I believe if you can offer someone asylum you’re really lucky.  It means you live somewhere nice and safe.  For a long time being an asylum seeker was a good thing in the eyes of the press and the public.  Through the cold war any defector from Russia or East Germany was greeted with open arms and front-page headlines.  We applauded their courage, before patting ourselves on the back because their defection only served to confirm for us ours was a wonderful country.  Then with the break up of the old Europe, attitudes changed.  Asylum seekers stopped being heroes.   We stopped feeling proud people wanted to come to the UK to find a better life, or escape from danger, and let the tabloids persuade us hordes of economic migrants were waiting to flood over our borders. ‘They come over here, taking our houses, taking our jobs…’  The rhetoric is horribly familiar.  When I hear someone going on about all these migrants I want to say – Go on then, name three of them.  And anyway, what’s so bad about leaving your country to go another one to try to make a better life?  What about all those TV programmes telling us what an exciting and worthwhile thing it is to do? 

We’ve lost sight of the people involved.  They’ve disappeared behind piles of debateable statistics.  And ranting doesn’t do any good.  So out of my frustration I wrote a play about a family who not through any fault of theirs, become involved in terrible events that force them to leave their country and look for safety.  When we hear news of the suffering of thousands we can only sympathise, but sometime the story of one individual’s struggle for survival can remind us that we all share the same common humanity.

Nick Wood

2008