State racism against the Roma in France

At the end of last month, the shooting of a 27-year-old man by police in Grenoble sparked riots. Among other incients, youths torched 50 cars, construction equipment, and two shops.

Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux pledged to quickly restore order. But, in "waging a war against insecurity," he has vowed to tear down illegal Gypsy camps and expel Gypsies from other EU states who break the law.

As euobserver.com reports;

Since Mr Sarkozy's crackdown started on 6 August, over 40 camps affecting some 700 adults and children have been closed, with the government aiming to shut down 300 in total over the coming months. Any illegal immigrants are to be deported to their country of origin.

The president's move against illegal Roma is part of a wider security clampdown that began in the wake of the shooting of a youth by police in the Loire Valley in July. The killing, carried out after the youth committed an armed robbery at a casino, provoked a riot.

Mr Sarkozy subsequently proposed tough new laws, including stripping French nationality from those who attempt to take the life of a police officer, thereby becoming the first French head of state to openly link immigrants and crime.

The proposals have attracted opprobrium from the left of France's political establishment but the action against the Roma camps has also drawn criticism from within the president's centre-right UMP party.

Following the latest raid on Saturday on a camp in an eastern Paris suburb, UMP law-maker Jean-Pierre Grand said the government's policy was "turning disgraceful" and likened the camp evictions to round-ups during World War II.

Mr Grand said he had to react after hearing "that the authorities, arriving very early in the morning, break up families, sending men to one side and women and children on the other, and threatening to separate mothers and children."

He went on to note that these type of evictions do not work, as the Roma tend to regroup later.

Other conservative politicians have also spoken out against the tightening security laws. In an interview with Le Parisien, ex-minister Christin Boutin, president of the UMP-allied Christian Democrat Party (PCD), called for an end to "cultivating fear" and "putting people up against one another."

"Stigmatisation of one or another community exacerbates violence," she noted, adding that many French people have foreign origins, including the president himself, who has a Hungarian background.

The good news comes from the fact that the measures have seen something of a fightback;

Members of France's Roma, Gypsy and traveller minorities blocked a major highway outside Bordeaux on Sunday after hundreds of them were kicked out of an illegal campsite.

President Nicolas Sarkozy's government has in recent weeks launched a major and controversial crackdown on the travelling minorities, closing unauthorised camps and expelling foreign-born Gypsies from the country.

Sunday's blockade was the first major counter-protest by the groups, and more than 250 cars, trucks and caravans blocked the Bordeaux bypass and a bridge over the River Garonne in the southwest of the country.

Police and road safety officials said northbound traffic towards Paris was backed up for five kilometres (three miles) and southbound into Bordeaux for two kilometres, causing major disruption on a summer public holiday weekend.

The protestors blocked traffic on the bridge for about five hours before leaving to try to move their caravans onto a sports ground, but were stopped by riot police and several scuffles broke out.

They then reoccupied the bridge for another hour-and-a-half in the evening before leaving.

The United Nations has called attention to the growing problem of racism in France. However, whilst it cites "the absence of true political will," the real problem - as ever - is that said will is focused on demonising minorities for political gain.

If, as seems the case, France wants to follow in Italy's footsteps, then the results could potentially be very bad indeed. Direct action is the Roma's only weapon against a hostile state and a climate of growing racism.

Solidarity with Campsfield House hunger strikers

Migrants at the Campsfield House detention centre yesterday began a hunger strike in protest at their prolongued detention and ill treatment.

According to their statement;

147 detainees are staging a protest by refusing meals at Campsfield immigration removal centre. The protest erupted as a result of the treatment of detainees in detention centres especially for people who have been detained for a long period of time. We continue to refuse meals indefinitely for our voices to be heard.

Some of us detainees have been detained for over 3 years with no prospect of removal or any evidence of future release. There is no justification whatsoever for detaining us for such period of time. Our lives incidentally have been stalled without any hope of living a life, having a family or any future. More often than not, we are been detained even when our family (wife and children) are resident in the United Kingdom, depriving us of having a life with our family. We the detainees are also humans.

In certain cases, some of us are tortured and even face death or mental distress. On 14 April 2010, a detainee of Kenya national Eliud Nyenze died at Oakington IRC due to negligence. Mr. Nyenze, age 40, had a heart attack, requested for painkillers, repeatedly and kept crawling around the floor in pain before he died.

Detainees are currently undergoing mental stress with some of us developing mental problems on a monthly basis. We are issued removal directions without given enough time for an appeal.

It has become a habit by the UK Border Agency to use force in enforcing removal of detainees who have a pending Judicial Review without giving appropriate time or consideration to our case and forcing our removal before our cases are concluded. In some situations, we are not given enough time to appeal against the decision which breaches our rights under Article 6 of the ECHR. Our liberty and security has been taking away.

We as foreign nationals are often been criminalised for the purpose of detention and removal as the law under the European Convention of Human Rights permits the removal of foreigners who have established there lives in the United Kingdom and are a treat to national security. Foreign nationals are now been sent to prison for 12 months custodial sentence or more prompting the deportation of such individual. Removals are enforced on specially chartered flights with security personnel who abuse and torture detainees in the process. Detainees are restrained, strapped, beating and forced on the airplane.

On 26 July 2010, one of the detainee at Campsfield attempted suicide due to the level of treatment received at the detention centre.

The Amnesty International has also reported that our detention breaches the internationally recognised human rights.

On a regular basis, we are tortured, restrained, strapped like animals and beating to effect removal. This cannot be lawful given that there is provision within the ECHR convention that prohibits torture both mentally and physically.

We painfully ask that the government, the house of parliament, the house of common, the parliamentarians and all concerned to rise to our aid and address these issues that affects not only our lives and our future but the lives and future of the thousands of our families who are constantly under pain and torture.

This comes just a month after the report (PDF) by Dame Anne Owers, former chief inspector of prisons, who voiced that asylum-seekers should not be jailed.

It is also six months since the Yarls Wood hunger strike. Though those who took part are now embroiled in "a legal battle to gain official recognition that the protest even took place," as well as "to secure an inquiry into their allegations of violence and racial abuse by guards."

The refusal to acknowledge events continues. UK Border Agency deputy chief executive Jonathan Sedgwick claims the new hunger strikers "still have access to food from the on site shop and vending machines."

He goes on to assert that "staff are monitoring the situation closely and listening to the detainees' concerns. All detainees have access to legal representation and 24-hour medical care."

However, the history of hunger strikes, riots, and even a suicide cast doubt on these assertions.

As a spokesperson for Medical Justice, which has monitored detainee's health at the centre, said: "It's no surprise that detainees are on hunger strike.

"Independent doctors have visited detainees who are imprisoned despite not being accused of any crime. The damage to mental health of prolonged and indefinite immigration detention that the doctors have seen is so extensive that the only solution is to close these detention centres down."

Israel's racist migration policy sees children facing deportation

The following appaling story comes from Al Jazeera;

Children of undocumented migrant workers who were born and have lived their whole lives in Israel are now facing deportation [EPA]

For most children summer is a carefree time. But for the children of Israel's undocumented migrant workers, deportation looms on the horizon.

It has been a hotly contested issue since last July, when the Oz Unit, a strong arm of the interior ministry's population and immigration authority, first hit the streets.

