Colonial roots of Manchester’s homelessness

As the news covers a rise in refugee homelessness, Elsie Furie considers the root causes of homelessness for many Eritrean refugees in light of a history of British imperialism in East Africa.

Following their eviction by the council from Manchester’s St Peter’s Square on 26 February 2025, dozens of homeless refugees largely of Eritrean and Sudanese backgrounds moved their tents to Albert Square on the other side of Manchester’s Town Hall. As of late March 2025, more than thirty tents were gathered around the statue of British Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone that towers over the Square. Shortly after this, the camp was evicted again. They moved to sleep around the statue of US President Abraham Lincoln, where the tents remain today, facing another winter on Manchester’s streets. 

Refugees continue to be evicted from asylum accommodation upon being granted their new immigration status, and so the camp continues to grow and re-constitute. After being granted refugee status, people who were reliant on Home Office accommodation are given only 28 days to leave their homes. Though this ‘move-on’ period had been extended to 56 days in 2024, this was quietly reversed without consultation this winter. After this short four week period, many people end up homeless immediately. They are thrown on the mercy of local authorities who wish that housing refugees was not their problem.

The people in Manchester’s tents have mostly sought local authority support and been turned away. Many were rejected without lawful basis. Many were rejected more than once, labelled as not vulnerable enough for homelessness assistance or not responded to at all.

British colonialism in Eritrea

There is a painful irony and historical continuity in Eritreans being refused British state support and forced – before their further displacement – to sleep under a statue of a man who encouraged the colonisation of their nation two lifetimes ago. As the late A. Sivanandan wrote, ‘We are here because you were there’, a reminder of how Britain’s imperial past shapes the present.

Gladstone was the Prime Minister of Britain for four separate terms and is remembered for a reformist instinct towards Britain’s own poor, but he also ruled through one of Britain’s most feverish colonial eras, marked by expansionism and exploitation abroad. Whilst he is remembered for his speeches on liberty and peace overseas and his Liberal Party’s opposition to imperialism, his politics on imperialism was contradictory. In 1882, he led Britain to take control of Egypt during a period of competition for control of East Africa that gave access to the Red Sea. The Eritrean writer and freedom fighter Andebrhan Welde Giorgis writes of how ‘in the context of the growing Franco-British rivalry for hegemony over the Red Sea and its strategic commercial lanes, the British prodded Italy to occupy Eritrea’.

It was Italy that first defined the territories that now make up modern day Eritrea on the eastern ‘Horn of Africa’. Between the 1890s and 1941, Italy ruled Eritrea as a race-segregated settler colony, dispossessing its people of their land, refusing sanitation and education to its people, and enlisting its men to fight in Italy’s colonial expansionist wars. This subjugation ended during World War Two, when British forces faced down the Italian army. They promised self-determination to Eritrea to soldiers conscripted by Italy, inspiring many to abandon their posts. This gave Britain the edge in the regional conflict. Not for the first or last time in history, Britain cloaked itself in the language of liberty with no intention of delivering this in practice after the war was over.

Britain ruled Eritrea between 1941 and 1952. It maintained race segregation and implemented a ‘divide and rule’ politics between the diverse ethnic and religious groups. It sought to erase a unified Eritrean national identity or solidarity and suppress nascent liberation politics. Giorgis and many other historians describe the British regime as a dark time in Eritrean history, with the British dismantling and looting many of its industries and railroads. Similarly to their more famous actions in India at around the same time, Britain then planned to partition Eritrea between Ethiopia and Sudan along sectarian and religious lines. The British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs described Eritrea as ‘ethnically disunited and economically non-viable’, and argued that European powers should ‘dismember it’. In 1949, the United Nations decided to push ahead with partition. Eritrea had no representation at this General Assembly. Ethiopia eventually took charge of Eritrea until its successful secession in 1991, after a decades-long military resistance.

Like many postcolonial liberation movements in Africa, the social victory of 1991 was short-lived, with the new pseudo-Maoist leadership morphing fairly rapidly into a dictatorship under Isaias Afwerki, who still rules the country, aged 79, today. Political opponents were imprisoned, isolationist policies pursued, and the people of Eritrea subjected to a new era of political and social repression, including the indefinite military draft for both men and women, prolonged detention for draft evasion, and severe punishments for practising any form of religion except for state-sanctioned branches of Islam and Christianity. After a century of exploitation by imperial powers and, now, embattled home rule, Eritrea remains one of Africa’s weakest economies, and has one of the poorest human rights records in the world. Over half a million people live in Eritrea’s diaspora, after fleeing poverty, starvation and repression at home.

Repression and denial

One of the big tasks of British ideology under neoliberalism has been to distance Britain from its recent history of colonial abuses of power. Britain historicises its violence and acts as if it has no material effects on today’s world. It casts itself as an innocent bastion of tolerance, one of those chimerical Western/British ‘values’. For example, this article on human rights abuses in Eritrea mentions Italian colonialism and strikes a sympathetic tone, but skips the period of British rule and domination entirely.

Despite liberal posturing and silence on Britain’s role in global oppression, British arms sales continue to fuel localised conflict across the world. Arms sold to the United Arab Emirates have been found in use by the Sudanese Rapid Support Forces – a group directly responsible for the displacement of many of the Sudanese refugees sleeping rough under Gladstone and Lincoln in Manchester city centre. 

Refugees arrive in Britain from regions that were dominated and underdeveloped under British rule and are now ravaged by British-made weapons. They meet ignorance and hostility, and are treated as an incursion, a problem to be solved. At the hands of the Home Office and local authorities, they face fresh neglect and violence from a state that helped to institute and fund the wars and conditions of oppression from which they have fled. 

Many of those in Manchester’s homeless camp (and elsewhere in asylum accommodation) have escaped violence and repression, forced military service and religious persecution in Eritrea, and counter-revolution in Sudan. On arrival, they face a new set of challenges: poverty, hostile environment policies that restrict their access to services and work, struggles to obtain and maintain a stabilising immigration status, language barriers, racism from the government and local authorities, difficulty accessing support and social isolation if they find themselves in local areas where few people speak their first language. Eventually – if they are able to get past these problems to participate in work and the mainstream housing system – they then face racialised class exploitation that forces many into low-paid, precarious work and overcrowded, expensive private accommodation. 

A hostile environment

Manchester has been scourged over the last year by protests outside asylum accommodation, fascist rallies and outbursts of racialised violence. Between flashpoint events, rough-sleeping refugees have become a magnet for far-right YouTubers and fascist leaders. They come and film people in the tents and ask them invasive questions about their backgrounds, treating any hostility they face as proof of people’s sub-humanity. They interview passers-by as right-wing talking heads, or post the videos to social media to attract tens of thousands of views, dozens of racist comments piling up underneath. The far right group Britain First used one of these videos calling for mass deportation to promote their Manchester-based rally celebrating the anniversary of the  racist pogroms in August 2024. Under increasing political pressure from the right, even left-posturing politicians make excuses for refugee homelessness or join the ranks of those calling for stricter immigration rules, quietly aware that their policies are causing the problems.

In this hostile environment for those fleeing persecution, the rights of migrants have become harder to defend, both discursively and materially. In times like these, internationalism means learning a world history that isn’t taught in British schools, or on the BBC; it means solidarity with resistance movements everywhere, but also material and political support for those whose existence is resistance inside our own borders.