SOAS deportations

From Lenin’s Tomb.

Below is a prime example of the ongoing state racism. It’s shocking and appalling.

You’ll remember that SOAS college has recently been the target of a campaign because of its sacking of a key union activist. Now, the union-busting process has acquired the assistance of the state. I am told that at 6.45 am yesterday, representatives form the Border Control Agency raided SOAS. The entire cleaning staff were in a meeting called by the contractors when up to fifty officers arrived. The immigration police interrogated the cleaners and eventually rounded up nine of them who they claimed were in the UK illegally. They were, eyewitnesses say, lined up against the wall, and marched into a room, locked inside, and forced to fill in some documents. They were given no legal representation, and no interpreters to assist in understanding the documents they were supposed to be filling in. If I understand matters correctly, the cleaners were due to be deported this evening. SOAS management say that the raid was carried out in a “sympathetic manner”, but disclaims any responsibility. Members of the Living Wage campaign don’t believe them, and students from SOAS have mounted protests over the raids with a number of members of staff have supported them.

Letter condemning deportations

Demo in solidarity of the SOAS cleaners @ 8:30am tomorrow

The raid’s timing fits in with the NL response to the rise in racism and of the BNP since the credit crunch: victimise the victims!  The idea is that if NL acts tough towards immigrant labour then it will have a stick to beat the Tories and the Lib Dems. The truth of course is that the monster will be fed with what makes it grow. In the meantime the SOAS cleaners have become the direct victims of state racism.

No change New Labour

There’s to be an inquiry into the Iraq war but …to be held in secret. So much for the new improved Gordon Brown strategy. If this inquiry is to be meaningful then it has to be held in public, open to public scrutiny and democratic…

As Philip Cooper, whose son Jamie was seriously injured in Iraq, says, Ministers should not treat us like us mushrooms – kept in the dark and fed on shit.

And another sop thrown by Gordon Brown is the Child Poverty Bill. When you read the key parts underpinning this Bill is that they revolve around strategies, commissions and reports. I am not against that approach but where are the concrete proposals in tackling child poverty? The Bill is designed to define success in eradicating child poverty and create a framework to monitor progress at a national and local level.

But this seems to me further bureaucracy and slowing the process. Surely it is about practical social democratic policies combating child poverty? But hey, this is NL so lets have committees and commissions to discuss the bleeding obvious.

Also the Bill places a duty on the Secretary of State to meet four UK-wide income poverty targets by the end of the financial year 2020. And didn’t NL pledge that they would halve child poverty by 2010…? Or was I dreaming that commitment..?

NL may be please that the figures for child poverty are ‘broadly stable‘ but after 12 years …. this is pathetic! It is indeed a kick in the teethfor people living in poverty. And with the Welfare Reform Bill going through Parliament (it’s a little bit funny when NL wants to turbo-charge a Bill through they do…. but usually it’s about making social conditions worse for ordinary people not the opposite!) things will get a hellva lot worse for people…..

And on that issue of being quick off the mark when it comes to fulfilling their own material interests such as NL  privatisation (btw sign the petition keeping the Royal Mail in public ownership… and good luck with the strike action), cuts in public services or as it is known in business speak  ‘modernisation’, contracting out, and marketisation…. which is known in business speak as ‘choice and competition’.

And now Liam Byrne (chief secretary to the Treasury) has asked for ideas from the private sector in cutting the public sector ‘waste’….He will be addressing the CBI this week.

So we will see overhauling of public services, which in reality means more contracting out, more privatisation, more ‘modernisation’, more child poverty… So much for a changing and more engaging Gordon Brown..

Avanti neoliberalism.