As the state took aim at Israel's 250,000 illegal labourers, 1,200 children were marked for expulsion along with their parents.

The move, a sudden reversal of Israel's long-standing policy against deporting minors, sparked public outrage. Protests and media scrutiny delayed the deportations but only temporarily.

In October, Eli Yishai, the interior minister, indicated that the families would indeed be expelled. The following month, Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, announced that the children would be allowed to finish the school year.
 
Roei Lachmanovich, a spokesman for Yishai, commented: "The government's decision is that Israel should minimise the number of foreign workers in Israel. It is nothing against those 1,200 children - the decision is against the illegal workers who think getting pregnant gives them permission to stay here."

"There's a way that these parents use the children," Lachmanovich added, accusing the mothers of hiding behind their children to avoid deportation.

Forbidden relationships
But, in fact, many of the women became illegal simply because they gave birth in Israel.

State policy forbids migrant workers from having children in the country. If a woman does, she must send her newborn home. If she keeps her baby in Israel, she loses her work visa.

Romantic relationships are also forbidden for foreign workers. In June, the Israeli daily Haaretz reported on the story of Charlene Ramos, a Filipina caregiver with employment and a valid work visa, who faces deportation because she married another migrant labourer.

Hanna Zohar, the director of Kav LaOved, an Israeli NGO that advocates for workers' rights, says: "Israel decided to bring migrant workers. But they are not only workers, they are human beings."

Labourers should not be punished for falling in love or having babies, Zohar argues. Nor should they be expelled for it.

"Deporting children and their family is not humane," she says.

This confirms my point, made in December, that "it is not just Palestinians who suffer under Israel's two-tier labour system."

Then, I wrote how organising pressure had forced Israel's main trade union body - the Histadrut - to alter its racist policy towards migrant workers, if slightly. The task for activists in Israel now is to exert that same pressure against the racist policies of the state, in defence of families being forced out of what is - at the end of it - their home.

I sincerely hope that they succeed.

The detention of children is far from over

Upon formation, the new government claimed that it will bring an end to "the detention of children for immigration purposes." The first step in this is Damian Green's announcement that "children of failed asylum seekers will no longer be detained overnight at Dungavel Immigration Removal Centre."

Touted as a "positive outcome," what this actually means is that they will "be moved to Yarl's Wood centre in Bedfordshire which has specialist facilities and support services." For those who don't know what these "specialist services" are, I highly recommend the report titled Outsourcing Abuse (PDF) from 2008, and the more recent follow-up by Baroness O'Loan (PDF).

As Harriet Wistrich, of Birnberg Peirce & Partners, told BBC News, the reports "recognised that use of control and restraint, and the use of handcuffs, on this very vulnerable group of detainees has often been disproportionate, unnecessary and inappropriate," and "the use of force on such people can cause long-lasting damage as we have been able to prove on many occasions where civil claims have been brought and settled."

The recent Yarl's Wood hunger strike, catalysed by the extensive abuses which the report covers, only adds further doubt to the idea that this is a "positive outcome."

No Borders Brighton point out the human consequences of Green's plan;

It may have gotten you temporarily into the Scottish government's good books but that is of no comfort to people like Sehar Shebaz, who was detained on Monday with her 8 month old baby when she went to report on Monday. She had fled her violent husband in Pakistan to claim asylum in the UK, fearing for her life if she is returned to Pakistan (women who leave their husbands are under threat from his extended family and are often killed or maimed in acid attacks).

With the ending of the detention of children in Dungavel, she and her baby, like the other families detained there, were due to be moved to be moved to Yarl's Wood today. However, Ms Shebaz was refusing to cooperate with the move, claiming that her baby is too young to be forces to endure a nine hour journey in the back of a van. She herself is also ill, having been vomiting since the early hours of yesterday morning.

The response of the 'enlightened' UKBA regime? To threaten to remove her baby from her and transport them in separate vans anyway. So much for the new coalition's commitment to respecting human rights and reigning in the abuses perpetrated by the Big Brother state on people. Of course, they will claim that she is not a UK citizen but should that allow them to treat Sehar and her child any differently that they would expect them and their children?

No change or new beginning, then, in this transition from New Labour to the Con-Dem Coalition. As No Borders Brighton say in another post, "it seems like immigration bureaucracy is the same the world over: glacially slow, wilfully stupid and blind to human suffering."

See also When they said ‘We will end child detention,’ they meant ‘Keep on arresting babies’ by Clare Sambrook.

How Labour’s friends are ‘securing your world’

From Open Democracy, the following article exposes the murky world of private security contractors in Britain and how they are involved not only in the detention and abuse of migrants but also the erosion of civil liberties under the umbrella of "civil contingencies." The writer, Clare Sambrook, is a co-ordinator of End Child Detention Now.

At the bustling Counter Terror Expo in London’s Olympia this week they are giving top billing to the security industry’s favourite politician. ‘The most experienced cabinet minister of modern times’, they call him: Dr John Reid.

Home office colleagues say Reid — Labour hard man, former secretary of state for health and defence, and home secretary — is the minister who brought business in from the cold. These days relations are warm and cosy. Marketing their wares as vital to the war on terror, while dreaming up everyday applications for intrusive high security kit, Reid’s friends have quietly advanced deep into the public sector — running schools, GP clinics and police investigations.

Out of government but still a serving MP, Reid has been taking £50,000 a year from G4S — the Group 4 Securicor giant.

He has been hosting ‘business breakfasts’, and talking up the scary threats and looming crises — cyber attacks, pandemics, global warming, energy shortages, mass migration — that spell opportunity to his friends.

(They’ve made him honorary professor at the shadowy new Institute of Security and Resilience, at University College London; staff aren’t allowed to say whether industry is paying the bills.)

Life is good for G4S whose annual revenues have doubled to £6 billion in the past five years. Last month they picked up contracts for guarding foreign office buildings in the UK and in Afghanistan. They can afford to pay chief executive Nick Buckles (pictured) £3,835 every day.

G4S — slogan ‘Securing Your World’ — runs prisons, secure training centres and immigration centres including Tinsley House, where last year an asylum seeker who had been forcibly arrested and locked up, let go, arrested and locked up again, got predictably distressed — she was only ten years old — and tried to strangle herself.

Former Ghurkas-turned G4S personnel train British soldiers in mine clearance and ambush drills as part of their (increasingly outsourced) training before deployment to Afghanistan. John Whitwam, the former lieutenant colonel managing privatised Ghurkas, explains: ‘On Monday and Tuesday, they would be wearing Army uniform or dressed as the Taliban, by the end of the week they would be working elsewhere in G4S.’

Taking over core public services, G4S people monitor 12000 electronically-tagged offenders, run hundreds of police and court cells, tackle anti-social behaviour and transport half a million prisoners every year — as well as doing things like covert surveillance for insurance companies.

They are aggressively expanding the market for intrusive high security kit, touting number plate recognition technology to retailers so they can tell how frequently customers drop by.

They’re installing CCTV in schools — giving parents ‘an added sense of security’ — and more cameras in shopping centres, harvesting information about how we shop.

They’re promoting biometrics to help employers catch workers trying to cheat the clock-in system.

Their newest division screens and vets employees, not just at recruitment, but all through their working lives.

That’s G4S, ‘Securing Your World’.

