An emergency protest was held in Glasgow earlier today against a planned mass deportation of Nigerian asylum seekers, set to take place on a specially charted flight overnight tonight. Among those who have been detained by the UK Border Agency over the past week are three Glasgow-based asylum seekers, including one who has been resident in the UK for nearly 30 years, and John Oguchukwu, a Glasgow University student who has been here for nine years, having come to the UK fleeing religious persecution and torture following the murder of his family in Nigeria. Friends and neighbours of John were among those at today’s demonstration.

The move to deports dozens of asylum seekers from across the UK today comes as part of a crackdown over the past few years, with hundreds deported to Nigeria. This is due to the country being given ‘white list’ status for male asylum seekers by the Home Office, meaning applications are automatically dismissed regardless of whatever evidence is provided. And in their bid to rush as many asylum applicants as possible onto one charter flight, human rights go out the window – in the case of John Oguchukwu, he has ended up on the flight due to a  bureaucratic mix-up which has denied him his right to appeal to the Supreme Court and European Court of Human Rights.

Contrary to the image that the right-wing media have managed to popularise, the fact is that the vast majority of asylum seekers are genuinely fleeing from persecution in their home country. Research has shown that most asylum seekers that arrive in Britain did not even set out with it as their planned destination – the idea that masses of refugees are pouring across the UK’s borders in order to ’scrounge off benefits’ is simply a myth.

Those fleeing persecution and violence deserve our support and should be made welcome, not treated like criminals, rounded up and deported to an uncertain future. Refugees are welcome here!

The government has announced that they will no longer lock up asylum seeking kids.

Coincidentally, I have the strangest sense of déjà vu…

We’ll have to wait and see if they’re got their fingers crossed behind their backs this time, too, or whether they’re actually capable of doing what they say they will.

Nick Clegg said:

The change prioritises doing the right thing over looking and sounding tough.. reforms which will give the UK one of the most child-friendly immigration systems in the developed world.

It’s great that the government finally recognises that imprisoning innocent children is inhumane, something which David Cameron apparently described as a “scandal”.

665 asylum seeking children have been held in detention in the past year alone, in centres which are notorious for their brutality and racism. This should never happen again. But are the new proposals any better?

According to the plans, no children will be detained as of May 2011. But why wait? It’s not like any government departments will need to be dismantled or any staff will need to be given notice and redundancy packages. This move doesn’t require six months of preparation – just stop putting children in jail.

And once the the changes are enacted, parents would still be detained in high security complexes but their children would be assigned minders so they can “move around freely”.

Um. What? So these already extremely vulnerable children are going to have to watch their parents be imprisoned for no reason, but it’s ok, because they’ll get a social worker/babysitter to allow them to continue their lives as normal? No part of that is either normal or acceptable. Besides which – young children like Wania Shabaz, who was eight months old when she was taken, don’t really do much moving around freely without their parents.

Imprisoning asylum seekers and taking their children into care until they’re forcibly deported to a country they don’t know is just as inhumane and unjustified as keeping the children in prison with their parents is.

Just let them stay.

Over three hundred people gathered in Glasgow’s George Square earlier today to protest the UK Border Agency’s decision to axe Glasgow City Council’s contract to house hundreds of families seeking asylum in the UK.

This comes after talks broke down between the Border Agency and the council over the grant given to the local authority to accommodate asylum seekers.

Six hundred families – a total of 1300 individuals – have received letters over the past few days containing the following:

We must inform you that as a result of the change of your accommodation provider you may be required to move to alternative accommodation in the Scotland region. Whenever possible, you will be given three to five days’ notice of the
move to give you time to get ready. At the moment we cannot give you an exact date for any potential move. However, it will be sometime within the coming weeks. You will be allowed to take two pieces of luggage per person to your new accommodation.

Glasgow has been a designated “dispersal” area for asylum seekers since 2000, when the council gained a lucrative £10m annual contract to house up to 2000 asylum seekers. Most were put in dilapidated, run-down accommodation which the council already found virtually impossible to let to ordinary residents. But as Scottish housing charity Positive Action in Housing have said:

Refugees have brought a sense of community and vibrance to neighbourhoods where previously there was none. We see no merit in houses being left empty, damp and vandalised when there are people who need and want them. Their unnecessary departure will devastate those communities.

