‘We thought the Rwanda scheme was the worst of it’: Enver Solomon on leading – and leaving – the Refugee Council
NEWS | 24 November 2025
Enver Solomon, chief executive of the Refugee Council, is at his home in London when I meet him. It’s the start of a gruesome week. The home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, has just announced that refugees could have their status revoked at any time if the country from which they fled is deemed safe; the pathway from being granted asylum to getting citizenship would increase to 20 years; AI would be used to establish a refugee’s age; and – a strikingly nasty idea – the jewellery of those arriving in the UK could be seized. While media commentators puzzled over whether this would be enough red meat for Labour to see off Reform, this must surely have been a new low for Solomon? “There’s been lots of terrible weeks,” he says. “So I’m used to it.” He looks neat, open and determined, and his kitchen is incredibly yellow and cheerful, which I put down to sheer effort of will to look on the bright side. “We thought Rwanda was the worst it had ever been,” he says. You remember Rwanda – former Conservative home secretary Priti Patel’s wheeze, where no one arriving on a small boat would ever get the right to settle in the UK, a scheme which cost £700m and deported four people to east Africa, all of them voluntarily. Then Solomon and his team worked in the Rotherham hotel where people were almost burned alive by a far-right mob in 2024. “People inside were livestreaming it to our staff … so there have been some pretty low points. It’s difficult to say this is the worst it’s ever been.” View image in fullscreen Anti-migration protesters outside the Holiday Inn Express in Rotherham, August 2024. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images Nevertheless, he concedes that to hear this week’s plans from a Labour government, which people working in the refugee and asylum sector had hopes for, makes it “more of a letdown, more of a disappointment”. He mentions Alf Dubs’ radio appearance earlier this morning – the Labour peer who himself ran the Refugee Council in the early 90s, and came to Britain thanks to the Kindertransport, the series of rescue operations between 1938 and 1940 which brought mostly Jewish children to the UK to flee the Nazis. “He said this was grubby. And that’s what it is – grubby.” Especially so when Tommy Robinson applauded Mahmood’s plans. He also doesn’t believe it’s politically astute on Labour’s part. “I don’t think, from talking to pollsters and political scientists, that the ‘Nigel Farage is right, don’t vote for Nigel Farage’ strategy is going to work.” Solomon is a pluralist by instinct, never asking you to take his word for anything, always drawing in other voices, colleagues, friends, experts. He takes optimism as a professional duty. “One thing I say to staff is that you’ve got to remain hopeful. Otherwise, what’s the point? And you see hope in small ways. I was with a group of teenage boys last week – all have come here unaccompanied – and you just look at their faces and you see the bloodshot eyes, but they are desperately trying to learn English, they want to get on, and they’re still able to laugh. It’s moments like that you see the human hope that keeps you going, despite all the forces that are ranged against you.” Then he reaches for the Martin Luther King quote – that the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice – and I say, you cannot seriously still think this? The moral universe doesn’t look like an arc, it looks like the electrocardiograph of a person having a heart attack, but Solomon absolutely will not budge on this point. “Ultimately, you’ve got to believe that things are not fixed for ever. Everyone who’s fought against any injustice will have faced huge adversity, moments of deep despondency.” View image in fullscreen Priti Patel in Kigali in April 2022, addressing the media after signing an ‘economic development partnership’ between the UK and Rwanda. Photograph: Muhizi Olivier/AP Refusal to be discouraged is Solomon’s origin story, as it is the story of every one who has ever been, or was born to, a refugee. His mother grew up in apartheid South Africa. “The politics of apartheid were grim,” he says, briskly. She was a Muslim, the only woman in her family to go to university, and she worked as a social worker with Winnie Mandela in Soweto before her family decided life was fundamentally degraded by the “pecking order in South Africa. It went: white, Indian, coloured and then black African. It was a tricameral legislature. So they had the white legislature, they then had the Indian legislature, and then coloured representatives, and the blacks got nothing, completely disenfranchised.” So she came to the UK with her brother in the 60s, and met David Solomon, Enver’s dad, while they were both working for Camden social services. “My dad was born in Merseyside, on the Wirral. Jewish family, his forefathers had come at the turn of the previous century, fleeing the pogroms in eastern Europe.” Solomon grew up steeped in Judaism and Islam, celebrating the festivals of both, going to synagogue and to mosques. It was also a leftwing household. His dad stood as a Labour candidate in Stockport, where the family lived, in the 80s, where he got absolutely hammered by the Conservative candidate. “I remember knocking on doors for him when I was at primary school, I’ve got his old leaflet somewhere. It says: ‘David Solomon is a lecturer in social work at Manchester University and a proud member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.’” Solomon himself was a Labour party member for about a year when he went to university. He left in protest at its support for the Gulf war in 1991 and hasn’t been a member of a political party since (it sounds a little niche, given that Labour of course weren’t the party of government at the time, but it saved him having to leave a decade later, when so many others left). View image in fullscreen People thought to be migrants on board a small boat in Gravelines, France, earlier this month. Photograph: Gareth Fuller/PA Anyway, Solomon’s point is that there are values deeper than party affiliation. “My wife says that when she first met me, I was a leftwing international socialist firebrand, and now I’m more of a social democrat than she is.” His wife, who is Swedish, also works in the charity sector. “I say positive things about the royal family, the union jack – I’ve definitely travelled, politically. What does left and right mean any more? It’s about core values; I have a deep commitment to social justice.” It is something he believes he shares with a “decent majority” of the country, who he says believe “in multiculturalism and that it’s right to treat people with decency, humanity and dignity”. “That is why people were appalled by the Windrush scandal. That is why people were appalled when – in a unit where our staff work down in Dover for unaccompanied children and families – Robert Jenrick ordered the cartoons to be painted over. Everyone was appalled by that.” He recalls