All sorts of questions spring to mind. Do we want our world secured this way? What on earth was G4S doing locking up that little girl? Is the rise in surveillance evidence-based? Or is it Nick Buckles and his mates chasing five grand a day? Whose interests has John Reid been serving all these years?

And . . . are environmentalists so very dangerous that G4S had to deploy Ghurkas — battle-hardened in Iraq and Afghanistan — to protect ‘sensitive utilities’ ahead of last year’s London Climate Camp? Were they serious? Or was that a sales-boosting stunt?

G4S has even got a ‘police business unit’, whose managing director said late last year: ‘We have a team of 30 of our guys in one force on a major investigation right now, practically doing all of the roles except that of the senior investigating officer.’

Does that make us feel secure? Or would we rather have real police officers, trained for public service?

G4S isn’t the only gigantic security company doing surprising things.

There’s Serco, ‘Bringing Services to Life’ and misery to thousands of children who have passed through the company’s Yarl’s Wood detention centre in Bedfordshire.

Business is brilliant. Shortly after celebrating record annual results — profits up 30 per cent to £177 million — chief executive Chris Hyman (£3,233 every day) spent one recent bright spring day down at Silverstone, test-driving his team’s Ferrari F430 ahead of the new racing season.

Besides locking up asylum seekers ‘with respect and understanding’, Serco brings its ‘deep public service ethos’ and ‘commercial know-how’ to defence, transport, civil government, science, the private sector and, with rising excitement, education and the NHS.

They have got an awful lot under corporate control.

Serco trains RAF helicopter crews, helps run the National Nuclear Laboratory and the Atomic Weapons Establishment.

They sell intelligence systems to law enforcement agencies including the National Crime Squad and the tax-man.

They help police forces connect intelligence with number plate recognition in systems so fast and flexible they can easily adapt to new police powers.

Serco supplies the rising numbers of covert surveillance vehicles that police forces demand, builds and runs prisons and youth offender facilities, monitors electronically tagged offenders, enforces curfews.

They’re running state schools in Bradford, Walsall, Stoke-on-Trent, they’ve got their fingers on 3,500 Sure Start children’s centres.

They provide out-of-hours GP services in Cornwall, employ ‘community matrons’ in Newham, they manage stacks of PFIs and will take more than £250 million from the NHS over the next ten years for pathology services alone.

They’ve got 7000 security-cleared staff working on ‘significant elements’ of the government’s counter-terrorism strategy.

And guess who has won the freshly privatised cabinet office contract to run the Emergency Planning College at Hawkhills in North Yorkshire? Yes. From Friday, Serco controls the training of the people who would take charge during emergencies and disasters when the Civil Contingencies Act — the one with all those alarming arbitrary powers — kicks in.

‘The challenges we face are unprecedented,’ says Serco. ‘They call for a seamless, holistic approach to security and civil contingency.’

Yikes.

For someone who gets so much business from the UK government, Chris Hyman seems surprisingly unruffled by the election. ‘We have very significant business with local authorities,’ he told CNBC’s business channel earlier this year. Regionalisation, ‘has gone very well with us.’

And anyway, ‘It’s pretty much, we work for the civil servants really. There’s not much that we do that has to go through Parliament for decisions.’

If that’s the case, then we must rely on civil servants to fight our corner should conflicts arise between the interests of society and the security industry.

Conflicts like this one, maybe.

For years, doctors working among asylum seekers noted disturbing numbers of injuries to people being moved about by private security companies. Two years ago, doctors and lawyers from Medical Justice published a report about it — called Outsourcing Abuse.

The government asked former Northern Ireland police ombudsman Dame Nuala O’Loan to make independent inquiries. Reporting last month she said there was, ‘inadequate management of the use of force by the private sector companies’, and made 22 recommendations for change.

The civil servant nominally in charge of the companies is Lin Homer, chief executive of the UK Border Agency. Responding to O’Loan’s criticisms, Homer spoke not a word against her commercial partners. She saved her reproach for the doctors and lawyers who had brought these troubling matters to light. Their offence? ‘Seeking to damage the reputation of our contractors’.

The tabloids and using racist vitriol to cover up genuine abuse

From No Borders Brighton, we have another two excellent dissections of the anti-immigrant agenda of the tabloid media. First there is In Every Back Garden A Heartache, in which the gutter press demonstrates how "if it was committed by bloody foreigners" is part of the definition of "illegal."

We have been trying very hard to wean ourselves off commenting about the daily tidal-wave of racist vitriol washing over us courtesy of the likes of the Mail and the Express. However, the Mail's latest* outburst of Colonel Blimpishness outrage was just begging to be lampooned.

'Residents powerless to remove illegal immigrants from their gardens' - except the paper then goes on to say that they "are mostly from Eastern Europe" and the only actual country of origin it identifies is the Czech Republic, which held the presidency of the EU for the first six months of last year, so they can hardly be 'illegal' as they are EU citizens! The paper even claims that the 'trespassers' "have no passports", so the paper is even further from being able to affirm that the people in question have no legal right to be in the UK. But when has that ever stopped the Mail from spreading its racist vitriol in one of these type of stories?

Given that the paper spends so much of its turnover employing squads of lawyers to try and protect their libellous output, one would have thought they could have asked one of them to explain the difference between trespass and squatting (except one wouldn't want a libel lawyer trying to explain the ins and outs of property law, would one?). Doesn't fit in the the simulated outrage does it?

Even when an ex-cop helpfully fills the Mail's readers in on the difference between the two, he gets heavily slapped down by the rest of the BNP?UKIP voting idiots that buy the rag.

Of course, the Mail trots out a local Tory MP, Stewart Jackson, who claimed that Labour had failed to deal with immigration problems that have led to jobless migrants camping in British gardens. "The Labour government was warned that uncontrolled immigration would cause these sorts of problems." We bet you did. A quick search of Hansard has not revealed any Tories warning the government of the potential problem of foreigners squatting in people's gardens "leaving a trail of cider bottles, bags of human waste and drugs needles behind them."

Yes, the paper makes great play of the drugs and drug paraphernalia littering the area but also claim that the "police are powerless to step in." They even print a photo of the interior of a rather next outbuilding with a mattress, blanket, cardboard and milk bottle with the subtitle 'Disgrace: Drugs and rubbish litter the area, but the local council and police are powerless to step in'. Pure fantasy. There's even a photo of an incredibly rickety 'treehouse' with the caption 'Some of the immigrants are believed to have slept in this treehouse in someone's garden.' [Note the believed, a typical Mailism.]**

However, the real reason why we wanted to highlight this article was because of a quote by one of the Peterborough residents whose shed was being squatted. "I caught him [his squatter, no doubt squatting at the time] defecating on my lawn, where my dog plays. I had to build a fence to keep him out of that part of the garden so my dog doesn't get ill playing in his mess." As if his dog doesn't shit on the lawn too.

* Yes we know the Express also covered it but the Mail's was the most Blimpish.

** The Daily Star takes this and conflates it into 'Migrants found living in family tree house.'

Then we have Scraping The Bottom Of The Racist Barrel, which further emphasises this shoddy and lacklustre reporting style.

It beggars belief that this trivial story can make the front page of a national newspaper, and you can bet your bottom dollar that it wasn't the front page story in the local newspaper?

