PAID EXCLUSIVE: How university grants quietly fuel Britain’s border crisis

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Today I wanted to cheer everyone up with an article on how taxpayer grants - mostly at universities - quietly fuel Britain’s border crisis (wahoo…)

Forget the approximate £10 billion a year the UK is spending on accommodation for asylum seekers. On top of that, I have found countless examples of state funding for studies such as Decolonising Fashion and Textiles - Design for Cultural Sustainability with Refugee Communities and academics critical of the “hostile environment”/ national borders.

These projects were underway while the Conservative government was in charge. The same one that told us it wanted to “stop the boats” and paid the Rwandan government £240 million to help it as part of its asylum plan. All the while, taxpayers have been (mostly unknowingly) charged for research “to evaluate how effectively art museums can support refugee/migrant artists and communities and build solidarity across communities”, along with many other projects along the same lines. It’s as if the state is saying “Don’t come here! But if you do… fancy joining arts club?”

This area is a sensitive one which I want to add a caveat about. That is, I am not arguing that Britain shouldn’t help refugees, financially or otherwise. I believe that every country - where people have had the good fortune to be born into relative safety - should recognise that fact by giving to the world’s most vulnerable. My own “Charlotte Aid” is donating to Plan International, a global children's charity. It’s only a small amount but has been going out for the best part of a decade so now into the hundreds. Not Bob Geldof levels exactly, but my way of emphasising that I do care.

At the same time, illegal (and legal) migration numbers have to be manageable and affordable, and Britain’s aren’t. Over 19,000 have entered the UK by small boat in 2024, with a quarter of our aid budget spent on hosting asylum seekers.

The mess at the borders, in turn, means it’s harder to work out who’s vulnerable (if they even make it to Britain in the first place). Around 83 percent of small boat arrivals in the 12 months to June 2024 were male and - where age was recorded - over 40 percent were between 25 and 39 years old.

Link to BBC

Where are the women and children, you might ask? Especially those suffering under the Taliban.

Even if the system improved - and we had a manageable number of people we had a good idea were genuine refugees - I’m not sure how any of the taxpayer projects I’ve found would help. Take this one below (“Dancing Dialogues”), which I’ll outline later.

Housing is one of the most obvious things to spend money on. It was noticeably absent when Tory MPs decided Britain would “open its arms” to Ukrainians. There were stories of refugees returning to their war-torn homeland, as a measure of how desperate the rental situation is here.

Mental health services matter too. The Times has a very sad story today about 13 confirmed or suspected cases of suicide (of people being processed in the asylum system) since 2022, including a 14-year-old girl from Iraq who threw herself from a building (thankfully surviving) and a “21-year-old Russian woman who took her life at a canal in north London”.

Instead taxpayer money has gone to projects such as one that seems to claim chatting about glass can help Kurdish women, including those who have been displaced by war. Here’s a video of the lead researcher, a “Creative Wellbeing Practitioner”, explaining:

Most of the projects I’ll show you are similarly abstract, the majority funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (the quango I write about most on Woke Waste).

In short, we have a situation where the UK is spending approx £8 million a day on asylum hotels (the last figure in the Home Office’s annual report 2023), Labour has promised to restore the international development budget to 0.7 per cent of GDP (when the country can “afford it” - LOL) and we are spending MILLIONS on ridiculous academia marketed as support for refugees/ migrants/ diverse/ vibrant communities of lived experience.

To let you make your own mind up, here’s a selection of grants adding up to £8,764,274 (not included: the PhDs and theatre entry at the end):