Home » Uncategorized (Page 29)
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Cruel and inhuman – the British way
Foreign, elderly, frail and suffering from dementia? The Home Office, and its privatised “detention estate”, has the solution for you: handcuffs.
According to today’s Guardian, chief inspector of prisons Nick Hardwick says that the regime at Harmondsworth immigration detention centre (IDC) is guilty of a “shocking loss of humanity” in their treatment of detainees. On at least two occasions staff
“needlessly handcuffed elderly, vulnerable and incapacitated detainees in what he called “an excessive and shocking manner”. He said that the two men were so ill that one died shortly after his handcuffs were removed and the other, the 84-year-old, who has been named as Alois Dvorzac, died while still restrained.”
The first man remained handcuffed in hospital while sedated and undergoing an operation. Mr Dvorzac died while still in handcuffs. They were taken off only after his heart had stopped.
Handcuffing happens regularly because of “a lack of intelligent individual risk assessment”. In fact it looks like the default position when even a detainee classified as “low-risk” has to be escorted outside the centre, e.g. to hospital. (“Low-risk”, by the way, means “not likely to try to escape”.) Hardwick gives the example of a case where “a detainee who was using a wheelchair following a stroke had been handcuffed on a journey to hospital for no obvious reason”.
I note that the Home Office professional standards unit has completed a critical investigation report into this particular case.
I also note that the prisons and probation ombudsman is investigating Mr Dvorzac’s death.
I note that immigration minister Mark Harper says: “The use of restraint in this case seems completely unjustified and must not be repeated. Clear instructions have been issued making clear that restraint should only happen where absolutely necessary.”
But I take little comfort from these “investigations” or from this statement. Indeed, I almost despair, because the abuse has been going on for far too long, investigations and pious ministerial press releases have consumed large tracts of forest land, but on and on it goes. In my research into the treatment of asylum seekers in the UK and France I wrote the following:
“Since the mid-1990s there have been protests by detainees against their detention, their conditions and the treatment they have received. At Campsfield House in 2001, detainees went on hunger strike, complaining that they were being treated like prisoners when they had done nothing wrong. Much of Yarl’s Wood IRC was destroyed by fire in 2002 during protests, partly over the handcuffing of a female detainee on her way to medical treatment. Protests, hunger strikes, even riots continue to take place across the ‘detention estate’: BID’s written evidence to the Parliamentary Joint Committee (BID = Bail for Immigration Detainees) reported that
‘there has been an increasing incidence of hunger strikes in the detention centres. In BID’s experience, prior to 2006, there would be one or two hunger strikes a year in one or two detention centres. Since January 2006, there have been hunger strikes in Colnbrook, Haslar and Yarl’s Wood. In April 2006, 100 people were involved in a hunger strike in Colnbrook and in July and August 2006, the parents of children held at Yarl’s Wood undertook a hunger strike.’
“Self-harm and suicide are also responses to detention. BID told the Joint Committee that
‘in April 2006, 187 people were kept under surveillance in case they harmed themselves; 19 of those people required medical treatment. From April 2005 to March 2006, 231 people self-harmed and needed medical treatment; 1,086 were put on self-harm watch. Suicide verdicts have been recorded for two people in immigration detention and a further five inquests are to be heard into deaths over the last two years in detention centres.’
“The National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns (NCADC)[1] obtained figures under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 which told them that
‘there were 48 incidents of Self-Harm requiring medical treatment in Jan/Feb/Mar 2008 [and] this is an increase of 54% on the last quarter of 2007 … during which time there were 31 incidents … 361 individuals were put on Formal Self-Harm at Risk in Jan/Feb/Mar 2008, a 28% increase on the last quarter of 2007 … during which time there were 282 incidents.’