As to the story itself, it turns out that the Romanian family were sold a pig in a poke when someone told them in a local shop about what they thought was an empty house that they could squat it. So rather gullibly, they went along and forced the front window of the rather down-at-the-heels and abandoned looking end of terrace house (check out the photo) and started to throw out the 'rubbish' they found inside, only for the owner to return and call the police.

And yesterday the Romanian couple, Mihai and Laura Dediu, were given 12-month community orders and sentenced to 100 hours' community service for criminal damage to a window and door locks. As the burglary charge against then was dropped (the judge having commneted "in 26 years I cannot remember a case where burglars have taken a young child with them to carry out a burglary.”), they were only in the building for a few hours and nothing was actually taken, we fail to see how the Express can have come up with the headline 'Romanians steal man's home'.

Not only does inflating such trivial stories in order to score points against migrants beggar belief, it demonstrates the open scare-mongering and racism of a media which will utterly ignore genuine human rights abuses against migrants.

For example, whilst the Mail and the Express turn to minor incidents of squatting into the world's greatest outrage, we have a report by Refugee and Migrant Justice (RMJ) into the "problems faced by unaccompanied asylum seeking children on arrival in the UK." As RMJ state;

Every week at British ports, vulnerable children are found crammed in the boots of cars, hidden in lorries and found hanging underneath trucks. Many have travelled for months, alone, under the control of abusive smugglers. They arrive exhausted, traumatised, hungry and often sick or injured. Many have not slept or eaten properly for days.

When they arrive, the children believe they are safe at last. Their treatment by the UK Border Agency undermines that belief.

UKBA have done their best to whitewash this reality in their internal "investigations." The tabloid media ignores it entirely. We cannot allow them to get away with this. Whether on blogs, forums, social networking sites, or amongst friends and colleagues, please make this reality known. Otherwise, in allowing this to continue under the blanket of ignorance, we are as guilty as those who perpetrate the abuses.

Highlighting and resisting abuse in detention centres

Examining claims of systematic abuse in detention centres and throughout the deportation process, a review board has found that there was no "pattern" of inappropriate force. Although recommending a review of how complaint are handled, their report (PDF) found that "there is, and was, no systematic abuse by persons employed within the UK Border Agency detention estate, or as escorting officers."

As might be expected, the UKBA press release makes much of this one point;

The report, which was commissioned by the Home Secretary in September 2008, has unequivocally found no evidence of systematic abuse. It says that the force used in the alleged cases of abuse was largely justified and proportionate to manage what was often exceptionally disruptive behaviour, and to ensure that detainees complied with their removal from the UK.

What it failed to note was that, in many cases, there was "no evidence of consideration of the proportionality of the use of handcuffs and leg restraints both before, during and after that use of force." As Harriet Wistrich, of Birnberg Peirce & Partners, told BBC News, the report "recognised that use of control and restraint, and the use of handcuffs, on this very vulnerable group of detainees has often been disproportionate, unnecessary and inappropriate," and "the use of force on such people can cause long-lasting damage as we have been able to prove on many occasions where civil claims have been brought and settled."

The Independent offered a fuller overview of specific incidences of abuse claims where force was not "largely justified and proportionate."

In one case a Cameroon asylum- seeker was handcuffed in her hospital bed when she was recovering from an operation while a woman from the Democratic Republic of Congo was physical restrained during an intimate medical examination. In a further three cases serious physical injury was identified – those cases involved a broken finger, a punctured lung and a dislocated knee.

Baroness O'Loan said: "In the first two cases there was no satisfactory explanation as to how these injuries occurred. In the third case there was no clear evidence as to how the injury was sustained."

Highlighting a further example of the misuse of force, Baroness O'Loan said: "There was one case in which a very young woman was lifted almost naked and carried through an Immigration Removal Centre to another location. She was handcuffed behind her back, and the blanket which was supposed to shield her from view fell off. There was no evident consideration of whether this was necessary and proportionate."

The National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns (NCADC) quotes Suren Khachatryan. He claimed that he was kicked and stamped on during at attempt to remove him, resulting in a collapsed lung. Baroness O'Loan's report found that there had been no proper investigation. In response, he has said;

I am scared to say too much in response to this in case it [the assault] happens again. I am glad that this independent report notes there was no proper investigation. I am still feeling the consequences of the assault. I still have therapy. It has affected me. I am still receiving treatment five years later. I am very disappointed the government did not do their job properly in the first place. If they do want to re-investigate this again though I am willing to cooperate with them and provide them with what they need.

The NCADC, of course, authored Outsourcing Abuse (PDF) with Birnberg Peirce & Partners, Medical Justice in 2008. It was this report that prompted the full investigation which O'Loan has reported on today. It is one of the reasons "that there has been almost constant media coverage for months of a wide number of organsiations expressing concern about conditions in detention and during removals ; the Royal Colleges of Paediatricians, Psychiatrists and General Practitioners, the Children’s Commissioner, and Human Rights Watch to name a few." And the breadth of the exposure is staggering;

There have been revelations about inappropriate methods used by UKBA case-workers in determining asylum claims. Prominent actors, authors and religious leaders as well as articles in tabloid newspapers have called for an end to the detention of children. Over 30 MPs have signed an Early Day Motion calling for an inquiry into the circumstances surrounding a recent disturbance at Yarl’s Wood immigration removal centre for women, children and families. The BBC World Service recently revealed that at least £2m been paid out in compensation claims regarding detention. It seems that UKBA are under attack about detention from many sides.

Perhaps this is why they "were not notified by UKBA of publication of the inquiry" and "the press were invited to a briefing about the inquiry before we, the authors of the dossier, were provided with the report. The complainants, whose cases are featured in the report, were similarly excluded." Clearly, UKBA is doing its level best to suppress any negative coverage of its practices.

They are unlikely to succeed. NCADC, in conjunction with No Borders, are holding solidarity demonstrations in Glasgow and outside Harmondsworth immigration prison this Saturday. They will also be protesting at Yarl's Wood (map), where the hunger strike is now in its fifth week, on Sunday. For the latter protest, they "have chosen to act on Mother’s Day to highlight the cruel way that migrant women, many of whom have come to the UK to seek respite from violence and torture, have been separated from their families for no good reason and at little notice."

All who attend are asked to "bring voices, whistles, drums and anything else that makes a noise: we want the hunger strikers to know that we are with them, and that they are not alone on Mother’s Day." With luck, it will also let UKBA know that, however they try to spin it, their abuses can never be brushed under the carpet.

Rima,"M," and the traumas of child detention in Britain

The following story arrived in my inbox two days ago. Written by Clare Sambrook of End Child Detention Now (ECDN), it can also be found on Open Democracy. With the Yarl's Wood hunger strike ongoing, and today seeing a massive solidarity protest in Liverpool, I thought that it deserved reposting.

Take one traumatised child, classify as 'adult', arrest, lock up, and bundle onto plane, bound for danger - Labour's Britain in 2010

‘He looks my age,’ says my nine-year-old son. ‘He looks sort of like me.’

There’s a picture on my screen: a small, slight boy who, for legal reasons, we’ll call M. He’s being cuddled by his 17 year old big brother Z. Both boys are smiling. They have been reunited after a long, hard separation.

Back home in war-torn Afghanistan their parents and a sister were killed. Big brother Z was first to come to Britain, traumatised, in November 2008. He has refugee status, studies for his GCSEs at school in Leicester.

