Alex Chalk says there is a ‘lot of sense’ in the controversial comments made by Lee Anderson to the Daily Express
Long before it was docked in Dorset, the Bibby Stockholm was used by the Netherlands to also house asylum-seekers.
While the barge has since been refurbished, its use in Rotterdam in the early 2000s sparked complaints over the cramped accommodation and poor living conditions of those onboard.
Calling the prisoners ‘inhabitants’ and the cells ‘rooms’ seems like a bad joke. People are packed here on top of each other. The ceilings on the boat are low and the corridors so narrow that it’s hard not to bump into each other. The four-person cells are inhumanely small, no larger than twenty square metres. It’s stuffy and there’s not much light coming in.
There were four people in a cell, which caused frequent fights over the use of the television, cleaning the cell and the noise. There is only a little daylight in the cells, which makes reading difficult. Moreover, the ventilation in the small cell is insufficient to keep the cell fresh; when someone went to the toilet the smell would fill the whole cell. In the morning the guards would open the cell with their nose covered to protect themselves against the stench which filled the cell overnight.
