Stop Labour jailing more asylum seekers!
Campaigners in defence of asylum rights took to the streets in towns across Britain with even greater determination on November 3 for a day of action in defence of refugees.
Early that week Home Secretary David Blunkett had unveiled his supposedly radical reform of the asylum system. Certainly the media were right to argue that the new proposals were a slap in the face for predecessor Jack Straw, who had both introduced and defended the hated voucher system.
More than a year after the new Labour government stated its intention to review the voucher scheme, which forces people fleeing terror and torture at home to live on vouchers of £26.54 a week plus £10 cash, Blunkett announced his changes.
The voucher scheme will be abolished, but only on the basis that even more asylum seekers are rounded up and effectively imprisoned in new "reception centres" the government plans to build, with 3,000 beds in total. Anyone who leaves will lose all entitlement to any material support.
At the same time spaces in actual detention centres will be increased to 4,000. Already the government detains without trial some 1,700 asylum applicants in any given week, Now, as the Campaign to Defend Asylum Seekers (CDAS) say " the Home Secretary is seizing on the tragic events of September 11 in the USA to justify increasing the use of detention".
Refugees will be issued with a "smart card" carrying their fingerprints and photographs. They will be used as guinea pigs for the assault on civil liberties new Labour wants to carry through by introducing identity cards for everyone.
In the short term there will be an increase in the value of vouchers – in line with the increase in social security payments. This will do nothing to address the fact that inexplicably the government believe that it is possible to live more cheaply if you are an asylum seeker than if you are a refugee. The recent report published by the British Medical Association and the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture is packed full of horror stories of the lengths people are forced to go to survive on this ridiculously low amount, including mothers watering down formula milk for their babies.
Afghan refugee, Mohammed Asif, currently dispersed to Glasgow’s poverty stricken Sighthill estate, rightly argued that the government’s proposals "are not for reception centres, they are for prisons".
Blunkett made clear that his proposals are motivated not from any concern about the rights of asylum seekers, but to deter people from coming here in the first place.
In the meantime, Bill Morris of the TGWU, one of the most powerful players in the fight for asylum rights issued an ambiguous press release in response to the proposals.
It argued "In moving forward, the government must ensure that its programme is under-pinned by social justice.
"We would not want to exchange the paper voucher for a plastic voucher, which would retain all the problems of stigmatisation and division of the present system.
"Nor would we wish to see the new approach be just a quick fix to use the system to trampoline asylum seekers around a series of centres before bouncing them out of the country."
It then went onto argue that it would be keeping a close eye on the detail of the White Paper.
All campaigners for social justice must ensure not only that they are campaigning publicly against the government’s iniquitous proposals, but that they keep up the fight in the trade unions to commit as broad as range of organisations to do likewise.