This past October little brother M made his way here. Despite M’s size, his vulnerability, his boyish looks, officials said, you’re not 14, you’re an adult.

Instead of being taken into care, M was bounced around between three different adult hostels and a house-share with older men — and refused asylum.

Welsh Refugee Council staff were baffled and concerned. To them he looked every inch a traumatised boy.

Across the Afghani community and Red Cross networks, word rippled out: a boy called M badly needs to find his big brother Z.

The boy on the right is M: jailed in adult cell, transported

by caged van, booked as an adult onto flight into

war zone

The boys were reunited in February — and just in time, for if the big brother was, by official assent, just 17, then surely it must follow that the younger, smaller, slighter brother must be... younger.

M’s solicitor told his UKBA case-worker the good news and made an appointment. ‘I felt relieved,’ says Sabina Hussain, Welsh Refugee Council’s child advocacy officer, ‘I was looking forward to some stability for the brothers, and reuniting them for good.’

Last Monday, a bright, sunny St David’s Day morning, Sabina went with M to help him lodge his fresh asylum claim at the Border Agency’s Cardiff office.

M was arrested, and locked up in Cardiff Bay Police Cells, in extreme distress, dwarfed in man-sized padded clothing to protect him from self-harm. His seat was booked on a flight bound for Afghanistan, Tuesday 9 March.

In the dark early hours of Tuesday 2nd March, M was taken with an adult detainee by caged van on the 109 mile journey from Cardiff to Oxfordshire and Campsfield House, an adult detention facility run by the government’s commercial partner Serco. He shared a dormitory with seven men.

Welsh Refugee Council instructed solicitors, spearheaded an emergency campaign. Concerned citizens lobbied MPs and the Home Office. On Thursday morning, just days before the flight, Sabina said: ‘M is crying, “please help me, I'm scared, this place is no good, no sleep, no eat, I want my brother”. We are gravely concerned for his welfare.’

Solicitors appealed to the High Court to block M’s deportation. Sabina joined him in Campsfield House to await the Court’s decision.

Meanwhile, up in Glasgow, university professor Alison Phipps was asking friends to testify that she and her husband Robert Swinfen love their foster daughter Rima, that she loves them and that Rima really is 17, and not, as the authorities insist, over 20.

Fleeing religious persecution in Eritrea, shipwrecked off Italy, Rima Andmariam had sheltered in a derelict Milan squat, gone hungry, lost a finger, made her way to Britain and Cardiff — aged 15, according to her papers which Cardiff UKBA and social services refused to accept, insisting she was an adult.

Rima fled, moved from house to house, lived rough until twelve months ago when Alison and Robert took her in as their natural daughter. In May last year Rima was seized and locked up in Dungavel, a former prison.

When Rima’s solicitor lodged an application for judicial review, the Border Agency swept her out of its range, taking her 356 miles south by caged van to Yarl’s Wood, Serco’s notorious Bedfordshire detention centre. Another application for review, deportation averted. After seven days in Yarl’s Wood Rima was home again.

And then, last month, the day after Valentine’s Day, the government told Rima she would be forcibly deported to Italy within weeks. The family campaigns vigorously for clemency, fearing that each new dawn will bring the Border Agency’s arrest squad to their door.

Last Thursday afternoon the Hon Mr Justice Cranston stayed M’s deportation, ordered UKBA to free him and instructed Cardiff Council to provide accommodation suitable for a 14 year old boy, pending a full judicial review hearing. That night an exhausted M was released from Campsfield, driven back to Cardiff and placed with foster carers.

M’s fate and Rima’s hang in the balance — here, in Britain, a country where asking for sanctuary is a right, not a crime, and where, according to the government, every child matters.

Rima’s website can be found here.

The national petition to end child detention is here. 

And there’s a petition just for doctors, here.

Solidarity with the detainees at Yarl's Wood

Yesterday, the Observer reported that "Senior Home Office officials will be questioned this week over allegations that women inside Yarl's Wood immigration detention centre were assaulted by staff using riot shields." This comes after significant efforts from immigrant and refugee groups to draw attention to the issue, holding their latest and largest protest on the issue only two days earlier.

That the rebellion inside the centre has finally gained national exposure can be counted as a significant victory. However, the vast majority of the media stil holds to a rabidly anti-immigrant line. With the government determined to do the same, gaining anything more than temporary exposure remains difficult.

A case in point is the letter from Home Office minister Meg Hillier to MPs. In it, as No Borders Brighton point out, "her basic argument is that 'you are all liars'." She dismisses the complaints made as "based on inaccurate and fabricated statements by those who campaign against our policy," brazenly claiming that raising the issue "is irresponsible as it causes unnecessary distress to the women at Yarl’s Wood." Her response to allegations about "incidents of racial abuse and violence directed at detainees" is equally outrageous. Without even the pretence of any formal inquiry into what are clearly very serious allegations, she insists that "there was no such behaviour by our staff" and that "the detainees are treated with respect."

Essentially, in the words of No Borders Brighton, she is "repeating the same points that the UKBA had made about the Aynsley-Green report the week before, namely that it contained "factual inaccuracies" and that in some areas, it was "misguided and wrong."" Clare Sambrook was quick to tear such nonsense apart in Comment is Free, and in this case the pictures do the same job.

As these revelations emerge, and the government tries desperately to rubbish them, activists are making demands for justice. Click here to read the demands put forth by the National Coalition of Anti-Deporation Campaigns (NCADC) and download a model letter to send to the Home Secretary. At the same time, lawyers today launch a legal challenge on behalf of four of women held at Yarl’s Wood, claiming their incarceration amounts to “cruel, inhumane and degrading” treatment that breaches their human rights.

For more direct action, this Wednesday (3rd March) there will be a demonstration outside HMP Holloway from 18.30. The prison is on Camden Road in London. Either way, what is clear is that the detainees in Yarl's Wood, as with people everywhere who face injustice, deserve our support and solidarity.

The Daily Mail and the art of making the facts fit the editorial byline

The following post comes from the excellent Five Chinese Crackers, who have turned debunking the vitriol of the Daily Mail into an art form. With immigration certain to be a hot button issue at the general election, the continuing brutalisation of migrants in detention centres, and the Tories already looking to "unofficially" co-opt the BNP's clothing, such a dose of reality is long overdue for the tabloid media.

Regular readers will already know what the Daily Mail does when statistics are released that do not fit with what the paper wants to tell its readers about immigration, but James Slack (the Home Affairs Editor, no less. Ooh - get him) gives us a lovely lesson for new readers and old alike. Aren't we lucky!

Statistics were released on Thursday that should by rights please the Mail. You can find them here and here. A clue as to what they might be is in the page title of the article on the website (top left in the picture below the fold), which is strangely not the healdine of the story anymore:

See, we can't have that sort of headline. Goes against the narrative!

The new headline is 'Two passports a minute are given to foreigners as 1.5m issued since Labour elected'. It focuses on one of the few things in the latest statistics that the Mail can scare us with, since almost everything the paper wants to see falling fell and most of the things it wanted to see rise rose.

It's also not true. There are 1,440 minutes in a day, 525,600 in a year and 6,307,200 in 12 years. If two passports a minute were given to foreigners (interesting they're still referred to as 'foreigners' and not new British citizens) between 1997 and 2009, we'd be lookiing at a total of 12,624,400. That's twelve and a half million, not one and a half.
Here's what the article says:

Passports were given to foreigners at the rate of two a minute last year.

