one of Scotland’s most ethnically-diverse neighbourhoods was certainly provocative. I can see why it sparked such a reaction from the local community, with shouts from protesters said to include “let our neighbours go”.

Protesters said that it was the “hostile environment” created by the UK government that they were protesting against – and it is hard to argue that if action needed to be carried out, that much more thought could have been giving to the timing and the approach taken.

A diverse community united – which is what the demonstration against the detentions certainly looked like – is surely a great advert for what a modern Britain should look like? Quoted by The Independent earlier this week, Minnie Rahman, campaign and communications director of the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, said that the government’s immigration plans – and particularly those relating to asylum – were an “attack on what it means to care for each other”.

You certainly couldn’t say that the people of Pollokshields didn’t care yesterday, and the Home Office would likely have felt uncomfortable at the images. Scotland’s first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, tweeted that the Home Office had to “ask itself hard questions” in the wake of what happened in Pollokshields, saying that while she found current UK immigration policy “appalling”, even putting that aside, “doing this on Eid, in the heart of our Muslim community, and in the midst of a serious Covid outbreak was staggeringly irresponsible.”

Even campaigners agree that the immigration situation needs reform; nobody is disputing that – and the government will make clear that there is public support for it. But there is a way of going about it with empathy for those it affects. I would much rather have the level of community spirit shown in Pollokshields, than the “hostile environment”.