For nearly 20 years we have spent every summer on the island of Bute in the Firth of Clyde. This week, preparing once again for the 400-mile (644 km) drive north, I read a daunting opinion of our destination. In a Daily Mail report that has provoked a small storm on social media, a 35-year-old Syrian refugee, speaking under the pseudonym Rasha, said that Bute was “full of old people”, a place where “people come to die”. Her 42-year-old husband Abd (also a false name) worried that this would also happen to him; first despair, then entropy and the slow decline towards the grave. Abd said Scotland was beautiful, the people there had treated him well, he even liked the weather, but: “There is no movement, there is nothing. I’m not bored any more. I am depressed now. I feel like I have one option now — to die here. Only die here, nothing else.”
Rasha, Abd and their four children came to Bute in December from a refugee camp in Lebanon, together with 11 other Syrian families — 28 adults and 31 children in total — who were given homes in the island’s only town, Rothesay, under the UK government’s Syrian vulnerable person resettlement programme. Local authorities administer the programme from funds allotted to them by the Home Office; in Scotland, Argyll and Bute was one of the first authorities to sign up. Pictures of Alan Kurdi, the three-year-old boy found drowned on a beach in Turkey were still fresh in the public memory; the first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, offered to take refugees into her own home; public sympathy had still to be corrupted, confused or diluted by the events at the Bataclan theatre and subsequent terrorist outrages.
“People in Argyll and Bute are known for their warmth and friendliness, as has been proved by the huge offers of support... for those seeking refuge from Syria,” said Len Scoullar, a Bute councillor and the council’s provost. The council and other agencies provided interpreters, English language tutors and other kinds of assistance and advice to families who, as Scoullar said, “must be feeling incredibly vulnerable and confused. Other host communities did the same thing, but nowhere else attracted as much publicity.
The phrase “Scottish island” evokes Mendelssohn and the adventures of Katie Morag — romantic places, remote from mainland degradation, where the doors of the little white houses are never locked at night. Only when the television viewer saw the first refugees wheeling their suitcases through what looked like a damp council estate, under a sombre December sky, did a different reality intrude.
The statistics relating to Bute aren’t encouraging. According to the Scottish government’s index of multiple deprivation, certain streets in Rothesay are among the most deprived in Scotland, notable for their low household incomes and high crime levels. Research by the Campaign to End Child Poverty has suggested that more than a quarter of the island’s children live in poverty, the highest proportion of any district in the local authority.
More alarmingly, in terms of Bute’s future, is a rate of population decline that is probably the steepest of any sizeable Scottish island: in the 60 years between the censuses of 1951 and 2011, its population halved — from 12,547 to 6,498 — and has almost certainly shrunk by hundreds more in the seven years since. In Argyll and Bute as a whole, the population over the next 20 years is projected to decline by 13.5 per cent from its 2012 estimate of 87,000. There will be many more of the old, already present in disproportionate numbers, and even fewer of the young — a trend that runs counter to the forecast for Scotland as whole, which has a projected population increase of 8.8 per cent over the same period. No need to ask why the Syrian families were resettled on the island: it has houses waiting to be filled.
In the light of normal migratory ambition — to live where your compatriots have already settled — the thrust of the Mail’s story is hardly surprising. The paper interviewed two couples linked by sisters — Rasha and Fatima married Abd and Hassan (all pseudonyms but scarcely protective, given the group photographs of the two families that accompanied the piece). The husbands were businessmen in Homs before their homes and livelihoods were destroyed, and both want, in the words of Abd via an interpreter, “to go to a place where there are more Arabic people, [where] I can ... learn English here and there and probably catch a job”. He hadn’t expected to come to Bute. “We thought we were going to London or Manchester. But whenever we say anything about moving off the island, we are told ‘We had to pay a lot of money to bring you here’.”
‘Manipulative’ journalism
The story was an online hit for both the Mail and the Telegraph , which ran its version a day later, and it might be reasonably assumed that the reason for its popularity was the desire among a section of the public to see refugees as ingrates; in the words of the blogger Lisa O’Donnell, it was “a manipulative piece of journalism allowing the Daily Mail to perpetuate its true political agenda, which is not supportive of asylum”.
The story’s origins, however, were more complicated. Five weeks earlier, a Mail reporter had come to Bute to pursue another story involving a refugee. The story proved untrue, but the reporter made contacts in the Syrian community who later got in touch with the paper to publicise their concerns about their lack of prospects on the island. The first version of the piece, published in the Mail of Sunday, was longer, gentler and gave more weight to their gratitude. Through cutting and sharpening, the daily paper made the complaints more provocative.
In the days since the story appeared, other refugees have come forward to say how happy they are on the island — how well they have been treated, how nice the people are. A balance has been restored. Still, to stare out from the promenade on a dark August afternoon, when the clouds almost touch the sea and rain drips down your face from your anorak hood... to be driven into a frenzy of itching by midges the same evening... to regret the lunchtime mutton pie with the chicken korma on top: in these circumstances, who would think ill of a person for wanting away to sunshine, tabbouleh, common memories and convivial friends?
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
Ian Jack writes a weekly column for the Guardian. He began his journalistic career in Scotland and later covered South Asia as a foreign correspondent.