“Such responses to detention for deportation is not surprising. Asylum seekers’ fears of returning to their home countries are real. When asked if he thought he would be deported, S1 said simply:
‘No … if one day I knew they going to send me back I will kill myself [gesture across throat] before they send me back … [I know] when I go back I get shoot very easy … I don’t want to be like that again.’[2]
“Some detainees self-harm or attempt suicide when being deported. Security guards showed the BBC’s undercover reporter in the escort service at Heathrow airport an album of photographs of the inside of a van covered in a detainee’s blood. In the light of the Home Office’s presumptions of guilt, the poor decision-making at all levels and the lack of interest in monitoring returns, there can be no confidence that the decision to refuse and return is necessarily a safe one. In these circumstances, an assumption of risk may be better than an assumption of guilt. Indeed, if assumptions of guilt and the focus on immigration control were abandoned and, instead, Refugee Convention and human rights obligations were put at the forefront of the asylum process, with improvements made in decision-making to match those changes, the practice of detention for removal would be rarely needed. Certainly, a fairer process at the outset would mean fewer people at the final stage who were fearful of return. If the process is unfair and prejudicial from the start, however, the outcome will continue to be resistance at the end.”
I have started a petition to the Home Secretary. Please sign it:
Read the Guardian article here: http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/jan/16/harmondsworth-elderly-man-died-handcuffs?CMP=EMCNEWEML6619I2
Targets, incentives and the right to asylum
Read this paragraph from today’s Guardian:
“Home Office officials are being rewarded with shopping vouchers for helping to ensure failed asylum seekers lose their attempt to stay in the country, new documents reveal. Official guidance obtained by the Guardian shows that immigration staff have been set a target of winning 70% of tribunal cases in which asylum seekers are appealing against government decisions that they should leave the UK. These officers are also incentivised by Home Office reward schemes involving gift vouchers, cash bonuses and extra holidays, according to information received under freedom of information laws.”
Targets, then. So whatever happened to the constant Home Office mantra, “All asylum cases are dealt with on their merits”? Nothing, is the answer – because that was never the way the asylum system worked, and this investigation confirms what many of us have been saying for a long time.
And incentives? To be clear:
“Asked what rewards were given to presenting officers and case owners in the fields of asylum and immigration, the department confirmed high-street vouchers for £25 or £50 were handed out to ‘recognise positive performance over a short period of time’, including when officers ‘exceed their casework targets for a month’.”
Those of you who remember my neighbour Moh will wonder if his caseworker had “exceeded his or her casework targets for a month” when Moh was deported after 12 years in the UK. “Terribly inefficient, of course, to take so long, but let’s not quibble, Mr Jones, you’re the one who got there in the end. Here’s a £50 shopping voucher and some extra holiday time. Keep up the good work.”
Such schemes will increase the number of asylum seekers fitted up by their caseworkers. The following is taken from my PhD research, finished in 2010. FS3 is the codename I gave an Iranian refugee I interviewed. The quotes are from the official transcript of his interview and from the caseworker’s official letter refusing asylum. The letter sought to discredit FS3’s account of the experiences which led him to flee Iran. None of that letter stands up to scrutiny, but I simply mention here the passages referring to FS3’s detention in Iran. First, the caseworker writes:
“You say that whilst in detention, you were beaten, kicked, and ‘a crazy person’ burnt you with a cigarette. It is unclear whether the crazy person was a member of the security forces, or another detainee.”
It is perfectly clear in FS3’s account that the “crazy person” was a member of the security forces. FS3 is telling a story of abuse by the authorities in the detention centre. It is clear that when he claimed that he had been “beaten up, kicked” and that “my face was swollen, with blood pouring out of my nose”[1] he was accusing the staff at the centre. When he claimed that he heard “the cry of others who were being tortured in other rooms”[2] and that he “could hear the cry and begging of other prisoners”[3] he meant they were being tortured by the guards. When he said, “At the end a crazy person came and put his cigarette out on my hand”,[4] the culprit was clearly a guard, not “another detainee”.
Secondly, the caseworker writes[5]:
“When I asked you how often you were beaten Q36 , initially you were unable to say, then you responded ‘4-5 hours’, during which [you] sustained a bloody nose, and eye.”
