Mark Goldring is the outgoing CEO of Asylum Welcome, a local organisation in Oxford that assists asylum seekers, refugees and vulnerable migrants. He had been the CEO of Oxfam GB until 2018.
I turned Mark’s mind back to the unsettling civil unrest of the summer, when, fuelled by misinformation and racism online, anti-immigration riots broke out across 27 towns and cities in the UK. Asylum Welcome, the Oxford-based charity that Mark directs, was one of the locations circulated as a possible target.
“It certainly was quite a shock, coming to work on Monday morning to find out we were on a hit list for a Wednesday demonstration,” Mark told Cherwell. “The staff were scared and the clients were scared. Not everyone we work with knew of the threats, but they could feel the change in temperature across the country.”
Balancing the need to keep their vital services for the community running and the need to ensure employees safety, Mark had made the decision that the offices would close early that Wednesday. Just as they were preparing to leave, the reception was greeted by two unexpected visitors, Imam Monawar Hussain and Bishop Steven Croft, who walked in bearing lunch.
“They brought pizza! For the staff, the volunteers and the clients. That solidarity is really what we felt very powerfully through the next 12 hours.”
After lunch, the office was emptied. Mark told me of how, from the office, he then went to a local hotel to spend the evening with some of the 250 asylum seekers housed there. Inside the hotel the already tense atmosphere was brought to a climax by the sudden sound of chanting outside.
“We then realised it was the supporters of the refugees who were singing, not the demonstrators and we went out to join them. It was a threat that turned into a marked opportunity for people to express solidarity.
“Obviously, the atmosphere was very different in some other parts of the country. But in Oxford there was the sense that our solidarity was stronger than the extreme right wing.”
In light of these threats, I asked if he believed that anti-immigration sentiment in the UK had worsened in recent years. Something that Mark was keen to address was that the narrative of scapegoating migrants, perpetuated by some of the media and politicians, needed to change: “People were equating a sense of exclusion, that local services, jobs, opportunities weren’t good enough, with a sense that other people are taking it from us.
“No, I don’t think we can’t get healthcare because we’ve actually got too many migrants. Those very migrants are providing the healthcare. We would have a fraction of the students and professors that we’ve got. We’d have a fraction of the businesses. We’d have a fraction of the doctors and nurses and so on. Oxfordshire would collapse without migration.”
At Asylum Welcome the focus has been on assisting asylum-seekers and the most vulnerable migrants in the Oxford community. Mark described it as “a deliberate philosophy of responding to a broad range of needs.” This certainly rings true: Even a cursory glance at their website revealed the seemingly endless list of services they provide. These range from opposing government plans for the re-opening of the Campsfield detention centre, to providing translators to help individuals express traumatic experiences for Home Office cases, to supplying free bus passes.
A large obstacle for the charity was the unequal support available for asylum seekers depending on which country they come from. Mark told Cherwell: “Some refugees arrive welcomed by the government like the Ukrainians and the Afghans were, and there’s public funds to help them. Others arrive as asylum seekers where the government provides the minimum legal requirements and nothing more.
“As a local organisation we can’t pretend to have a national influence, so we join coalitions, or we help on an individual level. Wherever we can, we’ll do it by giving voice to our clients so that they can actually speak for themselves. We’ve taken up successful cases to stop deportations to Rwanda or to keep them off that awful barge which was rented last year.”
On the issue of advocacy, we discussed student campaigns for change and reform which were often met with opposition from their universities.
“Well.” He chuckled. “History shows students being opposed by their institutions. Many of which are run by people who used to be students themselves and fully understand both sides of that picture. I think the real challenge for student campaigning is longevity and consistency.
“Something like the Campsfield detention centre is not in the power of the university but our attempts to get the University to take a position on it have not made any progress. The science park development site has actually got land right next to it. They don’t even answer our letters.”
The work that Oxford University has done to become an accredited ‘University of Sanctuary’ was where Mark viewed the University as making the most progress. “There are some very committed people working on it at senior levels and student levels… A few tutors even came together to set up a maths club for displaced academics from around the world.
“I’m interested in what [Oxford] does to help refugees and asylum seekers who might not be students because, you know it’s only ever going to be a tiny privileged few who get into the University.”
Despite having had a long and varied career in the charities sector, Mark did not have a clear idea of what he wanted to do when he graduated from Oxford.
“I studied law. The only thing I knew when I graduated was that I didn’t want to be a lawyer. I had a much more ‘live now, get paid later’ mindset. And that was what took me to volunteer in Borneo.
“I’ve now run four different organisations, completely different. My last job was leading Oxfam and Oxfam spent more money in a morning than Asylum Welcome spends in a whole year. It’s a difference of scale, but that’s what I wanted.”
We reflected on his resignation as CEO of Oxfam in 2018, following news of Oxfam employees using aid funds to hire sex-workers while responding to the 2010 Haiti earthquake. Mark told me: “I think it was the right thing to do. I wasn’t CEO of Oxfam when the Oxfam staff behaved in the way that they did, but I was in the front line of the public storm about it and it was clear to me that Oxfam wasn’t going to rebuild without a sense of starting afresh.
“What would I have done differently at the time? It was a whole host of small [mistakes] rather than one big decision where we chose that we weren’t going to do something. That never happened – no one ever thought ‘we’re aware of this, but we’re just not going to respond to it’. We just weren’t forceful enough consistently enough.”
Much of Mark’s career has centred around Oxford and even now, as he retires as director of Asylum Welcome, he plans to work in a part-time role for South Oxfordshire Housing Association.
“I think that there is something that’s very special about [Oxford], you know. The name Oxfam comes from Oxford famine relief… I think [here] you have a liberal society, a comparatively wealthy society, and you have lots of forward-looking people. So, it doesn’t always feel like that on a day to day, but overall, [Oxford] is a positive place to be in at all levels, you can work in practical ways.”
Oxford University Development declined to comment.
