Ouch . . . the capitalist press are having a field day. The Evening Standard ran the usual "Asylum Scum in Jail Riot Frenzy" piece on their front page last night (well, OK, it didn't actually say "scum" but we know that's what they mean), and today's Independent contains an observation by the local Tory MP who thinks the riot occurred because conditions in the concentration camp were too "luxurious".

The problem with Yarl's Wood is that detainees who had committed serious offences were being housed alongside prisoners whose only crime was to have their asylum applications rejected. Yarl's Wood is the place these unfortunates are sent before they are deported - often back to countries with appalling human rights records and where they stand a good chance of being tortured and murdered. It's obvious that a riot was on the cards - especially as the prison camp was understaffed and morale among the detainees exceptionally low. (Hell,I'd be feeling a bit low if I was off to Kosovo tomorrow.)

While campaigners may celebrate the destruction of the UK's "showpiece" concentration camp, the consequences for refugees could well turn out to be fairly grim - many could end up being held in overcrowded Victorian jails with little or no faciilities. There is already talk of Campsfield detention centre in Oxford being kept open, even though riots have also occurred there due to the absymal conditions.

I guess the only reason the Daily Scum are not printing an "Al Qaeda Link to Jail Rioters" front page is because these guys came largely from Eastern Europe and not from Afghanistan. I suggest that David Blunkett & friends go and spend a long weekend in Albania to find out what life is like on the other side of the fence . . . then we might actually get a fair and just asylum policy.

All over Europe (especially in my native Denmark), racist politicians are successfully transferring the blame for economic and cultural dislocation onto the asylum seekers. This is just the first stage in a revanchist programme aimed at the total legal separation of non-whites from the "native" population. These neo-Nazis might still be in a minority, but it is a growing minority. Remember that when the Nazis set up their first concentration camp at Dachau in 1933, they called incarceration "protective custody". Eight years later, they built Auschwitz.