Officials approved a record 203,865 citizenship applications, 58 per cent more than in 2008.

Another 190,000 immigrants were given the right to settle in the UK in 2009 – a rise of 30 per cent on the year before.

Ah. So we're not talking about the time since 1997 like the headline implies - we're talking just one year.

Still, how many minutes were there in a year? 60 X 24 X 365 = 525,600. For two a minute, we'd be looking at 1,051,200. Five times the number we have. Unless we add the number of people given grants to settle, who I don't think are elegible for passports. Even if they are though, we're still looking at more than double the number we have to equal 2 a minute.

We have a Slack maths classic. Not quite equal to making 55 people seem like over 10,000, or adding together figures he must have known would give a misleading total before adding almost a billion extra pounds to the total - but it's a pretty good one.

Still, the numbers have obviously risen since last year. Why is that? The Mail says:

Officials claim the massive rises during the past year may have been caused by migrants rushing to beat the supposedly tougher system of earned citizenship due to start next year.

Okay. Maybe they do. Maybe they don't. Whaddayagunnado? But the actual statistics document, the one the figures presumably come from, says:

The number of decisions made in 2009 has recovered from the comparatively low level in 2008 when staff resources were temporarily transferred from decision-making to deal with administration of an increase in new applications.

Left out the bit that explained how the number of decisions made last year was 'relatively low'. Managed to keep the bit about the big increase in applications though. Funny that.

Notice also how he manages to say 'supposedly tougher' before telling us that the waiting period rises from 5 years to 7 or 8 years, which is most certainly tougher.

There's a scare quote from Damian Green before we move on to more statistics, which are:

A raft of statistics released yesterday showed that huge numbers of students continue to pour into the UK – despite concerns about bogus colleges and visas.

In the final three months of 2009, 61,715 student visas were issued – an astonishing rise of 92 per cent on the same period in 2008.

Alarm bells start to ring when you see the time frame shifted and zeroing into specific types of visa. They ring even louder when you check the stats and see there's a new category for student visa that wasn't there the year before.

There could be reasons for this rise that are explained by the introduction of the points based system. Maybe it covers more people than the old Student Visa System. Maybe it was rubbish at doing what it was supposed to do - make it tougher for people to cheat the system when they're not really a student. Maybe the new system created a backlog of applications that were dealt with later in the year. There seems to be an anomaly here. In Q2 there was a drop in the number of student visas granted of 10,000 compared to last year. Looking at the year as a whole:

The number of student visas issued to main applicants was 273,610, an increase of 31 per cent compared with 2008 (208,800).

So we have a much smaller rise than for the last quarter, which is of course why that was focused on instead of the whole year. Put this straight after the guff about passports and it makes it look like immigration's rising, right?

We're approaching the bottom of the article, so here's where we get the more positive (from a Daily Mail point of view) numbers. here's what we get:

The figures revealed a shift in the source of the arrivals.

Notice the wording there. Slack's about to start talking about the drop in the number of Eastern Europeans, and he segues between what he's already said by mentioning a shift in the source of arrivals.

He does this directly after talking about things that have risen (and exaggerated some of those by pretending they were at a rate of 2 a minute), which makes it look as though the number of 'arrivals' overall has risen, just from places other than Eastern Europe. In fact the number of people arriving in the country for more than a year has slightly fallen.

Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the tabloid bait and switch.

Here's how he goes on to report the Eastern European figures:

The number of Poles registering to work fell by a quarter at the end of last year, but arrivals from Latvia and Lithuania more than doubled.

Heh. When the numbers drop they're just people registering to work, but when they rise they're arrivals. See what he did there?

At least he gives us the overall drop from Eastern Europe since 2007 rather than last year. Pat on the back for that one.

After this, we get:

In the year to June 2009, 146,000 British nationals emigrated and 87,000 came back to the UK.

Remember that coverage when those numbers were different? They hit the front page then. They're bunged at the bottom of an article about something else now.
Next, it's this:

This meant that net emigration was 59,000, down from 89,000 in the year to June 2008 – and a peak of well over 100,000 in 2004. In the same time period, net immigration by non-British nationals was 206,000, down from 257,000 in the year to June 2008.

We've been given a figure for the total number of British citizens immgrating back to the UK, but only a net figure for non-British. Do you think that might be because it would contradict the main thrust of the article and ruin the bait and switch, even buried this low?

Right, now we're really, really close to the bottom,it must be time to get on with the asylum seeker figures, so here we go:

Actually, no we don't. There's no mention of that either, aside from the page title, which is probably only still on the website by mistake.

There. Lesson over. When figures aren't all what you want them to be, cherrypick the ones that are, exaggerate them, use them in a bait and switch that covers over some of the figures you don't like that you actually bother mentioning.

The continuing repression and brutalisation of migrants

Across Europe this week, a wide variety of incidents has shone a light upon the unremitting repression wrought against migrants.

In January, African migrants working in the orange groves of Rosarno felt the brunt of the Italian state. This month, it is Chinese sweatshop workers in Tuscany. As the Financial Times reports;

When the Italian police, firefighters and assorted inspectors banged on the factory door, launching their latest raid on illegal Chinese sweatshops in Prato, most of the stunned workers living there in damp, windowless cubicles were still in pyjamas.

Within hours, four more clothing factories in Lazzeretto street had been sealed and ranks of sewing machines confiscated, two illegal immigrants were hauled off and the remaining few dozen workers told to get out.

After years of tolerating and also benefiting from waves of Chinese immigrants who have built the largest concentration of Chinese-run industry in Europe, the people of this ancient Tuscan city have decided enough is enough.

“The last drop sent the vase spilling over. The city cannot go on like this,” declared Riccardo Marini, president of Prato’s association of industrialists. “The Chinese may respect the laws in France and the UK but here they don’t – because they were allowed to by a system of politicians and entrepreneurs. It got out of hand.”

What is striking here is that those so callously "told to get out" are not the owners or operators of the sweatshop. They are the workers. Whilst mayor Roberto cenni denounces "slave-like conditions," he condemns those who suffer them to an uncertain fate without care. Further to which, we also see an economic interst in the brutality as "the mayor – whose Sasch clothing chain produces and sells in China – wants the Chinese manufacturers in Prato to use the city’s own high-quality textiles rather than imported cloth." Funny how "slave-like conditions" and living in "damp, windowless cubicles" is only unacceptable when it's unprofitable.

In Greece, the ongoing and violent unrest has brought the tribulations of the country's migrants into sharp focus. In the wake of a new immigration bill put forth by the government, fascist groups called for an anti-immigration demo in Propylea - traditionally a landmark of left-wing and anarchist marches and struggles - under the banner "you do not become a greek - you are born a greek." However, LibCom reports that antifascists and anarchists organised a massive counter demonstration and managed to drive the fascists away. Their banner: "you are not born a wanker [malakas], you become a wanker!"

After the Greek Riots tells us that, as this was building up, "in the early hours of Tuesday (2.1.2010) the approximately 130 detainees held in the Venna “detention centre” for migrants, in the prefecture of Rodopi (very close to the North-Eastern borders of the country) revolted." Protesting "against their continuous and illegal detention, plus the horrendous living conditions in their prison," they "set fire[s] and some injured themselves as a sign of protest." Whilst  "the media reported that approximately 30 were released," Indymedia said "that 43 migrants were taken yesterday to the prosecutor, facing charges of mutiny and public property damage." Solidarity actions are in the works.