The impression given is of a man who was uncertain of the story he wanted to tell, finally inventing an implausible four- to five-hour beating, from which he emerged with no more than “a bloody nose, and eye”. However, virtually none of the interviewer’s account is true. FS3 was perfectly able to answer question 36, and he did so immediately and appropriately – but it was not the question the caseworker claimed it to be:
“Q36: Could you tell me how you were beaten?
A: Some of them punched me and some kicked me. My nose was bleeding and my eye. At the end a crazy person came and put his cigarette out on my hand …”[6]
FS3 then replied immediately to question 37, which did ask how often he had been beaten. However, he did not claim to have been beaten for four or five hours but to have been beaten four or five times:
“Q37: Could you tell me how often you were beaten?
A: I did not know from the day to the night. I would say about four or five times but I don’t know if it was day or night.”[7]
FS3 was refused asylum in the first instance on the basis of the caseworker’s inaccurate account of this and other aspects of his asylum claim, but he was eventually given leave to remain on appeal. Yet the inaccuracies in the caseworker’s account were still not noticed by the court. But, luckily for FS3, leave to remain was granted on other grounds.
These fit-ups seem bound to increase if targets and incentives remain part of the picture. The office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees has guidance for caseworkers. It contains this interesting paragraph:
“… while the burden of proof in principle rests on the applicant, the duty to ascertain and evaluate all the relevant facts is shared between the applicant and the examiner. Indeed, in some cases, it may be for the examiner to use all the means at his disposal to produce the necessary evidence in support of the application.”
Fat chance of that if targets, shopping vouchers and extra holidays rule the day.
The full Guardian article can be read here:
Snooker, concluded
Well, not concluded actually. But concluded for me because I go back to Hull tomorrow.
And this afternoon, in spite of my support, Judd Trump lost to Marco Fu. I got the impression that Judd’s “naughty snooker” has become less “naughty”, less spontaneous, less dangerous. Marco played a good, disciplined, consistent “straight” kind of game. And it was great. It works for him, and he won. It may not work for Judd. His spontaneity, and risk-taking, his flashiness, seemed to work. I suspect he gets talked to about the necessary “maturing” of his game, where “maturing” has a strong component of “growing up” in its meaning. This is a bit of a theme in snooker, I think. Marco was introduced today by a number of people who paid tribute to him, but I was slightly worried by one of them who seemed to be saying his game will go fine now because “he’s married now, he’s settled down.”
Maybe. But to Judd I sort of want to say, Don’t lose your spontaneity, or the unpredictability and danger in your game. Keep a bit of flashy.
One of the nice things John Virgo had to say about Marco today as part of the introduction was that “he always has time for everybody. And he never says no if someone wants an autograph.” As I left the auditorium this afternoon he was proving John Virgo right: there he was, surrounded by a great crowd holding autograph books, programmes and pieces of paper, and he seemed completely unable to say no to any of them.
Ally Pally, snooker and fast and slow food
I played in Alexandra Park (as in children’s play, not snooker) when I was nine. When I was a bit older I went roller skating there. Nobody came to watch, it was too embarrassing! But hundreds have come this week to watch the Masters snooker.
I always watch snooker on TV but this is the first time I have been to a tournament. Perhaps it’s the Ally Pally connection. And some libido, of course – there always is.
In which case I couldn’t have had a better start this afternoon: Mark Selby versus Mark Davis. Selby won – I nearly said “of course”, but it was in fact a close thing. Davis fought back in the last couple of frames, to the last frame in fact. Selby did one of his typical humorous jousts with the audience, offering his cue to a heckler after he missed a shot. Much laughter, much clapping, and then he went on to win. So I was happy. No one as sharp, stylish, skilled and just all-round nice as he is should lose – especially as it would have sent this particular admirer miserable into the drizzly rain of North London.
Tomorrow afternoon it’s Judd Trump, playing what he calls “naughty snooker”, in his clever, dangerous and electrifyingly sexy way. More of him tomorrow. He will be playing the quiet, calm, methodical, dignified Marco Fu from Hong Kong. Good luck to both of them. My money is on Judd, though.