how some focus groups were done around the time the Rwanda policy was proposed. Some of the Tory voters, he says, “hadn’t quite understood how it was supposed to work – they thought people would have their asylum claim heard here, and then if it was unsuccessful, be sent to Rwanda. When you explained to them, no, they’re not going to have their claim heard, they’re not going to get a fair hearing, these Tory voters went, ‘No, that’s not right’.” Part of the problem is the way mainstream politicians talk about refugees and asylum seekers – Keir Starmer’s “island of strangers” speech, for example, springs to mind (although Starmer has now said he regrets it). “Some of the language you hear now about refugees, the BNP would have used a few decades ago, and everyone was aghast at it then. And this is where mainstream politics now is.” View image in fullscreen The home secretary, Shabana Mahmood. Photograph: House of Commons/PA Solomon is clear on the potential problems of Labour’s new suite of policies – in particular reviewing a person’s refugee status every 30 months to determine if their home country is safe to return to, which will cost, estimates the Refugee Council, £872m over a decade. “They’re going to have to create a new bureaucracy to do this, at enormous cost,” he says. And how would it work, practically? For instance, “under the proposals, say I’ve got a daughter who’s studying for their GCSEs. They’ve settled in school, they’ve been here for 60 months, they’re a star student. They’re hoping to go and do A-levels, they want to become a teacher or a scientist. Then, they get a knock on the door, they’re told their home country is safe, and they have to go now. But all they want to do is get on with their life and contribute, have a good job and become a proud Briton. Are we going to say to them, ‘Sorry, we’ve decided you’re out. And even worse, we’re going to forcibly remove you, because if you say no, we’ll put you in detention, because we don’t want you to abscond.’ Is that who we are as a country? Is that what the majority of Britons want?” There is also the question of what happens to children who are born in the UK while their parents are in Mahmood’s 20-year limbo – will they be subject to immediate deportations to countries they’ve never been to? “What kind of system is this, where we have two categories of people?” Solomon asks. People don’t realise that refugees come from countries where the idea that you would sit at home and receive benefits off the state is deeply humiliating. It’s anathema to their upbringing Instead, Solomon says, the government should be focused on dealing with the huge backlog of asylum cases that has led to tens of thousands of people being forced to live in hotels while they await a decision. These hotels are astronomically expensive, with insultingly poor living standards, and have become a focus for local anger and legal challenge. “If there’s one thing this government could do to demonstrate competence and win the confidence of the electorate, it would be to stop talking about how illegal migration is dividing communities, and close hotels. There is still not a credible plan to do that.” The Refugee Council proposes granting limited leave to remain – subject to security checks – to people from Afghanistan, Eritrea, Iran, Sudan and Syria (nationalities that have a very high rate of being granted asylum), which would allow them to work until they are granted permanent leave to remain. The assumption that migrants are looking to claim benefits (created dually by Tony Blair’s decision that asylum seekers shouldn’t be allowed to work, and subsequent tabloid castigation of refugees as workshy) has been a gross mischaracterisation for years, and has become foundational to anti-immigrant narrative-building. “People don’t realise that refugees come from countries where the idea that you would sit at home and receive benefits off the state is deeply humiliating,” says Solomon. “It’s anathema to their upbringing, to their culture, to everything they’ve been told. They believe you go out, you graft, and you stand on your own two feet, and it’s deeply embarrassing for them to not be able to do that. Migrants come and they work hard. You can see that, the world over.” View image in fullscreen ‘They’re just people, like you and me’ … Solomon at home. Photograph: Christian Sinibaldi/The Guardian More recently, a fundamentally racist narrative linking refugees with criminality, particularly sex crimes, has taken hold. “The asylum seekers and refugees who we work with and the refugees who work at the Refugee Council all feel othered, they feel they’ve been tarnished with this language: suggesting that they’re these terrible people, doing these terrible crimes. They’re just people, like you and me. They’re men, they’re women, they’re children, they just want to get on with their lives. If they’re young, they want to get an education; if they’re older, they just want to get a job.” The tinderbox atmosphere has flared up in dismaying events, Solomon says. “I heard an extraordinary story a few weeks ago from a councillor down in the south-west. A group of non-white men were gathering outside a building, and some local people assumed it was an asylum hotel and started protesting. It was student accommodation. The men were British students that just happened to be brown, like me. This is the consequence of political rhetoric.” The politics is now so dangerous that the Refugee Council has had to take security measures at its offices and at Solomon’s home – something the charity wouldn’t even have considered two years ago. Solomon is moving to another job in January, to Nacro, a criminal justice charity. Amid some neutral, commonsense thoughts about five years being long enough in any organisation – he took up this role in 2020 – is a palpable exhaustion. “It’s not just a tough job because of the issue: human beings who have had an incredibly tough time, in a hostile environment that has got more hostile. But it’s the intensity of it: it’s always in the headlines, it’s always coming at you. It’s always impacting on our staff, on our organisation. I don’t want to do the job feeling that I’m worn out and I’m just about hanging on.” It’s hardly Solomon’s first rodeo: he has been in the charity sector since the early 00s. Before that, he worked as a journalist at the BBC for 10 years but switched careers after becoming disenchanted with the era of 24-hour, bite-size news. He was working at a children’s charity just as the coalition government came in and brushed aside the state’s commitment to ending child poverty. “This really matters. It’s about who we are. It’s about how we interact with people on a daily basis. It’s about whether we’re prepared to see people as aliens, second-class citizens, or whether we’re people with a sense of shared humanity. Part of me does feel that it’s walking away from a cause which is so pivotal and matters so much to so many people’s lives. But lots of others will fight the good fight, and I’m going on to fight the good fight in another area.”
Author: Zoe Williams.
Source