But this is nothing compared to the impact that being uprooted from Glasgow will have for 1300 individuals concerned. Having fled their home countries fearing persecution or worse, many of them will have eventually found a home, and some level of stability, in Glasgow. But due to a whim of the UK Borders Agency they once again face massive upheaval in their lives. To add to this distress, as the above letter states, they will get ‘three to five days notice’ – to wave goodbye to their friends and neighbours, leave their schools and colleges, and pack their belongings into ‘two pieces of luggage per person’. Glasgow City Council are right to condemn this as totally unacceptable – it’s a disgusting way to treat anyone, let alone someone who’s already been through a huge amount of suffering and distress in their lives. UKBA have laid bare their priorities – that saving money is more important than the wellbeing of those they’re legally obliged to look after.

UK Borders Agency will now be looking to tender the contract to house asylum seekers to private companies – as many in Glasgow already are. The idea that asylum seekers will be better looked after in the private sector is madness, where unscrupulous landlords can exploit some of the most vulnerable people in society. Although far from perfect, organisations working with asylum seekers in Glasgow – like the brilliant Unity Centre - describe council run services as ‘the best service provider in our experience’. There’s a number of reasons for this – more accountability and regulation, and greater provision of services through social work, homelessness services, repairs and so on. With the council’s contract terminated, Positive Action in Housing anticipate “an increase in refugee homelessness, complaints about isolation, poor access to statutory services, poor housing, repairs and lack of basic amenities like hot water and electricity, to name a few issues. We also anticipate that there will be more people going undetected who are sick, disabled or traumatised.”

There is now speculation that UKBA may have motives beyond simply financial savings in their attempts to lower the number of asylum seekers living in Glasgow. Asylum seekers have, over the past decade, become an integral part of the fabric of the city. Across the city, those seeking asylum are our friends, our neighbours, our school mates. When asylum seekers have been mistreated, threatened with deportation or locked up, people across Scotland have come to their defence, from the Glasgow Girls and the recent campaign to keep Florence and Precious Mhango, to the hundreds who marched in solidarity with the city’s asylum seekers following the tragic events at the Red Road flats earlier this year. Even the local press, far from playing to the racism and bigotry of the national media, have often been supportive, and backed campaigns to stop deportations. Things have not been made easy for UKBA – it would be no great surprise if this is a deliberate attempt to ‘disperse’ asylum seekers to an area where the authorities think they’ll get less hassle.

It’s typical of recent governments’ attitudes towards asylum seekers that they can be uprooted from their homes and lives at barely a week’s notice. Speakers at today’s demonstration made clear that those wishing to stay in Glasgow would receive all the support they need in their battle to stay in the city they now consider home, with the fight continuing this Saturday, when another protest has been called outside the UK Borders Agency office at 200 Brand Street, Govan, from 10.30am.

Clegg realises he has fucked up

More evidence, as if it was needed, that Nick Clegg is a giant walking sack of shit with a ministerial car: yesterday at Prime Minister’s questions he said the government was going to close Yarl’s Wood, a hellhole private prison for asylum seekers who have done nothing wrong.

But, a bit like when the Lib Dems promised in government that they would stop locking up kids, only to lock up and then deport a baby from Glasgow, it turns out this claim was about as true as the SDL claiming they’re not racist. The government’s real powers were quick to make sure everyone realised that in fact only the “family unit” (i.e. the bit where they lock up parents and their innocent kids) will be closed, but the centre as a whole will remain open. (Even on this minimal commitment – please note it hasn’t actually happened yet!)

Yarl’s Wood is a place where our society locks up people who have fled torture, rape and other horrors from around the world. Very often, their suffering in other places is the result of our government’s policies. When they get here, they are denied the right to live in relative safety in the UK, stuck in a private prison run for profit by 21st century evil megacorp SERCO, and eventually deported back to countries where they face extreme danger.

