NEW LABOUR is swimming in a tide of increasingly racist and reactionary policies.
Foreign Secretary Jack Straw tells us he "sympathises" with Australian Prime Minister John Howard’s plight in trying to keep out the Afghani asylum seekers on the Tampa – at a time when Howard’s actions have met with widespread condemnation across the globe.
David Blunkett promises to send in snatch squads to remove people whose applications for asylum have failed. Immigration officers will be armed with new powers to search premises and make arrests. Blunkett has argued that these measures are necessary to restore "faith in the asylum system".
Now the Government have given catering company Sudexho an opt-out from the minimum wage legislation so that they can pay asylum seekers less than one tenth of the paltry minimum wage – a miserable 34p an hour – for cleaning and cooking! The timing of this is somewhat ironic, coinciding as it does with the UN conference on racism, at which the British government is leading the former slave-trading nations in resisting any apology for their past crimes against humanity, any recognition of the legacy of slavery – and any payment of reparations to the African countries affected.
Every rabid racist comment in the tabloids is met by yet more concessions and right wing policies from politicians.
These people must be held to account and their reactionary ideas consigned to the dustbin of history. We say: Step up the fight against racism, throw out the system of forced dispersal, and scrap immigration controls.