MULE congratulates Clare Sambrook

Article published: Sunday, November 7th 2010

MULE contributor Clare Sambrook is the winner of this year’s Paul Foot Award for investigative and campaigning journalism for her work on the detention of children asylum seekers. Clare spoke to us about her work and reaction on winning the prestigious accolade.

Clare, who works as a freelance writer, beat off high-calibre opposition including Nick Davies of the Guardian for investigations of phone-hacking at News of The World and Jonathon Calvert and Clare Newell of the Sunday Times.

MULE: How did you feel on receiving the award?

CS: Totally stunned. I had been chuffed to bits to be on the longlist and astonished to be shortlisted in such fantastic company: Nick Davies, Jonathan Calvert and Clare Newell, David Cohen and Linda Geddes — and the legendary Eamonn McCann who got a special Paul Foot lifetime achievement award for his years of campaigning about Bloody Sunday.

MULE: You have said that Paul Foot’s books were an inspiration to you when you started your career. What was it that led you into investigative journalism?

CS: I had naively thought journalism was necessarily investigative — probing and digging and finding things out. Otherwise, what’s the point? Whatever job I’ve had, I’ve resisted the press release culture.

MULE: What led you to set up the group End Child Detention Now?

CS: It started with one family’s real life ordeal. My friends Esmé Madill and Simon Parker have worked alongside asylum-seekers for years — they started Refugee Action York. (This isn’t paid work; it’s what they do for fun.) Friends alerted them to a two-year-old who’d been left parentless when the UK Border Agency took his mum away. . (his dad had already been locked up for eight months).

This family was reunited in a car park then locked up in Yarl’s Wood for 26 days. The experience traumatised them. At the 31st attempt Esmé, Simon and their friends managed to get them legal advice. Meanwhile I ran a little press campaign. Eventually this family got leave to remain. In other words they had a good case from the beginning! Their whole damaging, degrading ordeal served absolutely no purpose. Fuelled by rage, six of us struck on the mad idea of starting a national campaign to end child detention.

MULE: What positive effects do you feel that the campaign – in conjunction with your investigative reporting – has had?

CS: An awful lot of people who had no idea that immigration detention of children happens now know and they’re angry about it. MPs included. A lot of them were clueless. Thousands of people have taken political action, some for the first time, writing and talking to their MPs, going on a demo or vigil, 5,000 people signed the online petition. We’ve collaborated with all sorts of campaign groups in a spirit of comradeship, shared intelligence, and helped other campaigners get their work into print.

We lobbied and briefed the Lib Dems and perhaps helped influence them to put ending child detention in their manifesto — which became part of the coalition agreement. We’re told that the campaign has given heart to people who’ve experienced the inhumanities of UK asylum policy.

MULE: Shortly after the arrival of the coalition government, it appeared that your campaigning had paid off with the announcement that child detention would be ended. However the government has since a massive U-turn, compounding the secret trialling of a “fast-track” deportation scheme launched in the summer. How did you feel about that and what will you do to continue to put pressure on the government to end these practices?

CS: You’re right. The government has reneged on its promise to end child detention— we have to keep fighting. The Home Office has cleverly exploited NGOs by inviting them to serve on a review of ‘alternatives to detention’ while pursuing secret trials behind their backs. We need to spread awareness of this duplicity. And push the government to end child detention immediately. We’re urging people to keep on at their MPs. We have a sample letter here: http://ecdn.org/

MULE: In an article published in MULE this year, you uncovered the multi-billion pound industry operated by private companies who rake in vast profits through government contracts – often involving the detention and mistreatment of asylum seekers. Given that many of the companies involved are extremely influential and count former ministers among their ranks, do you think that there is realistically any hope of putting an end to this market of making money out of peoples’ misery?

CS: You can’t change anything until you know about it. We need to spread awareness of the encroachment of companies like G4S and Serco into so many areas of our lives. Pretty much everyone now accepts that it’s seriously stupid to let banks become too big to fail — it’s an invitation to bad governance and, as we’ve seen, economic chaos. What about the outsourcing companies now taking control of vast swathes of core public services?

MULE: Investigative journalism is in decline as revenues in the print press decrease and cuts to staffing are made. What would you say to aspiring journalists and researchers who want to follow the same path as you? Do you think there is still a future for investigative reporting?

CS: What’s really hard is learning how to inquire and investigate and write well. The best way is to work under pressure alongside really good reporters but those opportunities are few and extremely hard to get. Nick Davies’s Flat Earth News is brilliantly depressing on the churnalism that young journalists have to perform these days.

The good thing now is that you don’t have to wait for a national newspaper executive to notice you in order to get a story out. You don’t have to know someone who knows someone. You can set up google alerts to find the bloggers and online mags that are interested in your kind of story. I found Manchester Mule through Google Alerts. We now have a list of 200 bloggers, reporters, campaigners. I send material I think might interest them.

Amid the good advice that’s helped me: don’t make assumptions; work at intelligence-gathering; get alongside people who know their stuff and ask them to explain things. At the end of every interview I ask the source: is there anything else I should have asked you? Most people are otherwise too polite to tell you that you are totally barking up the wrong tree.

Right now I’m reading Heather Brooke’s Silent State and Your Right to Know — a real education.

MULE: What will you be investigating and campaigning on in the future?

CS: Ending child detention until they end it. And then I must finish my second novel and get some money in.

Thank you to Manchester Mule for your help on the campaign.

Clare Sambrook’s website can be found here, while the End Child Detention Now site is located here.

The Paul Foot Award For Campaigning Journalism was created in 2005 by Private Eye and The Guardian set up in memory of the journalist, who was renowned for his tireless campaigning and investigation of issues in miscarriages of justice such as the case of the Birmingham 6 and his exposure of the corrupt architect and mason John Poulson. As well as contributing to several mainstream newspapers he was on the editorial board of the Socialist review for 19 years and during his career was the recipient of various awards. Paul Foot passed away in 2004.

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