Earlier this year, innocent women locked up in Yarl’s Wood went on hunger strike to protest their incarceration, and the abusive, racist treatment they faced from SERCO’s staff.

Anyone with even an ounce of humanity or decency in their body who got into power would tear the prison walls down right away. Nick Clegg and his ConDem chums have proven that they’d like people to think they’re decent human beings, but in fact they’re duplicitous wankstains more interested in implementing an extreme-right economic programme than basic human rights.

Britain's shame: Yarl's Wood

You’d think this blatant porkie would have got Clegg in a spot of bother, but instead of being angry at him for lying from the dispatch box, all the media and political commentators are going mental about a point earlier on in the day when he actually told the truth!

In the posh boys debating style that Westminster is famous for, he was clashing with Jack Straw, and said, perhaps without thinking it through, that, “We may have to wait for his memoirs, but perhaps one day he will account for his role in the most disastrous decision of all: the illegal invasion of Iraq.”

This presents his Tory chums with a bit of a problem: they voted for the Iraq war back in 2003, and absolutely backed the idea that it was legal.

For once however, Clegg was telling the truth on this one. Under international law, the UK and US had no authorisation to send their troops into Iraq, and the rest of the world had to sit back and accept it because they didn’t know what else to do about George W. ‘Monkey with a razorblade’ Bush. In Britain, the then Labour government tried to pretend it was legal because they got the attorney general to “change his mind” and say everything was kosher in time for the invasion.

Now, the fact that the Deputy Prime Minister has said what we all know, that the war was illegal, from the government dispatch box, might give some more leverage to people who want to take the UK to court for war crimes and flouting of international law in invading Iraq.

Nothing to worry about lads, it's all legal and above board

To try and clean up the mess, the same beleagured government spokespeople were forced to insist that the deputy PM was speaking in a personal capacity (at Prime Minister’s questions! It doesn’t get much more official than that!), and that his views were not those of the government.

Nick Clegg is obviously a bit of an idiot if he thought that this would have no implications when he said it. But the sad thing is it’s obscured what is a big issue: privatised prisons which we use to lock up innocent people. The fact of the matter is, I don’t really care about the legality of the Iraq war. If the government at the time had managed to get a legal fig leaf for what they were doing it would still have been wrong, and no amount of debating after the fact will change that. What is happening right now though is that we have a piece of human garbage as deputy PM who keeps claiming he’s going to stop locking up kids and innocent people but never actually seems to make good on it.

Could asylum seekers BE any more fabulous?!?

Not only do they manage to escape their own countries after fleeing terrible persecution, they manage to make a new life for themselves here despite the British government persecuting them just as much – as well as managing to royally piss off the right wing press on an almost daily basis.

The Daily Express are terribly upset about asylum seekers over-running our country, eating our children, etc etc, and it’s recently got a whole lot worse – you can now get asylum if you’re gay (claim the Express). A judge said “they must be free to go to Kylie concerts and drink multi-coloured cocktails” (claim the Express).

Wow. BULL SHIT ALERT.

Let’s go through the facts one by one for the sake of the Daily Express writers, shall we?

1. An asylum seeker is someone SEEKING ASYLUM FROM PERSECUTION.

2. Some people are PERSECUTED BECAUSE OF THEIR SEXUALITY.

3. THEREFORE, yes, some people will need to be granted asylum BECAUSE THEY ARE GAY.

4. Asylum seekers live on a MAXIMUM of £33.50 a week – often less, and often paid in food vouchers instead of money. Going to a Kylie concert and drinking a single cocktail would leave an asylum seeker starving for the rest of the month.

This whole fuss has come about because of a recent ruling that fear of persecution over sexuality is valid grounds for claiming asylum. This ruling came after two men, from Cameroon and Iran, were initially refused asylum and threatened with being sent back to countries where they would face imprisonment, torture or execution. They were told to just suck it up, go home and BE DISCREET.

