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No reset for the Home Office
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.
An attack on human rights posing as a clampdown on “terrorists”
Here’s a translation of part of a story in the French newspaper Libération[1]:
They call it the optimisation of security. Or how to do still more, on the cheap, with an existing system that is already not exactly lax. So on Monday the government responded to the damage caused in the Champs-Élysées during the gilet jaunes’ “Act XVIII”. The new measures, intended to stamp out these actions once and for all, have been announced from the desk of the prime minister, Edouard Philippe, at his desk in Matignon [the prime minister’s Paris residence]. He chose, incredibly, a martial tone for the occasion.
The most spectacular measures concern the banning of gilets-jaunes demonstrations “each time it is necessary” “in the areas which have been most affected”, whenever the authorities “know that extreme elements will be present willing to cause damage”. Let’s be clear, this means in fact banning all gatherings of the gilets jaunes, by its nature a very heterogeneous movement and reticent from its very beginnings to organise hand in hand with the authorities. Until now, the authorities have shown indulgence in the first hours of demonstrations but called in the forces of law and order at the first signs of conflict. After Saturday the shape of things looks quite different: if there is a publicly declared ban police and gendarmes will be ordered to question everybody present in the places named – Édouard Philippe mentioned the Champs-Élysées in Paris, Capitole Square in Toulouse, Pey-Berland Square in Bordeaux. Such an operation has already been tested, notably on the celebrated Parisian avenue during the “Demonstration for All” during the presidency of François Hollande.”
You get the picture. On a pretext of knowing the unknowable, they will deny everybody their right to protest. This, in the land of human rights. This, in the EU with its much-vaunted human-rights guarantees. We must be careful when we ask for clampdowns and bans on the people we don’t like – such bans are easily extended to people we do like and to ourselves.
It is also interesting to note that no mention is made by the French prime minister of the policeman caught looting on Saturday during the demonstration,[2] no sign of “questioning” him for being “present in the place named” and caught looting, or charges being made, or court hearings to come. Remember, the “authorities” are after us, never after them.
[1] https://www.liberation.fr/france/2019/03/18/gilets-jaunes-l-executif-montre-ses-muscles_1716016?xtor=EPR-500001&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=quot
[2] A policeman was videoed looting clothes from a shop in the Champs-Elysees during the gilets-jaunes demo. A second police officer then struck the camera operator with a truncheon. The first officer apparently nicked a Paris-St-Germain football jersey! – https://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2019/03/17/gilets-jaunes-l-igpn-saisie-apres-une-video-montrant-un-policier-prenant-des-vetements_5437508_3224.html?fbclid=IwAR0qfiwyAgpS8N1pgOjqnNEurAI1rmRNiL-O3ZkmKBFO4y_U_-XrmhxXoYo
Students set the example
We had the protests in Florida against American gun laws, during which the students showed themselves to be more adult than the adults. In the UK, students are supporting their lecturers on strike. And now, in France, it is students leading the way in taking action to protect migrants and refugees, and to protest against France’s policy towards them. Here is my translation of the introduction to an article in the French newspaper Libération:
Tonight, Hafez should be able to sleep in the warm. Unless, that is, the authorities at Jussieu University (in the 5th arrondissement of Paris) decide to evacuate the prefabricated building occupied since Wednesday by students, activists and migrants. The occupation movement, the aim of which is to provide accommodation for “people in exile”, [i.e. asylum seekers and refugees] was started in Lyon in the autumn, has continued during the winter in Nantes, and has inspired similar movements elsewhere. The University of Paris-VIII has joined in, so there is now a second Paris university being occupied. It has a twofold aim: to offer a roof to migrants, while the thermometer shows minus-freezing temperatures in the capital; and to create a platform for political demands, particularly against the migration policies of the [French] government.
Keep going – and keep warm.
Here’s the full article:
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