Meanwhile, the most explosive events in the Europe-wide war against migrants have been taking place in Calais. A Calais Migrant Solidarity press release tells the full story;

Under instruction from the town authorities, the elite French CRS riot police today forcibly evicted the new Calais migrant centre – called Kronstadt Hangar - by smashing down the front doors, less than 24 hours after migrants and No Borders activists pushed through police lines to occupy the building, which has been legally rented by No Borders and SoS Soutien aux Sans Papiers.

Marie Chautemps said: “The Kronstadt Hangar was opened as a direct intervention into a winter of repression that the migrants in Calais have faced since their ‘jungle’ communities were destroyed in a cruel PR stunt, back in September.”

She continued that: “With the authorities blocking any attempts to create a place for migrants to shelter from constant police harassment or from the bitterly cold winter, the Kronstadt Hangar intervention was made in the name of common human respect as well as resistance to an increasingly fascist EU border policy.”

On Saturday evening, about 100 migrants came to the warehouse with the intention of entering. They were met by two separate lines of French police on either side of the hangar. Shouting “freedom! freedom!”, the migrants and No Borders activists pushed through the police lines and successfully occupied the hangar. Donations of blankets, extra-clothes, basic mattresses and hot tea were provided for the migrants.

However, after a safe and secure night, 75 CRS police arrived on Sunday afternoon and forcibly evicted the new space by smashing down the front glass doors. 12 activists were arrested, but later released, while one was taken to hospital.

The police proceeded to trash the hangar and all the possessions inside, and have welded the entrance shut, so that it is now currently impossible for anyone to re-enter the warehouse.

In a press release issued earlier today, SoS Soutien aux Sans Papiers highlighted the joint agency between the French and UK governements, in operations such as these. Just as there is increased collaboration between the governments on both sides of the channel, so there is an increase in resistance to the repressive policies of Sarkozy, implemented with the approval of the British government. Alex Parks said “The authorities in Calais have been trying to remove migrants from Calais for years without success, because they are in denial about the terminal reality of the un-equal world we live in. This is not over, solidarity and resistance for the right to freedom of movement will continue in Calais.”

This action, and the absurd justifications which came with it, only serves as proof that EU is becoming a repressive fortress state.

Unfortunately, leading the way in that regard is Britain. Whilst ministers such as Margaret Hodge offer rhetorical bluster aimed at stealing the thunder of the far-right, eighty four women are on a hunger strike in the Yarl's Wood detention centre. The F Word offers a report by the Black Women's Rape Action Project;

Over fifty women are currently trapped in an airless hallway in Yarl’s Immigration Removal Centre. On Friday 5 February they began a hunger strike. Today they were herded into the hallway were they have been left there for over two hours without access to water or toilets. Four women, including an asthma sufferer, have fainted. Around 1.30 the guards came into the hallway and started to beat women. As we spoke to one woman she told us that someone was bleeding. One of the managers told the women they would regret what they have done; she called the Chinese women monkeys, and the Black women black monkeys. Four other women have been locked in other rooms for three hours, and have been told by room mates that their belongings have been packed. They are worried they face immediate removal even though their cases are still being considered. Fifteen women have been locked up in “Kingfisher”, the punishment wing.

According to women on the other wings all movement has been restricted - even those not on the hunger strike are not getting any food including diabetics who urgently need it.

Hunger strikers want to speak to the press and get the truth out about the protest.

They are protesting at the length of time they have been detained - one woman who cannot speak English, has been held for over two years. Their statement is attached. Their demands include: an end to the “degradation and humiliation of detained/foreign nationals during deportation by detention staff and escorts during flights”; an end to the Fast Track for asylum seekers which denies fair decisions, the restoration of full legal aid and access to independent legal advice for everyone who is being detained.

Cristel Amiss, Black Women’s Rape Action Project which is supporting women on hunger strike said “Over 70% of women in Yarl’s Wood are rape survivors, many are sick and vulnerable. Why are they being punished for raising serious injustices? This “kettling” tactic has been thoroughly discredited, women should be allowed back into their rooms immediately, there should be an immediate investigation into what has happened and any guard found to be responsible for injuring women must be sacked immediately”.

Although getting rid of individual guards will rectify some specific injustices, and of course give Yarl's Wood itself a way to say it is writing wrongs, the fact remains that what has gone on there and is going on there is systemic. It will not go away with one or two guards, but only with a dismantling of the entire centre and an end to the arbitary and inhumane detention of migrants.

Immigration controls cannot bring an end to mass migration - only dismantling capitalism and the brutal conditions that it fostered can do that. Likewise, born of racism and predicated upon hysteria, they can never be fair or humane. All they can do is offer a salve to the tabloid media and perpetuate the mythology that divides the working class against itself. We need to recognise that the plight of the migrant is our plight, in extremis, and stand shoulder-to-shoulder with them in the struggle ahead.

Why Margaret Hodge's pseudo-Griffinism only helps the BNP

In the General Election, Margaret Hodge will be defending her seat in Barking against British National Party leader Nick Griffin. It's not surprising, then, that at the forefront of her concerns is how to tackle the BNP and the disenfranchisement that drives people to support them. Unfortunately, it would appear that she has decided that the best way to do this is to steal their rhetoric.

In Thursday's Daily Mail, she wrote that "we need to have an honest conversation about what’s really going on in our working class communities." In that much, she's right. She is also right that "parties like the BNP tap into people’s frustrations and that’s why we’ve seen a rise in support for them." But beyond that she misses the mark completely. The idea that this translates into a "need to be much braver and draw a distinction between immigration and fair access to public services" is a misunderstanding so profound that it's hard to know where to begin.

Let's be clear on this point: although the BNP tap into people's frustrations, this does not in any sense make the solutions they offer the right ones. The whole point here is that the BNP, as so many other fascist groups before them, take genuine grievances against the current system and spin them to offer a scapegoat and division.

As an example, let's take social housing. The reason that we are suffering a severe shortfall in social housing and long waiting lists at present has nothing to do with migration and everything to do with successive governments that have put private profit ahead of public welfare. Studies have shown that migrants do not "jump the queue" for social housing, and I have previously debunked attempts by the Daily Mail and the BNP to rubbish those findings. What we have, instead, is a policy that goes back to the Thatcher era whereby money made from giving council tenants the "right to buy" was not reinvested in housing stock. As Liverpool Antifascists point out, "councils are not allowed to build new houses with the money from the sales, and housing associations have built very few. This has meant that total social housing has reduced from 35% of housing stock in 1965 to about 21% today." At the same time, "successive governments have left it to the private landlords to provide more houses but this just hasn't happened. As always, the system we are ruled by prioritises profit over the needs of real people, whatever our colour or race."

This is the realisation that needs to be made if we are to stop people turning to the BNP out of sheer frustration. Private greed is a genuine threat to our lives, unlike living with people of other races who are - like us - just trying to get by.