Maybe the Daily Express haven’t noticed, but being gay isn’t about listening to cheesy music, and having a keen eye for fashion and interior design. If you’re going to face torture for liking sugary cocktails and pint-sized Australian singers, it would be annoying, but not that difficult to get around. If you’re going to be tortured for who you are and who you love, it’s kind of a different story.

It’s really great news that the Home Office now has an official policy of accepting people’s asylum claims based on their sexuality – however this doesn’t change their reputation for branding people’s legitimate stories of oppression as lies, or just ignoring their own policy and detaining and deporting people regardless (like when they said they would no longer detain children).

As socialists, we believe that the world belongs to all of us – Cameron, Clegg and the Daily Express have no business deciding who should or shouldn’t be allowed to come and live in Scotland.

Say it loud, say it clear – refugees are welcome here!

Scotland's shame: Dungavel Removal Centre

The ConDem government has announced what should be good news: the practice of detaining children at Dungavel is to end.

Dungavel Immigration Removal Centre is a prison for asylum seekers who are to be deported. Parents with children have been held there, in some cases for more than a year. However, the fact that in Scotland we imprison kids horrified many, and the centre has been the site of repeated protests. More than that, there has been in a political consensus in Scotland that this is wrong, and that it must be ended.

This was something the Lib Dems had pledged to do, something which, alongside their pledge to scrap Trident and introduce a fairer tax system (neither of which will now happen since they jumped in to bed with the Tories), helped give people the impression that they could vote for a mainstream alternative. This has since proved to be a cruel lie.

However, it has emerged what the ConDems plan to do about the imprisonment of children in Scotland: they’ll move them to England. Great work guys!

It’s been announced that families will now be taken to Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre in Bedfordshire, supposedly because this has the facilities to accommodate them. You can paint this whichever way you want, a child in prison is still a child in prison.

As we’ve reported previously, Yarl’s Wood was recently the site of a major hunger strike of inmates, who were demanding their freedom and better conditions. They were subject to physical and verbal (racist) abuse. It’s a privatised prison, run by the sinister company SERCO. It’s no place to send children.

Although there are many great groups down south operating to help refugees and those locked up in Yarl’s Wood, it’s no accident that the new government wants to get them out of Scotland. The debate on asylum in England is further to the right than it is here, with all the focus on cracking down. That isn’t to imply that Scotland has some amazing record of welcoming people and anti-racism. But there is a consensus that locking up kids in Dungavel is wrong, due at least in part to the tireless support work of SSP MSPs on the issue from 2003-7. This means that what’s politically unacceptable here can be got away with in Bedfordshire. The Lib Dems should receive absolutely no credit for stopping kids imprisonment in Scotland only to continue it in England. They should instead by mercilessly hounded for the lying hypocrites they are.

But to get practical about what we need to do: Despite the fact that the ConDems had already announced that child detention was to end, on Monday Seher and Wania Shabaz were detained at Brand Street Reporting Centre in Glasgow, and sent to Dungavel.

Seher and Wania Shabaz

Twenty-five year old Seher has been living in the UK for three years, after she was forced into marriage against her will. Her husband was physically and sexually abusive, and threatened to kill her. She was locked in his flat in Blackburn for days at a time. She begged her family in Pakistan to take her back, but they were unsympathetic.

In May last year her daughter Wania was born, and she decided she couldn’t cope with the abuse any more, so she phoned the police. They referred her to Social Work, who said they couldn’t help her because she wasn’t a British citizen. In December she left and came to Glasgow.

Here, she was put in homeless accommodation and assisted to make an asylum application. Her husband followed her to Glasgow, and she had to be moved to avoid him. Her in-laws have been harassing Seher’s family, claiming there was no abuse and that she ran off with another man. If Seher is returned to Pakistan she faces at the least being ostracised, and possibly much worse, as deserting her husband is viewed as a serious matter. Seher said:

“This is the system I would be returning to if they deport us. They won’t spare me, it’s not a small issue if a girl runs away from her husband or in-laws. Our only value in Pakistan now is if I am dead.”

