Dartford Crossing protester, possible deportation

[WildAlphabet]

Essex radio did an interview with the partner of a protester who climbed the dartford bridge as part of Just Stop Oil.

The gist of it is he was surprised to get three years in prison, they expected a few months. The length of his sentence means he’s facing deportation, as a German national.

They did a phone in, and I was quite surprised that even the angry radio essex listeners they put on, who were massively against his actions, disagreed with deportation as additional punishment. Some wanted community service to make up for the loss they suffered, others name called, but they thought splitting a family was too much.

I was kind of intrigued how the mumsnet demographic would view it, often being quite rule-bound or conservative. Personally I disagree with the one year rule for deportation, particularly for non violent crimes. It’s out of sync with most of the world. I guess also as a second generation immigrant who could also potentially lose the right to stay here if wrongly convicted, it’s scary on a personal level. It’s played on my mind the last few days

Here’s an article https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-essex-66756841.amp

When asked directly the same posters who have played the whataboutery card have not been willing to say they aren’t ok. They’ve been asked directly a few times after they themselves raised the Windrush issue. It became part of the thread as it developed and others tried to claim it was about one man being a special case.
If anything posters have doubled down on the idea of deporting anyone without full citizenship for minor crimes

My child also missed a hospital appointment due to picketing during train strikes and travel chaos being beyond all my contingency plans. No one has been deported for not standing down their protest (and I wouldn’t want them to be).

That's pretty much how I feel - and I have lived abroad, and considered myself lucky to be able to do so.

If you block a major crossing like Dartford, you must know that you will cause some combo of stopping a blue-lighted ambulance/ stop an organ on its way to a transplant that someone has waited for for years/ cause people to miss funerals of friends and relations/ stop people getting to their hospital appointments or critical operations or chemo. Do that sort of thing, and you will lose allies.

There was a protest where I live some years ago which could have blocked the road, but given the risks of delaying the emergency services the organisers took good care to ensure that it didn't.

I’ll be honest, I don’t feel lucky to have acquired a passport here as an adults. I sat tests, paid a lot of money out and tens of thousands over the years on family visas too. I’ve worked professional jobs and paid high taxes, contributed to the economy hugely as a family. No luck or charity offered, I had skills and I paid like my parents with their leave. As did my husband.
I just think it’s home, I have worked and earned a right for equality under the laws of the land. I’m not feeling lesser for it, on special behaviour .
I don’t think that’s entitled

yes, i think that they just enjoy mayhem, its a good excuse !

I've just come back to this thread and seen this fairly unsubtle attempt to call me a racist.

no, I don't think that black boys have a fair chance at life here, and I don't think people who grew up here should be deported for minor crimes.

and I think it's incredibly telling that you are trying to call other people racist when you've started an entire thread in defence of a rich white German bloke who came here as an adult, broke the terms of his visa, fucked around repeatedly, and has no family ties or reason to be here.

The hypocrisy. Fuck him.

Some young black men have been deported in hugely vulnerable states in mental health crisis. Some have grown up in poverty and had such a shit hand, been a product of this country’s failings then been deported to a foreign land when we’ve failed then. Some have been exploited children, then deported as young adults. European or Caribbean or African, I think we should recognise children born and raised here as having rights, and I don’t think deportation should be such a trigger happy consequence.

none of this applies to this dickhead. None of it.* *He wasn't an exploited child, he isn't from a global majority background, he doesn't have mental health issues, he wasn't born and raised here, he wasnt raised in poverty, he isn't being deported to somewhere he doesn't know. He's going back to fucking Germany after a couple of years of overgrown teenage gap year fucking about over here.

it's disgusting that you are trying to manipulate and distort the situation by bringing in situations of people who are genuinely being fucked over by the system, in the service of this massively overprivileged white man from one of the world's wealthiest countries.

These people are deserving of care and empathy and understanding and support. He deserves fuck all.

Unfortunately the law is the law :(

it's disgusting that you are trying to manipulate and distort the situation by bringing in situations of people who are genuinely being fucked over by the system, in the service of this massively overprivileged white man from one of the world's wealthiest countries.

This

I'm generally supportive of any protest (whether i agree or not) but I very much disagreed with the way these protests were carried out and felt it took far to long for police to move these people on.

However, I can't see any good reason to jail any of them, let alone deportation.

The reason to deport him is because he is here on a work visa, he gave up his job, he no longer has the legal right to remain in the UK. If they were to not deport him after his sentence he would essentially be here illegally with no recourse to help to put his life back together.

Returning him to Germany where he has the right to any support and assistance such as social housing and benefits is far more humane than putting him in a halfway house with no entitlement to housing or benefits and leaving him to try to find a job that will give him a work visa with a criminal record.

If left in the UK he could end up homeless and with no way to actually get the money to get back to Germany. He has no family here and a partner who he wasn't even living with who will quite possibly have moved on with her life by the time he comes out.

Its all very well to say he shouldn't be deported but its not really that simple and not deporting him is potentially not in his best interests.

It would be different if he was going back to a country where he was fearful for his life, or didn't have any ties but that's not the case here.

If I committed a crime in Germany I think I would much prefer to end up back in the UK where I have ties, family and friends and a right to certain state support than left to drift in Germany with none of those things.

@Superfood has put it much more succinctly than I ever could.

He’s breached the terms of his visa by leaving his job.

Should we ignore visa conditions for everyone, or just him?

This thread is specifically asking about whether a given crime is serious enough to warrant deportation as part of the punishment. This thread has nothing to do with people who have overstayed their visa/broken up with a partner/no longer have a job etc. Nor anything to do with those who did have the right to remain but there's been a cock-up with the paperwork. Those are separate from criminal justice.

Do you not understand this?

