Sudan war exposes hypocrisy of UK government's treatment of asylum seekers

I met Raheem* in Calais earlier this year along with hundreds of Sudanese people living in the brutal conditions of refugee sites in northern France who hope to cross the Channel.

He told me he wanted to come here to finish his education and find what he called “community”. “The UK is my dream country,” he said.

For Raheem and his fellow nationals, we are an obvious destination to rebuild lives shattered by the bloody war in their homeland.

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The UK has a long historical relationship with Sudan, where English is an official language, that is rooted in empire. Sudanese people have shared cultural connections with Britain, as well as familial and social networks.

Despite these connections, it takes massacres and war crimes, such as the slaughter in El Fasher this week, to draw UK political and media attention to the war in Sudan.

They are the latest atrocities in what the United Nations has called “the world’s largest and most devastating humanitarian crisis”.

I met hundreds of Sudanese refugees in the same situation as Raheem on another visit to Calais, just last week.

They have few other options than small boats if they wish to seek asylum in the UK. Just 83 Sudanese people have been able to use the UK resettlement scheme.

It’s why people seeking safety from the war gather in growing numbers at the UK’s border, willing to risk their lives to cross the Channel and seek asylum.

More than 2,000 Sudanese people arrived in small boats in the first six months of 2025 – a 324% increase on the same period in 2022, before the war began, but still a tiny proportion of the estimated 10 million people displaced by the fighting.

For those who submit an asylum claim here – if they are “lucky” enough to avoid detention and deportation under the “one in, one out” scheme – more fear, uncertainty and loss of dignity await them.

The government is “furious” that refugees such as those from Sudan would dare claim safety here.

So, to satisfy political whims, ministers will put people in ex-military camps, ban them from work, and given them less than £10 a week to live on.

People in the UK’s asylum system now also face relentless racist and anti-immigrant abuse from political and media leaders, protests outside their accommodation, and violence including attempts to burn and kill them.

Far from damping the flames fanned by the far right, the government has banned citizenship for anyone who made a “dangerous journey”, and scrapped family reunion for those granted refugee status, moves that diminish dignity, care and fairness, values we all share.

If the government wants to vent its fury, it should not aim it at people such as Raheem, who have fled massacres in Sudan, but direct it back at itself.

Because it’s the British government that continues to licence the sale of arms and military equipment to UAE, some of which has turned up in Sudan, raising “serious questions about the UK’s potential complicity in mass atrocities”.

These atrocities expose the hypocrisy and cruelty of asylum policy because they are enabled by the government’s own foreign policy.

But our political leaders refuse to take responsibility for even the very small proportion of people displaced by the conflict who seek refuge here.

And Sudan is only one example foreign policy displacing people that Ministers then refuse to address – the scandal of systematically refusing Afghan asylum applications is another.

This government said in its election manifesto last year that it would “uphold human rights and international law”.

This promise lies in tatters, in the face of cynical political point-scoring that has seen the government strip refugees of their rights, while continuing to fund and arm the conflicts that generate displacement.

Until the government actually creates safe routes, and until we admit and address the relationship between foreign policy and forced displacement, people will continue to arrive by any means available to them.

The real crisis those dangerous journeys represent is not a crisis of border security, it is a crisis of human dignity and racial justice, in which predominantly Black and Brown people suffer and die at the UK’s border.

It is past time for this government to stand by its pledge, do the decent thing and change direction on asylum.

*Raheem is not his real name. Ben Whitham is senior policy and research officer at Refugee Action.

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