Seher arrived at Brand Street to report in, as all asylum seekers have to do every two weeks. Despite never having shown any risk of absconding, she was detained and taken to Dungavel. She said:

“I told them I was signing every two weeks and I am continually running from a very bad situation, why are you detaining me? They said to me “This is what we have decided”. I said I have a small baby and I have none of her clothes or baby things. They said that was not their problem and I was put into the back of a van and after an hour my baby and I were taken to Dungavel. I just could not stop crying. My baby was due for medical treatment today (Tuesday, May 18th) and despite giving them a medical letter at the detention centre they insisted on detaining me.  This is just a prison. We are kept locked in in the family area. But why? We have never ran away or tried to break the law. I can’t take my baby out for fresh air when she needs it. That is the worst thing, not being able to play in the open with her, and I don’t like her seeing the barbed wire or to know what it means – that we cannot leave.

“I just want to be able to raise my daughter in peace, find work and stand on our own two feet and make a simple life for us. Nothing else. My daughter is just a baby, she has done nothing to harm anyone. I just ask the government to release us from here.”

Groups working to support Seher, like the Unity Centre and Positive Action in Housing fear that she will be taken to Yarl’s Wood today. The journey will probably be in the back of a van, completely inappropriate for an 8-month old baby suffering from diarrhea, and who has been denied medical treatment. This morning Seher says she has been vomiting and is extremely distressed. When she tried to protest what was happening to authorities in Dungavel, they threatened to take her baby from her by force and transport them separately to Yarl’s Wood. Once again, the people responsible for detention have been shown to be cruel racists, who should not be given any authority over a young mum and her baby.

Tory Immigration Minister Damian Green, who apparently has a servant to carry an umbrella over his head like P. Diddy

What you can do: Urgently, get in touch with Damian Green, the new Tory UK Immigration Minister. You can email him on greend@parliament.uk. Better still, phone him up and give him hell about the way Seher and Wania have been treated. His Westminster office is on 020 7219 3911, and the fax number is 020 7219 0904. And his constituency office in Ashford is on 01233 820454, fax 01233 820111.

Also, get in touch with your own MP and MSP, and demand that Seher and Wania are not removed, and allowed to return to their home. You can find the details of how to contact them here.

It’s a simple demand we’re making of the government: let asylum seekers live at home while their claims are being processed. No children, anywhere in the UK, should be in prison. Make your voice heard!

Update: On Wednesday Seher and Wania were taken on a nine hour journey by van to Yarl’s Wood, where they are currently incarcerated, and facing deportation to Pakistan tomorrow. Her solicitor is making representations to the Home Secretary, and is waiting for a response. Now is the time we all urgently need to add our voices to those contacting the government to demand that they be allowed to stay in the UK. Click here for model letters and where to send them.

What’s sickening is if she had remained in a violent relationship she wouldn’t now be facing deportation.

Yesterday all 12 families locked up in Yarl’s Wood sent a jointly signed letter to Nick Clegg pleading that they be let go, and their children, who were born here and speak English as their first language, are allowed to return to school and try and pick up a normal life. The families include two pregnant women and 14 children and babies, who have received no education whilst imprisoned by the UK.

If the ConDem government is really going to end the detention of children, then they should release these families immediately. Please write to cleggn@parliament.uk to let him know how you feel about being a citizen of a country that imprisons children who have done nothing wrong, depriving them of education. Demand that he release them now.

Update, Monday 24th: Despite the best efforts of many, Sehar was deported on Saturday. Despite appeals to Nick Clegg, Home Secretary Theresa May and Immigration Minister Damian Green, guards forced her on to a plane to a country where she faces an uncertain and dangerous future. Whatever happens to her now is on the hands of these assembled scumbags.
We mustn’t ever let people forget that the Lib Dems are full of shit when it comes to asylum. When they claimed they were ending detention for children, ON THE SAME DAY they imprisoned a baby. Their hypocrisy is breathtaking. We must now be very concerned about what exactly the government does have planned, as we can put nothing past these bastards. Does ending detention mean they’ll lock up parents and put the kids in care for example?
Disheartening as this news is, our efforts must now to turn to building awareness and solidarity with the remaining 11 families locked up in Yarl’s Wood, four of whom are on hunger strike.

