The pointlessness of the exercise made me think about those facing destitution who, having endured 20 years in limbo in the UK, can apply to regularise their status on the basis of long residence. They must then jump through a series of further unnecessary and burdensome hoops - chasing medical records to document their length of residence; gathering letters from friends, relatives, distant acquaintances; proving their destitution in order to avoid exorbitant visa fees.  

 

Compared to that prolonged exercise in cruel and arduous pointlessness after 20 years of enforced suffering, my few extra miles weren’t much to fuss about.  

 

I followed the tramway as far as it’s possible, turning round at a sewage works - the third (and smelliest) that I had passed. It was then downhill all the way back to Bugsworth, sped on by the certainty that friends, family, a pint, and a rest awaited. 

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If people manage to submit an application to the Home Office based on their 20 years’ residence, they have no certainty as to what will happen next. They have to wait - months, even years, with the possibility that the application will be refused, especially if they have had difficulty evidencing the length of their stay.  

 

If successful, they will be granted status, but often with no access to public funds, and they will be put on the ‘10-year route’ to settlement, meaning they have to renew their status every two and a half years, with punishing fees each time – if they don’t do so, they ‘fall off’ the route and lose their status. As if on finishing the marathon, I had been told that I couldn’t stop and relax but would have to walk a further 10 miles, with the risk in the evening gloom and drizzle of falling into the canal. 

 

* 

 

10 years, 20 years, 26 years - these are unimaginably long periods in the span of a human life to be stuck in destitution. But in historical perspective, 26 years feels relatively recent - just as 26 miles in the geography of the UK as a whole is just a speck on a map.  

Next year marks 26 years since the passing of the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999, the New Labour legislation that started the "dispersal" of people seeking asylum across the UK, including to GM. Section 115 of that Act also excluded those deemed “persons subject to immigration control” from public funds - setting the parameters for enforced destitution over the following decades. Today, the system seems immutable, set in stone - it can be a shock to recall how recent so much of the hostile environment around migration actually is. 

 

Bugsworth, where I concluded my run, today is a beauty spot, nestling between the hills of Chinley Churn and Eccles Pike, proud in its industrial heritage as a major inland port. But by all accounts, it was not so long ago that it was a hostile environment, as wagons laden with rocks and lime came careering down from the hills with only a rudimentary manual brake to slow them; limekilns belching out smoke; the din of loading and unloading; human life exploited and devalued in the service of bringing the materials to build our city.  

 

It’s a fitting reminder that hostile environments don’t have to last forever. The toxic layers of hostile legislation around migration that have accreted over the last century, devaluing and exploiting human life, are not as immutable as they can seem. Let’s hope that the next 26 years will see a rejection of the divisive rhetoric; a dismantling of the rafts of legislation that sustain the Hostile Environment; and an opportunity to repair communities and lives traumatised by recent decades’ immigration policy. And that we won’t have to be fundraising for a fund that shouldn’t have to exist!