Who do I want to see in the final? At the moment, Mark Selby and the great courageous character Ronnie O’Sullivan. Let’s see.
And the fast and slow food? Don’t ask. Nothing but hot dogs at lunchtime. And in the evening in the bar a 30-minute wait for food after you order. That meant, at 6.15, that it was too late to order if you wanted to eat and get into the evening session on time. The reason for all this: cutting staffing costs probably. Capitalism knows how to spoil our pleasures, even as it provides them.
If you’re deaf, don’t believe all you read
To use TV subtitles or not to use them? With my digital hearing aids my ears deal with most everyday situations pretty well. But I find some TV a bit difficult and often use the subtitles as a back-up. This is fine for most programmes, but for live programmes (such as the news) the subtitles are pretty hopeless because they’re not synchronised and seem to be spontaneously produced, buggered up and (sometimes) corrected as the programme unfolds. I watched the BBC News channel at 1pm today. At one point, the presenter was giving some background to a story about former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon. He was explaining how long Sharon had been in a coma. The subtitles, however, told a puzzling story: “Mr Sharon”, they said, “has been in e-commerce since 2006.”
Bet you didn’t know that!
Against war, French style
The French singer Renaud wrote this song in 1994.
The translation which follows the French text is mine.
LA MÉDAILLE
Un pigeon s’est posé‚
Sur l’épaule galonnée
Du Maréchal de France
Et il a décoré
La statue dressée
D’une gastrique offense
Maréchaux assassins
Sur vos bustes d’airain
Vos poitrines superbes
Vos médailles ne sont
Que fiente de pigeon
De la merde
Un enfant est venu
Aux pieds de la statue
Du Maréchal de France
Une envie naturelle
L’a fait pisser contre elle
Mais en toute innocence
Maréchaux assassins
Le môme mine de rien
A joliment vengé
Les enfants et les mères
Que dans vos sales guerres
Vous avez massacrés
Un clodo s’est couché
Une nuit juste aux pieds
Du Maréchal de France
Ivre mort au matin
Il a vomi son vin
Dans une gerbe immense
Maréchaux assassins
Vous méritez rien
De mieux pour vos méfaits
Que cet hommage immonde
Pour tout le sang du monde
Par vos sabres versés
Un couple d’amoureux
S’embrasse sous les yeux
Du Maréchal de France
Muet comme un vieux bonze
Il restera de bronze
Raide comme une lance
Maréchaux assassins
L’amour ne vous dit rien
A part bien sur celui
De la Patrie hélas
Cette idée dégueulasse
Qu’à mon tour je conchie
Renaud Séchan
THE MEDAL
A pigeon perched
On the braided shoulder
Of the Marshal of France
And he decorated the upright statue
With a gastric offense
Marshals – assassins –
On your busts of bronze
Your superb chests
Your medals are
Nothing but pigeon’s droppings
Nothing but shit
A child came
To the feet of the statue
Of the Marshal of France
A natural need
Made him piss against it
But in all innocence
Marshals – assassins –
This unthinking child
Has nicely avenged
The children and mothers
You have massacred
In your dirty wars
A tramp slept
One night at the feet
Of the Marshal of France
In the morning, dead drunk,
He vomited his wine
Like an enormous fountain
Marshals – assassins –
You deserve nothing better
For your misdeeds
Than this filthy homage
For all the blood of the world
Shed by your swords
Two lovers are kissing
Under the gaze
Of the Marshal of France
Dumb as an old priest
He will stay set in bronze
Stiff as a lance
Marshals – assassins –
Love means nothing to you
Except, alas, patriotic love
That disgusting idea
That I, in my turn, abhor.
Renaud Séchan
The First World War: a soldier’s declaration
Unlike Wilfred Owen (see previous blog), Siegfried Sassoon survived the war. But in July 1917 he made the following statement against it:
“I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority, because I believe that the War is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it.
