Celebrating the scapegoats

What do Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Karl Popper, Wole Soyinka, Josef Conrad, Rudolf Nureyev, Omid Djalili and Lomano Lua Lua have in common? They all came to the UK as refugees.

The founder of Marks & Spencers? The designer of the Mini? The people who popularised that famous old British staple fish and chips? All refugees. The BNP didn't tell you that, did they?

Next week is Refugee Week, a celebration of the significant contributions refugees have made to the political, scientific, social, artistic and intellectual culture of the UK. The initiative is supported by Amnesty and Oxfam amongst others, and events will be taking place all over the country to mark the occasion.

I must admit that the concept of a Refugee Week got me thinking of Ian Dury's controversial song 'Spasticus Autisticus'. Polio sufferer Dury wrote it in angry response to the fact that 1981 had been officially designated Year Of The Disabled - well meaning, perhaps, but patronising, and in any case why couldn't EVERY year be Year Of The Disabled? Similarly, shouldn't every week be Refugee Week? And once it's over, and the Mail and the Express slink back to their usual ways, demonising asylum seekers for all society's ills, isn't the cynic entitled to wonder whether anything has changed.

But, as Benjamin Zephaniah rightly argues, everything must start somewhere, and in the current political and social climate a Refugee Week is a necessity: "[It] is important because it reminds us that refugees are not just statistics to be used an abused; they are living, breathing people. I am British, I was born here and I have no intention of leaving here, so I want to create a society here where compassion is built into our culture; in this society we will be so aware of the world around us that we will not need a Refugee Week. Until then this is how we do it".

You can find out about Refugee Week events near you here.