How you can speak out against the proposals
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The Sovereign Borders Bill is only that: a bill. It has to get through several stages of amendments before it becomes law. The number and scale of amendments depend on the amount and scale of opposition. That’s why it’s vital for anyone and everyone who opposes the bill to join together and make our voices heard.
1 – Respond to the consultation
The best thing you could do is respond to the government consultation. It need only take you 20 minutes – but it will be 20 minutes very effectively spent.
The government has said: “We want to listen to a wide range of views from stakeholders and sectors, as well as members of the public.”
So whether you’re an individual or you represent a group or an organisation such as a school, we urge you to respond.
To view or respond to the consultation document, click the button below. Scroll to the end and click ‘respond online’.
Responding to the consultation isn’t daunting, but it should be done tactically. Therefore, we strongly recommend that you use either of the 2 sets of guidelines shown opposite.
Guidelines for responding
We recommend that you use either of these 2 sets of guidelines:
- Amnesty International’s guidelines are for individuals. Very clear and to the point if you’re pressed for time.
- Asylum Matters guidelines for are for organisations, such as schools, community groups and charities.
What to do
- Set up a profile to respond as an individual or organisation (the questions vary slightly).
- There are 10 sections. You don’t have to answer all of the questions; you can even just respond to the multiple choice ones if you don’t want to write anything. In fact, there are some questions that Amnesty advises not responding to, as they are leading or don’t let you respond meaningfully.
- Responding to the important questions takes about 20 minutes or all the questions would take about an hour.
- If you do choose to write responses, we recommend you draft them somewhere else first(Word, Google docs etc) and then paste them into the answer space. If you press ‘enter’, it submits your response immediately; you can go back, but it just wastes time. The writing is also really big so it’s hard to read over what you’ve written. It’s much easier to craft your response and then paste it in.
- Don’t be put off by thinking you might write the wrong thing. The advice from Amnesty is clear and they provide lots of evidence you can use to back things up.
Deadline: 11:45pm, 6 May 2021. Here’s how long you have:
02
Days
01
Hours
40
Minutes
45
Seconds
2 – Write to your MP
This letter focuses on the flawed consultation process, as this is a live issue. We believe this is the best place to begin. Once the new immigration plan is brought to Parliament, we can respond to the content.
Guidelines for sending your letter
We very much encourage you to personalise this letter to some degree. MPs take individualised letters more seriously than when they receive hundreds of the same letter.
Click the button and download the letter. Add the date at the top and your name and address at the bottom, deleting the square brackets. You must be in Julian Smith’s constituency, otherwise please address the letter to your own MP.
3 – Share on social media
If you don’t already, please follow us. There will be multiple posts about this issue.
Most importantly, please share posts to your own feed.
Perhaps you’d be willing to like and/or comment (which means Facebook/Twitter will show our posts more often).
Talk to everyone you can
Tell your family, your friends, your colleagues and your milkman. Put it on social media. People need to know before it’s too late.
It’s surprising how many people really do care but don’t always hear about what’s going on. If they’re concerned, ask them to do something about it.