This comes from last Friday’s I for 21st February 2020, and reports that two organisations dealing with immigrants and detainees have written a letter of protest against the Tories latest deportation of ex-convicts. They complain that the deportees may not have had access to proper legal advice. The article, by Chloe Chaplain, runs
The Home Office has been warned a planeload of people due to be deported from the UK contains “asylum seekers and vulnerable victims of trafficking” who might not have had access to proper legal support.
In a joint letter, Detention Action and the Immigration Law Practitioners’ Association have written to the Home Secretary, Priti Patel, claiming that those on board a flight scheduled to leave the UK yesterday might not have been given “adequate access to justice”.
The Home Office said that all cases had been properly considered and that all detainees were “given simple opportunities to seek any legal advice they require” while in the centres.
But Ms Lenegan said her concerns stemmed from the quality of advice available to these people.
“What I imagine the Home Office is referring to is the detained duty advice scheme – and that is what we are concerned about,” she said. “All the detention centres have this scheme where lawyers will sit in the removal centre for a day, and there will be 10 half-hour slots to speak to people.”
I think I’ve come across this story before, or something like it. These questions were being raised when the deportations first occurred. Now it seems that the organisations involved have raised an official complaint.
It also looks like they’re trying to refute the Tories’ claim that the legal advice they’ve received is adequate. To my, admittedly inexpert eyes, a half-hour slot is nowhere near adequate for someone in an immigration detention centre to get propler legal advice. However, it does fit the Tories’ and Blairite’s strategy of presenting a bare minimum of support and then claiming that it was somehow full or adequate. From personal experience, I know that people writing letters of complaint to the authorities are warned how they phrase these letters, so that the Tories do not subsequently misrepresent them as a kind of public discussion when no such thing has occurred.
As for Patel herself, Mike yesterday raised the question whether she was ‘self-hating’. Is she a member of an ethnic minority who hates their own race? Patel had made a statement denying that Boris Johnson was racist after the rapper Dave changed his lyrics to attack BoJob at the Brit awards. But Johnson certainly looks like one, with his racist caricatures of Blacks, Muslims and Jews in his execrable novel, 72 Virgins. Not to mention his remarks about ‘grinning picanninies’ and not shaking the hands of the Black people attending the Tory party conference.
Patel claims that her parents arrived in this family in 1972 as part of the Ugandan Asian community expelled by Idi Amin. They were given sanctuary by Ted Heath when every other country, including India, refused them. But her parents actually arrived before that, in the 1960s, meaning that they may not have been allowed into this country as asylum seekers as she claims. Under her rules then, she’d have had her own mother deported.
Mike’s article is also worth reading as he demolishes the Tories’ simple equation of low-paid with low-skilled. The Tories want to refuse entry to migrants unless they’re going to a job that pays £25,600 plus. But Mike states that when he was working as a journalist and editor, he was never paid anywhere near that amount.
And I’m absolutely sure Mike’s experience is common. There is now a wave of graduates seeking low-paid jobs for which they are ridiculously overqualified, because the graduate-level opportunities simply aren’t there. And I heard from academic friends over a decade ago that even academics may be on extraordinarily low wages due to the way the profession’s been restructured so that the upper management are vastly overpaid. The people, who do the actual teaching work, on the other hand, may be on part-time contracts and other devices, which would keep their salaries under that £25,600 amount.
This is more toxic, racist exploitative nonsense from a toxic, racist and exploitative government seeking to capitalise and inflame hatred against immigrants.
Tags: 'Detention Action', 'I' Newspaper, Asians, Chloe Chaplain, Conservatives, Deportations, Detention Centres, Graduates, Idi Amin, Immigration, Immigration Law Practitioners' Association, Journalists, Lawyers, Lecturers, Mike Sivier, Ms Lenegan, Priti Patel, racism, Ted Heath, tony blair
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