Since 2001 the BNP have made steady inroads into British politics, gradually building up a significant base in local councils, and expanding slowly but surely into other arenas – winning a seat on the Greater London Assembly and their highpoint last year, winning 2 seats in the European Parliament. It’s almost been a grudging acceptance by some people on the Left that the BNP’s growth could at best only be slowed in the short term, due to their high profile and the constant anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim sentiment in the British press. So it’s not surprising a lot of folk looked with dread to what was going to happen in Barking and Dagenham, the BNP’s stronghold.

It’s where the BNP’s leader Nick Griffin was standing against New Labour hack Margaret Hodge – who gave the BNP ammunition with her comments on housing – and it’s also where the BNP were the official opposition on the council. They had a real chance of both taking Hodge’s seat and taking control of the council – the BNP were throwing the kitchen sink at Barking, and telling their members and supporters they were on the verge of a breakthrough.

Instead they were annihilated – to the surprise of BNP supporters and antifascists alike. They lost all their council seats in Barking and Dagenham – Labour now hold all 51 council seats. Griffin’s vote was also down from 2005. He came nowhere close to challenging Hodge, and finished third behind the Tories. In his speech conceding defeat, Griffin said that they had lost the battle for Barking, and that the area was “colonised”

The BNP’s misfortunes weren’t limited to Barking and Dagenham – they lost councillors all across the country, and are down from 45 councillors to 19 (though English council elections don’t happen all at once, they have other councillors who weren’t up for election).

This result might seem surprising given the BNP got their best result, in terms of votes a couple of nights ago – over half a million. But we don’t know how much of this increase is due to the BNP’s ability to field many more candidates than they were able to in 2005. For example the BNP vote in Scotland in 2005 was only 1,590 but jumped up to almost 9000. On the face of it this looks like a fantastic boost for them, but in reality it is largely due to being able to increase the number of seats they can stand in. They only stood in 2 in 2005 (Glasgow Central and Glasgow North East), in 2010 they stood in 13.

The only direct comparison we can make then, is the vote in Glasgow Central and Glasgow North East – and in both seats, the BNP vote was down from 2005. It’s particularly surprising in the North East, where there’s a lot of concern about immigration and asylum seekers and the BNP nearly held on to their deposit in the by-election last year.

These results couldn’t come at a worse time for Griffin, who has already had to deal with internal difficulties in the BNP – like Mark Collet allegedly trying to kill him, mutiny in the Scottish BNP, their website owner walking off, as well as other discontent around Jim Dowson’s practical ownership of the party. The BNP’s electoral meltdown will inflame the anti-Griffin opposition in the BNP, who may now feel that Griffin’s holocaust denying past is baggage that the BNP can no longer carry, and a new leader more in line with the image of the “new” BNP must be found.

The smarter BNP activists will be asking why their vote collapsed. The reality is that across the UK people who were willing to vote BNP as a protest vote in elections were Labour were certain to win will no longer do so under threat of a Tory Government. From Glasgow North East, to Stoke, to Barking, traditional Labour areas are prepared to hold their nose and vote for Labour to defy the Tories.

Setbacks for the BNP of course aren’t solely attributable to the threat of a Tory Government – it’s likely that thousands of voters would have gone to the polls to vote in fear of what a BNP council would look like, and would have probably chosen Labour as the far lesser evil.

The setbacks for the BNP shouldn’t make us complacent though – the BNP’s ideas still have an an echo among hundreds of thousands of people, and relying on a Tory Government to scare people into voting Labour to keep the BNP out is no long term strategy. If people won’t cast protest votes for the BNP out of fear of the Tories, they won’t cast protest votes for the Left or the Greens. If Labour don’t stand up to the Tories the BNP could posture themselves as the real party against cuts, for British Jobs for British Workers etc.

