https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jul/04/the-uk-once-welcomed-refugees-now-we-detain-them-indefinitely-it-must-end

In a few decades, welcome centres for refugees have become detention centres built on violence and humiliation. The government must shut them down, writes Kamila Shamsie

In the last few months I’ve found myself returning, again and again, to a phrase that I associate with the project Refugee Tales and its campaign to end the indefinite detention of asylum seekers: counting up. When prisoners are given a jail sentence, they can count down to their release date; when refugees are placed in detention they can only count up from the date they were incarcerated, without knowing how high the number will go. In the last few months, we’ve all been counting up. Counting up from the last time we saw people we love, counting up from the last time we were at liberty to traverse the cities and towns in which we live, counting up from the last time we planned for an imaginable future; and, for some people, those who are most vulnerable, still counting up, from the last time they left the confines of their homes.

But when I say I’ve found myself returning again and again to that phrase, I don’t mean to imply that the months in lockdown led me to think that I know what it feels like to be in detention. Quite the contrary. While I was counting up I was also reading and writing and going on walks and able to see people I love, even if that was via a screen. I knew that the lockdown wouldn’t go on forever and, crucially, I knew the lockdown hadn’t been implemented with the express purpose of making people like me suffer. So when I considered those in detention centres I thought how lucky I was; I thought of how many people had been living in a counting up world well before the pandemic, and how they would continue to live in that world, regardless of treatments and vaccines.