PROTESTERS across Britain shouted with one voice yesterday to demand that the government’s plans to send refugees and asylum-seekers to Rwanda be stopped.

Revulsion turned into nationwide action against the plans as the Trade Union Congress joined forces with campaign groups Care4Calais and Stand Up To Racism to organise protests.

Supporters included RMT general secretary Mick Lynch, actor Ricky Tomlinson and 11 national trade unions.

Protests took place in Nottingham, Coventry, Dudley, Cambridge, Norwich, Manchester, Portsmouth, Sheffield, Leeds, York, Shrewsbury, Harlow, Tower Hamlets in east London, Lewisham in south-east London, Stoke and other centres.

Some protests targeted detention centres where refugees are incarcerated.

Civil Service union PCS, whose members include workers in the government’s Border Force agency, is jointly mounting a legal challenge with Care4Calais.

PCS general secretary Mark Serwotka said: “PCS is proud to support this legal challenge on behalf of our members in the Border Force.

“It’s time for the government to show humanity to the people who come to our shores for refuge, and to start to engage seriously with sorting out the asylum system so refugees are treated fairly and according to the law.”

Care4Calais chief executive Clare Moseley said: “We have seen up close the human cost of locking people up and telling them they will be sent to Rwanda.

“From suicide attempts to hunger strikes, it is harrowing.”

Stand Up To Racism co-convener Weyman Bennett said that Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Home Secretary Priti Patel and the government, as well as every candidate in the Tory leadership race, “supports the heinous Rwanda detention policy.”

He said: “[They] are hell-bent, despite the incredible growth of an anti-racist movement … to intensify their racist hostile environment for refugees and migrants and make people in the most desperate situations seeking safety into the scapegoats for a crisis and attacks on living standards that they did nothing to cause.

“We must keep up the pressure — we can stop offshore detention to Rwanda, and make the Nationality and Borders Act unworkable, but it will mean a mass campaign, it will mean escalating protests, and it is vital that the trade unions take this fight into workplaces everywhere  and onto the streets.

“We are organising to prepare in every area for this kind of response to the Home Office and its attacks on our neighbours.”