Margaret Hodge, filling her coffers in that same profit system, has no interest in telling this truth. That is why she dismisses reality by saying "of course we need to build more houses and it’s fantastic that this Government has started building council houses once again, but there won’t be a return to the 1960s and 70s when we saw mass building of council houses." As such, scapegoating takes priority, and "we need to be radical in our thinking and look at drawing up a point system based on length of residence, citizenship or national insurance contributions which ensures that economic migrants can only access social housing and key benefits when they have paid into the system."

Hodge tells us that "this isn't about race," but we knew that already. Likewise, it isn't about "having a transparent system which people understand and which is fair" or "giving people in communities like Barking and Dagenham a voice and real solutions to their problems." It's about playing the same blame game as the BNP and turning one element of the working class against another so that they need not look up and see who's really responsible for their ills.

Those who oppose the BNP do not do so just because of "Nick Griffin’s views on the Holocaust and his sympathy with the Nazis." Antifascism is about opposing an ideology which divides the working class in order to promote the interests of the nation-state. We don't want to see BNP fascism co-opted by Margaret Hodge any more than we wanted to see National Front fascism co-opted by Margaret Thatcher. We want to see it destroyed.

How Haiti became a microcosm of globalisation

As SchNews notes in its excellent analysis, Haiti - The Aftershock Doctrine, "Haiti is a unique place. The only nation to be founded by a slave rebellion, its angry population of African slaves managed to defeat the French back in 1791. Renamed as Haiti - the original Arawak name for the island - it was the Cuba of its day- an inspiration to enslaved peoples the world over and a thorn in the side of the imperial regimes."

Now, in the aftermath of this recent disaster, it faces imperial domination once again;

Unable to reconquer Haiti militarily, the people of Haiti have been subjected to blockades and one sided trade agreements ever since. The prize for most outrageous treaty probably goes to the 19th century French government, which demanded that Haitians pay France reparations for lost earnings following the loss of ‘their’ slaves.

As French neo-colonialism was replaced by the American variety, years of massive loans on impossible interest rates has meant that any money from Haiti’s cash crops have gone directly to international banks, after corrupt leaders took their cut.

The infamous hereditary dictatorship of ‘Papa’ Doc and ‘Baby’ Doc Duvalier ruled the country with a unique form of voodoo oppression between 1957 and 1986. The three decades of Duvalier rule saw Haiti change from being able to feed its population to becoming a cash crop economy reliant on US food imports.

One of the many unpleasant sights from the Haitian disaster was former US presidents George W Bush and Bill Clinton standing together, earnestly encouraging people to help Haiti. Haiti’s former president, Jean Bertrand Aristide, was deposed by Bush Senior in ’91, reinstated on Clinton’s orders by US troops (on condition that he sign up to harsh neo-liberal measures), only to be deposed by the Marines in 2004.

All of this provides some sort of context for the relief effort that’s underway. Lack of money and the complete absence of almost any social function of the state meant that when the magnitude 7 quake hit so close to Port au Prince, whole neighbourhoods of the slum city disintegrated. The airport, seaport, roads and communication links were all so badly built and their destruction so total that the normal routes for aid and rescue teams were barred.

Whilst everyone else from Medicine San Frontiers to the Icelandic government were busy sending food, medics and drinking water, the Americans dithered, sending the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson three days later, without emergency relief supplies but with plenty of sidewinder missiles and combat helicopters. Even as the rest of the world pitched in, the Americans claimed they couldn’t deliver aid without making sure Haiti was safe first. In that peculiar form of helping that we’ve learned to know so well, the Americans sent in the marines (again). Some 10,000 troops have been, or are about to be deployed - a readymade army of occupation.

As of Tuesday, the US military is officially in direct control of Haiti. But then, in reality, Haiti has been effectively under occupation on and off for years now. The troops providing aid should be seen in this light - As the Geneva Convention states: “The duties of the occupying power include ... providing the population with food and medical supplies; agreeing to relief schemes... maintaining medical facilities and services; [and] ensuring public health and hygiene.”

In an effort to prove that the military presence is somehow necessary, the US media has been hard at work painting a picture (just like New Orleans post Katrina) of criminal gangs, mass lootings and ‘human rats’ (to quote Time Magazine) that need pacifying in order to be given assistance. Yet the word from agencies on the ground is that, apart from the desperate search for food and basic supplies, the population has been relatively quiet.

The militarisation of the Haiti aid effort has caused huge problems for international NGOs. Medicine Sans Frontiers has publicly criticised the USA for slowing down and mismanaging the aid effort. Since Sunday MSF medics and 5 planes carrying 85 tonnes of drugs and surgical supplies have been turned away from the airport due to the prioritisation of military air traffic.

Francoise Saulnier, head of MSF’s legal department said, “We lost three days, and these three days have created a massive problem with infection, with gangrene, with amputations that are needed now, while we could have really spared this to those people."

Just as it did in Iraq, the US military has been trying to control the flow of information out of Haiti. Yesterday ( 21ST) the military ordered the removal of all international journalists from the Haitian capital’s airport, without bothering to supply any explanation.

Assuming that aid workers can prevent starvation and disease from taking many more lives, the aid effort will slowly turn into a reconstruction effort. As much as Haitians no doubt appreciate any help right now, the form of aid will have a major bearing on Haiti’s direction over next few decades. The IMF is talking about a Marshall Plan for Haiti. Originally the plan was for a loan of $100 (£60) million that included demands for wages cuts and raised prices.

Public pressure from debt relief activists such as Jubilee USA, complete with the facebook campaign “No shock doctrine for Haiti” managed to curtail some of the most obviously exploitative aspects of the IMF’s proposal. Anti-capitalista Naomi Klein called this victory "unprecedented in my experience and shows that public pressure in moments of disaster can seriously subvert shock doctrine tactics."

In the midst of this crisis, CNN breaks the following news;

The U.S. military is gearing up for a possible influx of Haitians fleeing their earthquake-stricken country at an Army facility not widely known for its humanitarian missions: Guantanamo Bay.

Soldiers at the base have set up tents, beds and toilets, awaiting possible orders from the secretary of defense to proceed, according to Maj. Diana Haynie, a spokeswoman for Joint Task Force Guantanamo Bay.

"There's no indication of any mass migration from Haiti," Haynie stressed. "We have not been told to conduct migrant operations."

But the base is getting ready "as a prudent measure," Haynie said, since "it takes some time to set things up."

Not only are American interests being protected on land with tens of thousands of US troops, but the US government in the guise of the Department of Homeland Security have initiated Operation Vigilant Sentry to keep away any Haitians who might think of fleeing their devastated country. If we were in any doubt about this, the US have been using radio broadcasts to tell Haitians quite explicitly;

Listen, don't rush on boats to leave the country. If you do that, we'll all have even worse problems. Because, I'll be honest with you: If you think you will reach the U.S. and all the doors will be wide open to you, that's not at all the case. And they will intercept you right on the water and send you back home where you came from.

Those perpetrating Shock Doctrine imperialism will readily repatriate those fleeing it, though an easing of restrictions means Americans can adopt their babies. As such, it appears that the Haiti crisis has come to embody the injustices of neoliberal globalisation in microcosm.

If you wish to show solidarity with the Haitian people suffering this fact, you can join the Facebook group, "No Shock Doctrine for Haiti," here. If you wish to help the people with a donation, both Medicine Sans Frontiers and Medicine Du Monden have reliable credentials of avoiding corruption by state interests.