Online access is now Free. If you have an existing subscription click here for more information
Front line: Too well to stay
Published 04 September 2023
If you’re suffering from a fatal illness, better make sure it’s debilitating if you want to remain in the UK.
Being a poverty lawyer means helping people, right? You’ve got to believe that. Otherwise you might go a bit loopy.
I saw Juliet again today, and her daughter Francesca. Juliet hails from the Horn of Africa. She has been here for six years, and has been living with the knowledge of her HIV two months longer than her three-year-old has been alive.
Juliet’s flame left her in lovely Hackney – no Romeo, he. Living on sofas for a while, eventually she came to us with her housing problems. We put the heavy hand of the law on the council, and as a prize she was housed in a handsome hotel.
Said largesse of the parish is a coffin cubicle, a narrow bed where mother and daughter hide from cockroaches at night.
In the day, Francesca parades with her mother, both of them tricked up in bright clothes donated by well wishers – all show business.
Juliet is staying well, strong as an elephant. So she asks the Home Office if she can stay, and keep the access to good healthcare, versus going back to a country where drugs cost more than almost everyone can afford.
In the fullness of time the legal process delivers a verdict. Juliet may have a fatal illness, but right now she’s doing fine.
Her viral load is a bit whacked, but it could be a year or two before she really gets sick. Little Francesca, cute as a cherub – she’s clean, too.
With some regret, I like to imagine, the immigration judge dismisses her application to remain in these shores. The threshold for preventing the deportation of persons with painful and threatening illnesses is alarmingly low.
People have been deported more or less on a drip. Sorry, have a nice death – everyone could get cancer sooner or later. It must be a relief Juliet is so strong and healthy right now, so her appeal can be dismissed.
Or put it another way, if Juliet dies in another country from economic deprivation and a lack of medical care, and her daughter is left at the mercy of providence, it’s not our problem. One has to protect the NHS.
The council pulls the plug on Juliet, but she hangs out in the cockroach hotel, picking the locks almost as fast as the management can change them. Local residents help her break in, because no-one can bear to see a little girl so full of fun on the street.
Today, I tell Judith that if she can’t live underground in Hackney any longer – she has to go to the Home Office and get in the line for deportation. After this, daughter and mum will be shipped off to somewhere outside London, because the capital is too expensive. Then after that, Juliet and Francesca will just have to wait.
As I explain this, I wander around the office, eye contact being difficult when you can’t make the law work properly. But Francesca is having none of it. She gives big grins, kicks the photocopier, is persuaded to make drawings, but loses interest. Drives the volunteers crazy, and then gives a cheeky smile, ‘like, what about me?’
And so I send Juliet and Francesca on to Birmingham or Strathclyde, waiting until they’re put on a plane. Juliet is torn from her specialist HIV clinic, and her daughter loses all her new friends. Sorry I couldn’t help you, ladies.
Nathaniel Mathews is a solicitor at Hackney Law Centre.
