TourGuide

From Noborders Network Wiki

Glasgow TOUR GUIDE

Content:

• 1) short introduction of what this is all about

• 2) program of the day

• 10:00 - Welcome and Breakfast at Carnival Arts - 34 Albion Street, Glasgow, G1 1LH
• 11:00 – Intro to the day / Training for Tour Guides -
• 12:00 – Free time / Preparation time.
• 13:00 - 14:00 - Meeting Point at Buchanan Underground St. Tour groups form. Tours Starts
• 16:00- 17:00 approx – Meet up with the Cr8 street carnival.

• 3) map of glasgow with "points of interest"

Points of interest on the tour will include:

The Immigration Reporting Centre in Govan, where asylum seekers and their families have to sign on, and from where they are often snatched and taken to Dungavel. Also known as the Scottish Enforcement Unit.

The HQ of Serco, the parent company of Premier Prisons which runs Dungavel Immigration Removal Centre. Serco also runs the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston, and has other multi-million pound contracts with the ministry of defence, neatly linking the arms trade and imperialist wars with the persecution of refugees who manage to escape to Britain.

Glasgow City Council's City Chambers, the palatial Victorian HQ of the local authority with the £120 million contract to house asylum seekers in Glasgow, until they are refused asylum, when the council evicts them from flats that no one else wants into utter destitution.

YMCA Glasgow, the organisation with Home Office contracts to house newly arrived asylum seekers in the new "Scottish Induction System", dispersed asylum seekers in NASS accommodation, and which runs the "voluntary" returns programme with the IOM for people with no option but to escape homelessness and destitution by returning to the regime they fled from (it's called the "Options" scheme.)

The Scottish Refugee Council, which began life 25 years ago as a campaigning organisation, but whose business nowadays is mainly with the £4 million per year contract to run the "Reception Assistant" part of NASS dispersal of asylum seekers to Glasgow.

The tour will also probably pass such attractions as offices of airlines involved in deportations, army recruitment centres (where you can sign up for "tours" of the places people feel compelled to migrate from), the docklands where migrants disembarked in previous centuries, along with the products of the slave trade and colonial plunder on which Glasgow grew rich - the second city of the British Empire.

Here is some information on the Vouchers scheme for "failed asylum seekers". A relevant quote is "The File On 4 programme spoke to Kurds housed in accommodation in Oldham, Greater Manchester after they were denied asylum from Northern Iraq.

Living 10 miles from Manchester city centre, they cannot use their vouchers for the fortnightly bus journey to pick them up or the 20-mile round trip to report to the Home Office each month.

Their weekly £35 can only be used in some supermarkets or in expensive city centre coffee shops. "

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/file_on_4/4112226.stm

• short texts for every "POI"

** marking places on the map
     

photografies of some places, impressions of glasgow ...