I’ve been a refugee twice – seeing the response to racism makes me proud to be British

I’ve been a refugee twice, I have to remind myself. 

I tend to forget the second time. I was a teenager then. “Leave the country, take early retirement, or die,” was what the chief martial law administrator, General Ershad, said to my father – who was renowned as an honest man, at the top of a civil service department, under a military dictatorship that wanted to corruptly take aid money. The upshot was we left Bangladesh. Honesty at the time was not conducive to life expectancy.   

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The first time was when I was much younger, during the civil war that led to the creation of Bangladesh, splitting off from Pakistan. My father was jailed as a political prisoner and the rest of the immediate family fled the country, here to the UK, my mother’s homeland. Two of my uncles, Billal and Dullal, were not lucky enough to be able to flee and did not survive. My childhood memory of them is their joy in their nephews, my elder brother and I, and that is how I remember them.  

I know the experiences I had as a child and growing up in Pakistan and Bangladesh shaped me. I skate over the darker moments of civil war, military coups and the inhumanity we human beings manage to do to each other.  

The UK in the late ’70s and into ’80s was not like today. The racism, unrest and policing were all different. We have made so much progress as a society since then. We have laws to protect our minorities’ communities. The Macpherson report into policing came up with the concept of institutionalised racism. Seeing the rioting today, we do not have a police and judiciary that stand by or against us but stand with our communities. Seeing the response of people standing against racism, to protect those under attack and stand in the way of harm to protect others, makes me proud to be British.    

When people ask me, what should we do at Big Issue Invest to respond, my answer is simple. We respond before things happen. More than two-thirds of our investments are in the most under-supported parts of the country. We have been investing in communities to find enterprising ways of tackling poverty, with £43m of investors’ money put to good use in more than 140 investments.    

Our work supporting refugees has helped people settle and integrate, learning English and becoming a vital part of where they live. 

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There are so many solutions for us. At Big Issue Invest, we’re proud to support initiatives like Lightning Reach, a portal helping people discover financial support, Home Kitchen, a London restaurant employing people with homelessness backgrounds to learn the restaurant trade and Homes for Good, where we put £3.5m into providing quality affordable homes in Glasgow as an ethical alternative to the private rented sector. 

Community energy directly powers homes and community organisations, such as our investment in Wolverton Community Energy. These point the way to policy solutions – we can finance the shift of private rented sector portfolios to social enterprise solutions. We can introduce a social tariff – cheap energy for the first part of an energy bill paid by those of us better off. We could do a one-off debt jubilee, that Christian concept of forgiveness of unaffordable debt, for student debt and the debt owed by people in poverty to our private utilities. It is within our ability to rethink our economy and make life affordable. 

What we do at Big Issue Invest points the way to the wider social solutions we have to the problems we experience. 

There’s never been a better time to be part of the Big Issue Group. We have a big voice. We put our investors’ money where our mouth is, and what we get is amazing. 

Danyal Sattar is CEO of Big Issue Invest.

Do you have a story to tell or opinions to share about the performance of Keir Starmer so far, or any of the topics raised? Get in touch and tell us more. Big Issue exists to give homeless and marginalised people the opportunity to earn an income. To support our work buy a copy of the magazine or get the app from the App Store or Google Play.