Waiting isn't Working

1st April 2019

Every year, people are forced to flee their countries due to war or violence. Some people come to the UK to find safety and claim asylum. While they are waiting for the government to make a decision on their claim, they aren’t allowed to work.

We believe that this is unfair – people can wait years for a decision, unable to work in all that time. It just doesn’t make sense! So last year we partnered up with our friends over at Refugee Action as part of the Lift the Ban coalition to ask our government to give people seeking asylum the right to work.

The petition is currently at 37,077 signatures! But we want to show the Home Secretary just how many people support the idea of giving people seeking asylum the right to work and so we’re holding out until we get to a nice, even 50,000. How about sending the petition here to a friend to help us?

Here is a little look at some of the highlights so far:

Missing… Have you seen Common Sense?

If you were out and about in London some of you have seen a van with a gigantic ‘MISSING’ poster driving about Westminster in those cold rainy November months last year. We thought what better way to get our message across than to send a poster around the heart of parliament looking for the one thing we need… common sense! This went really well and turned many heads, as well as creating a bit of a buzz on social media. Here is the van in Westminster if you didn’t see it yourself:

Once we had done this, we thought – why not keep this up for longer and put it outside our Soho Scoop Shop? So that’s exactly what we did. Our Scoop Shop help this glorious poster up in pride of place for two weeks. It was a great way to get the whole of Soho involved!

We hit the road…

 There’s nothing we enjoy more than hitting the road with a truck full of ice cream, a couple of large cow onesies and visiting people who are as passionate as we are at fighting injustice. Last autumn we went up and down the country to different universities, talking to many students who were keen to sign our petition to show their support. 

A load of old nonsense…

Fish and Snips, What the Cluck, Sprout of your Rind…these don’t really sound like the kind of chunks and swirls we would put into a new ice cream flavour do they? Some may say they sound like a load of old nonsense… and that’s exactly right! On the 19^th February this year, we gave every MP (all 650 of them!) a tub of these fake flavours, sent directly to their desks. Surprisingly, the tubs were empty of ice cream but were full of reasons why they should lift the ban.

.

A few last words…

We’ve made a great impact in such a short amount of time and it would be great if we could keep the momentum up. There are currently two Private Member Bills going through parliament and the Home Office is reviewing its policy – so action is needed now more than ever! Sign the petition here to help us #LifttheBan.