From this week's almighty SchNEWS - Thurs 26th May 2006 | Issue 545.

Always a great read!

===============

Neo Labour's shift to the right has been frantically accelerating over the past few weeks, with the Home Office in disarray after civil servants misplaced more than a 1,000 (definitely guilty) prisoners who should have been considered for a timely booting out of the country.

Then there's those bloody asylum seekers to think of - that's enough to send any politician into a racist diatribe about how whitey is under threat from a flood of people about to steal our crap jobs from underneath our noses or how we better watch out because these people are rapists, murderers, kiddie fiddlers and terrorists anyway.

From the foul mouthpiece of the Murdoch Empire, the Sun, to the Daily Hate Mail and Torygraph, editors have felt obliged to show little interest in the fact that the real story is that the vast majority of migrants have come to the UK to escape repression and the grinding poverty which has been forced upon them by economic policies of UK plc and its G8 cronies.

Take Pastor Daly and his family. He fled Angola in 2001, after refusing to give information about members of his congregation to a government which was well known for its torturing, 'disappearing' and killing of political opponents. The family were visiting the Brand Street immigration office in Glasgow to sign on and were promptly abducted by a Home Office 'removal team' and shipped off to the Yarl's Wood Removal Centre.

Benefit claimants are now caught in a Catch-22 situation every time they walk in the centre for fear of deportation. The Daly family has been active in the local community for some time and locals chipped in by raising the £4,000 bail money which ensured their release. Last Wednesday, the Home Office backed down after being challenged with a judicial review of their decision to deport Daly, but the threat of deportation still hangs over the entire family.

Recent news that a Zimbabwean refugee was asked for sex by a UK immigration official in return for help on her case may have shocked many in the chattering classes, but for the refugee it was part of the same process that had seen her fleeing sexual violence in the first place. The gender bias which is present in decisions meant that Home Office failed to take sufficiently into account the issue of domestic violence that led Farhat Khan to flee a violent husband in Pakistan. Despite threats from her
husband's family to kill Farhat and her children if they return to the country, she still faces deportation. "The Home Office and the immigration courts accepted that we had been subjected to violence but refused to grant asylum" Farhat told campaign group Refugee Women, "The issue of my daughters being forced into child marriage was not given serious consideration.

I love Pakistan and wish that I could believe that my children and I would be safe there. But I cannot return and put my children in danger."

FIGHT OR FLIGHT

There are 2,600 such people in eleven detention centres across the UK (See SchNEWS 538). Most of them are asylum seekers from war torn and dictatorial places like Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan, that the UK has been busy destabilising and plundering for some time. And the government is filling the centres up so fast, they're having to build more so 4,000 more unlucky people can be banged up ahead of a flight back to poverty, destitution, torture and possible death. Those flights, by the way, are courtesy of British Airways, which announced a record leap in profits last week.

In addition to purpose-built detention centres, asylum seekers can find themselves in places like Strangeways too. Last month more than 300 people marched past the prison in Manchester, as part of international protests against immigration detention, passing by a BA Office and on to China Town for a remembrance service for the 18 cockle pickers who died at Morecambe Bay back in February 2004.

UK plc, of course, has privatised the profit opportunity that is the imprisonment of migrants. Harmondsworth Detention Centre is run by United Kingdom Detention Services, a subsidiary of Sodexho, the French hotels-to-schools-to-prisons multinational (see SchNEWS 382).

Their regime of abuse and beatings of detainees caused Harmondsworth to riot in July 2004, even as local coppers referred to the inmates only as "local residents".

The latest removal centre is Colnbrook, adjacent to Harmondsworth, but this time run by Premier Detention Services, a division of the Serco Corporation which refers to itself as an "international service company which combines commercial know-how with a deep public service ethos." This ethos extends to electronically tagging migrants under the euphemistically entitled "community monitoring programme" and ensuring that detainees are treated the same way as prisoners, despite the fact that they haven't actually committed a crime. Lucky Serco investors have seen pre-tax profits rise by 21% between 2004 and 2005, but are still too mean-spirited to put doors on toilets, so inmates can't even go to the loo in private.


With Bliar on his last political legs, expect new Home Secretary, John Reid, to try and save his skin with a series of announcemets showpiecing new initiatives to lock up more people. Responding to pressure from the Daily Mail crowd, Blair accused judges of an "abuse of common sense," in response to their decision not to deport nine Afghan men who hijacked a plane in Kabul and forced it to land at Stansted airport. Now Neo Labour promises another attack on civil liberties as it reviews the Human Rights Act, announcing that it would be much better if all these worries about human rights could be shelved so that ministers can get on with deporting all the criminals.

The plan is to make human rights abusers such as Turkey, Pakistan and Afghanistan, promise not to torture people who are deported from the UK.

We can, of course, trust the word of a government that has waged war against its Kurdish minority. We can believe in the sincerity of the Pakistani military dictatorship and have absolute confidence in an Afghani state that barely controls a third of the country. If only Bliar could have been bothered to read the court ruling which clearly stated that his government had acted beyond the law by failing to listen to its own immigration appeal panel. It seems that their ruling about the real dangers the Afghan men faced if returned to their former country was too liberal for the Tories that rule Neo Labour.

The 120 detainees at Colnbrook who had been refusing food since the 8th April, were joined a week later by 125 Detainees at Haslar detention centre in Gosport. Ten days after the original protests more than 300 detainees in Harmondsworth detention centre went on a mass one-day food refusal, in protest at the length of their detention and in solidarity with the protests in Colnbrook and Haslar. There are ongoing actions against the imprisonment of people who have committed no crime.

* Check www.barbedwirebritain.org.uk for more info on conditions at
the centres, the times you can visit to show solidarity with the
inmates and a list of latest actions.
* To read about individual detainees see Glasgow NoBorder Network
www.openborders.org.uk
* See also National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaign at
www.ncadc.org.uk
* For info on sexism in the asylum system see www.refugeewomen.com


------------------------------------------------------------------

UPCOMING DEMOS

* Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! and Unity - the Scottish Union of
Asylum-Seekers are holding a protest in Glasgow city centre, calling
for the right to work for all and for an end to dawn-raid style
arrests. Sat May 27th, 1-3pm, at the Donald Dewar statue - top of
Buchanan Street, Glasgow. For more info call 07779 785 529.
* Close Campsfield: Demonstration at Campsfield Detention Centre also
this Saturday, 12pm-2pm, Langford Lane, Kidlington, Oxfordshire, to
give support to detainees. Bring instruments or saucepans to make
some noise. This regular event happens on the last Saturday of every
month. For more see www.closecampsfield.org.uk
* Also in Glasgow there will be a protest on Sat June 17th against
deportations and the Dungavel Detention Centre at Brand Street,
Ibrox, at 11am till 1.30pm. For more see www.openborders.org

------------------------------------------------------------------