When I worked at the international telephone exchange in London (I’m obviously talking about when there were such things, so in the early 1980s) we had to sign the Official Secrets Act. We signed it when we joined and we signed it when we left. When I left, Mr Ignacek, a divisional supervisor, told me: “You have to sign the Act again.”

    “What for?” I asked.

     “So you don’t blab!” he said.

      “Blab?” I said. “What about?!” (We were only a telephone exchange. I wasn’t John Le Carré.)

      “Anything,” Iggy said. “You can’t even tell them the colour of the paint on the bloody walls!”

    All that was ridiculous and funny. The story (below) of how the Official Secrets Act is being used today to cover up cruelty and ill-treatment of asylum seekers is not funny at all. It’s shameful. And yes, Priti Patel is overseeing it, no doubt with her trademark enthusiasm for bullying way out in front. But, as I said before (see previous two blogs), abuse of asylum seekers goes back through the decades and was perpetrated by governments of all shades. Why did Labour Home Secretary David Blunkett introduce the policy of separating the children of refused asylum seekers from their parents and putting them in care in order to force their terrified parents to take the family back to their dangerous home country? The Head of Asylum Policy at the Home Office in 2006, Rod McLean, told me it was because he wanted to prove to the tabloid press that he was not a “soft touch” when it came to asylum. When I told MacLean that the Refugee Council had said this policy was “not the mark of a civilised society”, he sighed, shrugged his shoulders and said: “Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they?”

    And so it goes on. In our name. We have to do something about it. Get involved in one of the support groups mentioned in the article, send emails to MPs and ministers, raise the issue in your union branch, invent ways of protesting that are safe during the pandemic. We shouldn’t leave people to the non-existent mercy of our politicians and their civil servants.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/nov/23/home-office-accused-of-cover-up-at-camp-for-asylum-seekers