I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that this War, on which I entered as a war of defence and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest. I believe that the purpose for which I and my fellow soldiers entered upon this war should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible to change them, and that, had this been done, the objects which actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation.
I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust.
I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed.
On behalf of those who are suffering now I make this protest against the deception which is being practised on them; also I believe that I may help to destroy the callous complacency with which the majority of those at home regard the contrivance of agonies which they do not, and which they have not sufficient imagination to realize.”
The statement was read out in the House of Commons on 30 July and reported in The Times on the 31st. He remained in the army, was wounded in the head on 30 July 1918, was sent home and put on indefinite sick leave. He officially retired from the army on 12 March 1919. He continued to write prose and verse.He died in 1967.
Pat Barker’s novel Regeneration has at its centre the real-life encounter between Sassoon and army psychologist W.H.R. Rivers at Craiglochart in 1917 (Penguin Books, 1992, and no doubt reprinted subsequently).
The Old Lie
If I understood the BBC correctly yesterday, we are in for four whole years of centenary celebrations of the First World War. I won’t be celebrating.
After gas was used for the first time on 22 April 1915, Wilfred Owen wrote this poem against the idea that Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori – it is noble and fitting to die for one’s country:
DULCE ET DECORUM EST
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.
A Christmas message to Amazon
You heard about Amazon in an earlier blog (see Amazon undercover). Please sign this petition, which demands the “Living Wage” for Amazon workers. I know the petition describes the “Living Wage” as a living wage, which you may find, as I do, very annoying indeed. But sign the petition anyway – Amazon deserves it. It also deserves to find its warehouses and offices occupied by its own workforce, who, if left to themselves, could run the whole show better than the current owners. But I suspect that’s not going to happen before Christmas!
So SIGN THE PETITION: https://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/amazonuk-this-christmas-pay-the-living-wage-across-uk-operations
Immigration, the family & the archbishop
In the UK the right to family life (Art. 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights) has been increasingly refused through all sorts of rules and bureaucratic delays, refused even to refugees and other immigrants who have already gone through enough hoops to achieve British nationality status. “You don’t earn enough”, says the Home Office, “so your spouse will be a drain on the state.” “Your wife must do an English course,” it says, “even if she has to travel through dangerous areas of Afghanistan to Kabul for the classes.” “Your wife must go from Afghanistan to Islamabad for an interview,” it says. And on, and on, and on. People wait years for their applications to be processed, and it takes even longer when the UK Border Agency + the Consulate + the private companies (the last, of course, are “our partners”) who are part of the process lose the application, and then have the cheek to ask the applicants to start again.
It looks as if these refusals will be hardening up in future, according to legislation before parliament. One result is that Vincent Nichols, the Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, has written an article in today’s Guardian criticising the government’s policy on these matters. Before he wrote he did his homework, including talking to many of the victims of the policy. As a result, he says that the regulations now in place are anti-family, unsavoury and a scandal. He asks:
“… is it the government’s intention to penalise British citizens? To undermine marriages and to split up families? Other EU citizens are free to come and live in the UK with spouses from outside the EU. And yet British citizens do not enjoy the same rights. The feeling of being victimised by one’s own government is a bitter pill to swallow.”
Strong words from an Archbishop, and his article should be read in full. As might be expected of an archbishop, he ends with a pious hope: “I hope that parliament, in considering the current immigration bill, will take the opportunity to correct this clear injustice.” Amen to that, Archbishop, although snowflakes’ chances in Hell (if you’ll pardon the expression) do spring to mind.
But to help the process along, let’s all write to our MPs expressing our disgust at the government’s unsavoury, scandalous (and, not least, cruel), policies.
Here’s the archbishop: http://gu.com/p/3y7nx
Here’s some research suggesting that government statistics trying to justify the policy have been – er, well, cooked:
http://www.politics.co.uk/news/2013/07/09/revealed-the-financial-cost-of-theresa-may-s-immigrationl
Bob Mouncer's blog 