Inside Housing this week reports on the tragic case of the child of an asylum seeker who starved to death due to ‘significant problems’ in providing welfare services for the family.
In a chilling portent of what is to come for those with children whose benefits are sanctioned under the upcoming Universal Credit regime, the family had been forced to rely on ‘ad hoc’ charitable handouts. Increasing numbers of families are already dependent on food banks and charities to feed their children.
This case, whilst exceptional, highlights the very real poverty faced by those seeking asylum, despite the endless lurid headlines attacking benefit scrounging immigrants. Last year the government scrapped the funding for the Refugee Integration and Employment Service which provided support for those seeking asylum. The sad death took place before these changes,meaning the situation for refugees has got worse, not better since these cuts. Details of the cause of death have only now emerged due to a case review into the tragedy.
Under planned changes to benefits as part of the Universal Credit regime , families with children could face benefit sanctions of up to three years should parents fail to meet the requirements to actively seek work for 35 hours a week. Half a million sanctions were handed out to claimants without children last year under a similar regime.
Those who work with refugees have warned that more tragedies like the one highlighted by Inside Housing are likely unless more is done to improve support for refugees. With welfare reform about to plunge hundreds of thousands of vulnerable families into a similarly chaotic and inhumane system, it may not just be those seeking asylum whose tragic stories are told over the coming years.
A child starving to death in one of the richest countries in the world should be a wake up call to all those who are all too happy to condemn those with least to abject poverty. Whatever opinions about benefit claimants, asylum seekers or immigrants are spewed out by this vile government and their supporters, no child – whoever their parents are and wherever they came from – should go without food in the UK. Since this government of millionaires doesn’t seem to care, then it is down to all of us to ensure this sad waste of young life remains an exception and not the norm.
the void 
Sadly, children ARE going hungry daily. Theyt go to school hungry as their parents cannot afford to feed them. Teachers in some areas have been picking up the slack. Foodbanks are now doting the country – you need to ask yourselves, in one of te richest countries on then planet, how is it we cannot care for the young and vulnerable in our communities. Who is it who really couldn’t give a damn, and why?
It is bad now, it will escalate when the next round of cuts bite as Osborne and his cronies are not finished with us all yet. But that’s okay, David, George and your pals will be just fine, have some more shampoo!
Come back Oliver Cromwell (if you don’t know who he was, please google it).
“significant problems” = a fucking “sanction” !
You got that right.
euphemismed to death, we are.
The way language is used today by government and corporations, as the real meaning is hidden. Example ‘collateral damage’ – meaning we fucked up and killed the kids. Just examine all their language, they can wriggle and writhe all they want to, it doesnt get away from the fact it is all lies and bullshit.,
When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less. 🙂
Oliver Cromwell!! are you crazy he was a butcher killing over 8000 in Ireland alone many of them civillians he is as bad as the tories
Reblogged this on Warren Draper.
Completely despicable.
Universal Credit: Do not go gentle into that good night.
“AGJ
Oliver Cromwell!! are you crazy he was a butcher killing over 8000 in Ireland alone many of them civillians he is as bad as the tories”
We probably do –need someone like Oliver Cromwell. In those days the King ran the country for the benefit of his friends.
Yes, I am descendant of Irish he slaughtered. The Queen is out of the equation in modern times. Today it is Cameron and his silver spoon cronies who run the country for the benefit of their friends, similar as was at the time of the English Revolution in the 17th Century.
Cameron is the Public Relations man (manager) for the “ (to use a euphemism)- friends“. A loyal army could storm parliament and the traitors arrested just as Cromwell did. But things are far to complicated– the influences acting on us are global; the army would be infiltrated and usurped even before this ( if not already ). At the best; in the next media run election Cameron would be replaced with another puppet. And war is lost without even a fight. Thus there is little hope of another civil war .
If there were a Mayflower shuttle to the moon I’d be the first on it.
You make some very good points though I doubt if members of FARC in South America would agree with you on much but their terrain is much different than that of Western Europe. I would say influences acting on us are semi global but must agree that the media really does run our politics so we are all slaves to the media I know. We should give “Democracy” a new name, simply rename it “The Media”. As for the Mayflower Shuttle I disagree with you and state let those who yearn for property and ownership go and claim the moon as their own, by force if neccesary if ever a brand new situation which will allow this arises. In their greed, they are surplus to the requirements of a more caring humanity with right here on earth.
Mayflower shuttle to the moon is perhaps just the dream of a New World, not particular property and ownership; but a chance for different beginning.
Reblogged this on Jolande's Controversial Stuff and commented:
Powerful stuff – can we change things?
Why change things, pertinent is pertinent.
