 | | | THE LATEST PROGRAMME | | | |
| | Jonathan Freedland looks for the past behind the present. Each week, The Long View, recorded on location throughout the British Isles, takes an issue from the current affairs agenda and finds a parallel in our past.
Have you got a good subject for a future programme? Click here to make your suggestion. | | | 
Image from woodcut of the Palatines in England and Ugandan Asians arriving in Britain in 1972. |
 Sources used for readings in the programme
A wave of refugees are heading to London. They are claiming to be seeking asylum from religious persecution. They think that the England is the answer to all their problems.
This is the little known story of the Palatines who arrived in London in their thousands in the early 18th century, having been invited by Queen Anne to seek refuge as fellow Protestant from religious persecution.
Queen Anne expected a few hundred Protestants - in fact some thirteen thousand German refugees arrived within a few days of one another, starving, destitute - but many of them Catholic. And so a now familiar debate arose: how do you determine who is a 'genuine' asylum seeker? What is the correct attitude to economic refugees? | | | On Location | |   | | Left-hand picture:Dr William O'Reilly, Professor Saskia Sassen, Saeed Jaffrey and Jonathan Freedland on the river Thames..
Right-hand picture: Saeed Jaffrey
| |   | | Left-hand picture:Darkus Howe
Right-hand picture:Virginia Crompton. the producer, Saeed Jaffrey, Jonathan Freedland, Darkus Howe and Dr William O'Reilly at St Catherine's Dock.
| | In 18th century London, they decided to send the Catholics home, and set up large camps for the asylum seekers, who suffered terrible deprivations in their 'safe haven'. This led to another round of debate - how could we inflict such squalid conditions on people who had come to us for help? And yet if when there were so many indigenous poor, how could we put so much of our rescues into helping the immigrants?
Contributors
Dr William O'Reilly, of the National University of Ireland, Galway
Professor Saskia Sassen, London School of Economics
Darcus Howe, journalist and broadcaster
Saeed Jaffrey, , star of My Beautiful Laundrette
Oliver Letwin, MP, Shadow Home Secretary
FURTHER READING
Guests and Aliens, Professor Saskia Sassen, New Press; ISBN: 1565846087 .
|
| | |
Listen to introduction