That's not what the article says. I don't know if you're right or if you're making it up to suit your opinion, but yes if someone breaches their visa I have no issue with them being deported. Equally if someone commits a serious crime.

I've seen no evidence this is the case here and I don't agree with jailing people for protesting.

In the decades to come as climate change continues to ravage the earth we will look back at this incredulous.

Except that an ordinary Joe in UK just living their normal live has very little they can actually do to actually make difference.
So blocking us from work/hospital/visots etc is useless bullying of small flies because they can't get to the big ones with private jets and emmissions like 7k of normal people a year.

ALSO! Maybe he should go and proteat his own government about closures of their nuclear power plants.

@RamsesTheChub it's been reported that he gave up his job to be a climate activist.

Now if thats the media twisting things then fair enough. But as it stands as far as we, the public, can tell he has broken the terms of his visa and is therefore eligible for deportation irrespective of his crime.

Of course the ordinary Joe can do something! Saying that is just a cop-out for the people who are too lazy / selfish / entitled etc. to do something.

No, it's putting ordinary people against each other for absolutely minimum climate gains so while they fight amongst each other, the actual mega polluters are left alone.

Their stated idea is to put pressure on the government to take climate change seriously, but that is a smoke screen. The U.K. has been taking climate change seriously since the 1990s. As a pp said, we have quietly halved our CO2 per capita and on an absolute scale have reduced total CO2 by almost 40%.

So it’s protesting under a false premise as climate change is already being taken seriously. The whole “investment in oil” is a red herring too because oil only affects the climate if you burn it. Millions of barrels of oil are needed for other industries- pharmaceuticals, agriculture, engine lubricants (including the wind turbines), and cosmetics.

Investment in oil to maintain a gentle down trend in the production and use of oil until we have phased out the burning of oil (petrol and diesel), is both necessary and also especially needed to combat the impact of climate change on agriculture so that we don’t all starve to death.

This means that all the leaders of JSO and XR are doing is attention seeking with the aim to get into the news in order to recruit more gullible but good intentioned but vulnerable pensioners to their cause as well as get them to donate money to them.

One reason XR keeps creating splinter groups like JSO and Insulate Britain is due to serious questions being asked about where the money they have raised through donations has gone? And why leaders of these groups seem so flush with money and property all of a sudden?

There is a boldness to many thinking it is right and proper that they be paid a high salary from these donations to be essentially paid activists, supppsedly pressuring the government to do something it has been doing these past 30yrs. It’s win-win because they can fabricate crises, do a protest, and then claim credit for progress they had nothing to do with.

There are many examples of these protest groups directly protesting large corporations, banks, oil and gas, private jets etc., they don’t only target public roads but that’s what gets media attention.

But protest is not the only option, here’s a handy list of options http://www.imperial.ac.uk/stories/climate-action/

and if you already do most of those things then amazing! But most aren’t do anything much and that’s a problem.

The article says it. He left his job as a musician to be a JSO protester and is of NFA. Musician is a shortage occupation where it is cheap and easy to get a work visa. The requirements of a work visa is that you have a job in the category of your visa, you do not quit that job, and you earn a minimum amount of money each year.

Obviously, they either didn’t know he’d left his job and was in violation or they did but could not find him as “no fixed address” is what people who are in hiding do not just the homeless. Then he showed up in a hammock on a bridge so they caught him out. Tons of visa holders get away with violating their visa until they are caught out for something else or a triggering event happens like no tax return, or the visa expired and wasn’t renewed.

I didn’t read up any further beyond the phone in and quickly scanning that article to link for anyone who wanted info. His particular case is obviously different if he would actually be liable to deportation without the prison term, because it’s not actually the cause of his deportation order if it’s true what others have researched. He’d have been deported if caught anyway. I haven’t really followed the news that much on just stop oil, nor is it my friendship circle so I’m not as read up as others on the backgrounds. I don’t drive much in day to day life so the impact hasn’t hit me either, bar avoiding journeying for a few days near dartford. If he has actively chosen to breach his visa, not follow all the routes accessible to him and knowingly deliberately left work well he did enter an inevitable situation by choice. If it’s true and it’s wilfully misleading the reporting then I can’t support his particular person.

I do however still disagree in the wider sense with the blanket one year automatic rule for those here legally and think it has a disproportionate impact.

I laughed out loud at @Superfood and the outrage about having your views questioned. You slung enough mud at me, ignored all clarifications and clear answers to push a weird agenda that I have a thing advocating for rich white people only. Then when you are questioned yourself on the same vein you are full of outrage. I’m no lesser being, nor are you special on here. If you chose to twist people’s words, imply awful things about them then people may in turn question you are your motives like I did. Especially when you evade answering, in particular the direct question about deporting. You accept some groups are facing institutional racism, are disadvantaged and disproportionately hit by the law- but do you accept that this law is harming those groups mainly. Not the odd white man, they get caught up, but the wider impact is not mainly people with the resources to correctly and easily follow immigration rules and costs. I don’t generally ask if people are racist, I presume they are decent, but you implied it was my motive enough and since it was such a forefront thing for you- it was worth exploring the exact position since you brought it to the thread. Don’t accuse others and twist their posts if you want the same courtesy

Oh I just found this statement:
https://settled.org.uk/statement-about-the-case-of-marcus-decker/

It says he did not breach a work visa, he had pre-settled status under EU law.
I’m not from an EU country so not totally sure- but isn’t this not tied to work? Just that he lived here prior to Brexit and the existing EU law carried over for people here? Where are people seeing the work visa thing? I’m open to it- I just can’t find it.

Apparently it’s also the first case of deportation linked to a protest here, so I guess that’s why it’s newsworthy- especially on the back of the new laws around the restrictions of protests and the reduction of the automatic sentence for deportation from 4 years to 1 year.