This shouldn’t mean we don’t celebrate though – it’s squeaky bum time for Griffin and co, whose seats in the European Parliament now look a lot more fragile than before. If the Tories do take power, they may do to the BNP what Thatcher did to the NF – steal their rhetoric on immigration, and steal their votes. And in Scotland they will have a very interesting time upholding “British” identity if the union foists upon us a Tory Government we didn’t vote for.

We’ve had a lot of stuff on the blog recently about the way in which immigration and asylum are being treated in this election – from Labour lumping the subject in as ‘crime and immigration’ in their manifesto, to Brown, Cameron and Clegg all trying to outflank each other on the right while talking about it during the televised debates.

Which is why the release of this new asylum myth-busting pamphlet, produced by people working alongside Asylum Seekers in Glasgow, couldn’t have come a better time . Not only does it expose some of the most popular asylum myths for the outright lies that they are, but it also examines why this is happening – and the agenda of some of the biggest perpetrators spreading these falsities. It’s brilliant – go read it, and get everyone you know to as well.

“Many people believe asylum seekers are one of our society’s biggest problems. No wonder. The scarestories printed every day in the Sun, Express, Star and Mail are hardly ever challenged in the press or in parliament. That’s why we’ve set out some facts that might make you see things differently. We think they show that asylum seekers are not causing these problems, but that asylum seekers are being used as scapegoats. It’s the oldest trick in the book. Blame the other fella. Divide and rule. We produced this leaflet because we’re fed up too. Fed up with services that get worse instead of better. Fed up with council tax hikes and impossible house prices. Fed up with schools and hospitals being run down and sold off piecemeal. Fed up with low pay and crime. Above all, we’re fed up being lied to about why this is happening.”

DOWNLOAD THE LEAFLET HERE

The Institute for Public Policy Research  have been analysing support for the BNP and trying to determine what causes communities to turn towards the far-right. You can see their findings here.

The BNP would have us believe they are supported by people whose communities are over-run with immigrants and asylum seekers. But they’re lying. The more immigrants living in your community, the less likely you are to vote BNP.

Our findings suggest that areas that have higher levels of recent immigration than others are not more likely to vote for the BNP. In fact, the more immigration an area has experienced, the lower its support for the far right. Rather, the evidence points to political and socio-economic exclusion as drivers of BNP support.

We therefore urge mainstream politicians to strongly resist the notion that people have been driven into the arms of the BNP by the harm immigration is causing to their communities. Instead, they must focus on building strong communities and strong education systems, and on rebuilding trust and confidence in democratic politics, so that marginalised people do not feeling so disconnected. This should allow them to both better serve the interests of these communities, and undercut support for the BNP.

We couldn’t agree more.

This just goes to show that anti-immigrant feeling is not rooted in reality, but is shaped by the racism of the policians and the media. People who actually live next to immigrants know that they are no more evil than any other part of society.

Hundreds of local residents and people from across Glasgow marched through the city earlier today in memory of Red Road flat residents the Serykh family, who were driven to suicide last weekend reportedly following the failure of their asylum application.
The demonstration gathered at the Red Road flats, one of the main areas in which Asylum families are ‘dispersed’ in the city, and marched on a route to the city centre, before a rally just off George Square. The march was noisy (with a samba band!) and got a really good reception from passers-by, especially when we reached the city centre and held a brief sit-down protest outside the City Chambers. Despite the overhanging sadness of last weekend’s events, the march had a celebratory atmosphere – of hundreds of people coming together to show Glasgow’s true face as a welcoming city that opens its doors to refugees and asylum seekers, and refuses to be taken in by the lies of the mainstream media and politicians who try to use those seeking sanctuary in our country as scapegoats for the problems of the system.
You can read more from Leftfield about the asylum system and the Red Road flats here.

SSP PUBLIC MEETING: end the government’s terror against asylum seekers! for decent housing, jobs and incomes for ALL!
Wednesday 17 March, 7.30pm. Church Hall, Quarrywood Avenue, Barmulloch.
With speakers Kevin McVey (SSP candidate in Glasgow North East) & Waheed Totakhyl (Scottish Afghan Society).

the marchers pours into george square

no borders, no nations, stop deportations!