The last few weeks have seen the media effort to foment racist sentiments against asylum seekers - particularly Roma - reach unprecedented depths.
While some of the broadsheets have begun to pull back at little in response to criticism from their readership, they too participated fully in the initial phase.
Independent socialist GRAHAM USHER was so furious about these developments that he sent us the following article.
THE BRITISH press is at it again - attempting to whip up a crude, racist backlash with the latest in a series of desperate ravings about asylum seekers.
For example, on March 13, the Birmingham Evening Mail followed up its double page spread on "aggressive beggars" three days before with the headline: "Fury At Asylum Handout!".
On the same day the Daily Mail, equally reliable for reactionary rantings, weighed in 'with "£32,000 A Year Asylum Seeker!" whilst The Sun insisted that: "Britain Has Had Enough" as "Refugee Milks Us Of £32,000 Per Year!".
These lurid headlines were all concerned with an Algerian man and his large family (eighteen), all of whom fled their country of origin fifteen months ago to escape a civil war-type situation. The family now has two council homes in inner Birmingham.
Anyway £32,000 split eighteen ways (£1,777 per person per year) is hardly "luxury" - any more than are mobile 'phones and satellite television - another ludicrous claim by the press!
Further the situation of the man in question, Mohammed Kinewa, is a clear exception to the situation facing most asylum seekers who, in Britain, normally face virtual internment in concentration camp-type centres in Middlesex or Oxfordshire. Others await drawn-out hearings, frequently surviving on little more than £40 worth of food tokens.
Diversion
It is always an easy option to deflect attention away from social issues such as homelessness and the fact that nearly three quarters of a million homes currently stand empty and neglected in Britain.
Instead of focusing on this, or unemployment, or poverty, the media is saturated with fanciful claims that "Refugees are living in luxury and milking us dry".
To seize on this example, as the racist tabloid press has done, and try to make it out as the norm, is as distorted as it is despicable.
It is also important to point out that, all too often, the hypocritical British capitalist system and its political rulers in the shape of Labour and Tory governments covertly (and sometimes not so covertly) supporting regimes that cause people to flee for their lives in the first place.
The same publications which now berate one Algerian family fleeing a life threatening situation were comparatively restrained when Margaret Thatcher and other monsters were recently "taking afternoon tea" with Pinochet (a man who headed a vicious South American military dictatorship which violently overthrew a democratically elected, leftish government in 1973 and is known to have slaughtered tens of thousands of its political opponents with the direct connivance of the "democratic" USA and its shadowy CIA).
Now Labour Home Secretary Jack ("I hate aggressive beggars") Straw has decided that the odious Pinochet is "too sick" to face extradition or a proper trial!
Owners
We should not take lectures from a press which tells us what its wealthy owners want us to hear and read, not least when The Sun and company also rant on about "Gypsy Spongers" and "Romanian Spongers...begging and building mansions on OUR handouts".
This is not informed or objective journalism but grossly oversimplified, distorted and deeply xenophobic trash, as is the hysteria surrounding the supposedly serious problem of "aggressive begging".
Fears
It is cynically designed to home in on some of people's most basic fears when in the streets.
Among those enlisted to help whip up openly racist sentiments among ordinary working people and is the bosses' favourite trade unionist - Kenneth Jackson [I refuse to call him 'Sir Ken'] general secretary of the Amalgamated Engineering and Electrical Union (The Sun, March 14).
This man is currently retailing the tired old chauvinistic, anti-foreigner, semi-racist rubbish so beloved of old-guard trade union bureaucrats, especially when claiming to speak for the 'labour heartlands.
Jackson does not object to the real scandal: that finance is free to roam the globe at will in the search for higher profits, while similar freedom of movement is denied to labour - especially when the worker has a black skin.
This is the reason for divisive and racist immigration controls: and these, like the capitalist system which breeds them, must be fought!