The Butcher of Downing St and his cousin-fucking Etononian throwbacks
must be prosecuted or thrown out.
Here Heore, they (the tories) only have position through forms of accession, holders of “The Silver Spoon” rights. It is often said these people are self made success stories. There is no such thing, we all have a God given right to decency. When it comes to the work capability thing, the Nazis were better than this lot. Watch World at War programs relating to concentration camps and you will see what I mean where selection process for work or the gas chamber is undertaken. The DWP Agents declared me fit for work whereas I know for sure the Nazis would have sent me to my destruction directly. Sorry I move away from story “child starves to death” but comment is pertinent / relevant to the non-intuitive no compassion scum of apprentices (tories) who currently are the UK gangmasters, so called government.
Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.
This is very true for sure – Not many will see this though.
There’s not many pleasant ways to die, but to slowly waste away from lack of food has to be one of the very worst. To watch your child die of starvation must be one of the worst most soul destroying experiences a human being can be subjected to.
What makes this case even more obscene as Johnny said, is this is a rich country with plenty of food. It is not the result of some natural disaster or famine, but is the result of deliberate policies designed by and enacted by an insatiably greedy, completely cold-blooded, heartless, out of control evil elite, who see everyone who is non-elite as expendable, worthless vermin. It is the complete depths of human depravity. If the people of this country do not rise up against these people, they will destroy us all.
I fear that a substantial proportion of the people in this country won’t even care about this story, because they’ve been so indoctrinated by the media with the idea that asylum seekers are vermin who are infesting and destroying the country and have been taught to see foreign brown people as not fully human.
Aim for Internationalism, removal of all borders except the ozone layer, this will not happen however, politics is but a game, humanity will forever retain a primitive state.
You only have to read the posts of trolls on the Guardian, who still deny that because we are not like Ethiopia, then there is no hunger here. They blatently dont want to hear it.
What is happening now reminds me of pictures of the prisoners in the Rab Concentration camp, imprsisoned by Mussolini in the 30’s, slowly starved and died of diease and malnutrition. Hitler did the same in his own Fascist state.
This is Fascism, IDS is the dictator who believes in social Darwinism, or survival of the fittest – in humans. IDS doesnt want useless and sick mouths eating the food that is paid for by Tory voters.
If IDS could legally get away with it, he would build work camps for the lowest in society and condemn them to death through neglect.
Fascists dont care what race you are – if you are not part of the super race, working for its ideals, you will be eradicated.
Fascists also believed that the core people should have a cushy life as long as they contributed to it and condemned any kind of welfare state for those that didnt work for it.
The UK is now very fast becoming a Fascist state, run to all intents and purposes by Iain Duncan Smith – the only man who defied his own prime minister in the last reshuffle.
All his Universal Credit is is a punitive sanctions regime, designed to deny welfare to most of the people who need it.
People rot on the streets in America, and they will here too.
Hear hear. I wish UK people would wake up to this appalling reality.
Hear Hear indeed, well said. If this is an incipient fascist state they are constructing and it certainly looks like it is, it will be a fascist state with technology of incredible sophistication and power unprecedented in human history.
Minority Report: Fiction Has Become Reality
It was a mere ten years ago that Steven Spielberg’s action film Minority Report, based on a short story by Philip K. Dick, offered movie audiences a special effect-laden techno-vision of a futuristic world in which the government is all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful. And if you dare to step out of line, dark-clad police SWAT teams will bring you under control.
Examples abound.
FICTION: In Minority Report, police use holographic data screens, city-wide surveillance cameras, dimensional maps and database feeds to monitor the movements of its citizens.
REALITY CHECK: Microsoft, in a partnership with New York City, has developed a crime-fighting system that “will allow police to quickly collate and visualise vast amounts of data from cameras, licence plate readers, 911 calls, police databases and other sources. It will then display the information in real time, both visually and chronologically, allowing investigators to centralise information about crimes as they happen or are reported.”
FICTION: No matter where people go in the world of Minority Report, one’s biometric data precedes them, allowing corporations to tap into their government profile and target them for advertising based on their highly individual characteristics. So fine-tuned is the process that it goes way beyond gender and lifestyle to mood detection, so that while Anderton flees through a subway station and then later a mall, the stores and billboards call out to him with advertising geared at his interests and moods. Eventually, in an effort to outwit the identification scanners, Anderton opts for surgery to have his eyeballs replaced.
REALITY CHECK: Google is presently working on context-based advertising that will use environmental sensors in your cell phone, laptop, etc., to deliver “targeted ads tailored to fit with what you’re seeing and hearing in the real world.” However, long before Google set their sights on context advertising, facial and iris recognition machines were being employed, ostensibly to detect criminals, streamline security checkpoints processes, and facilitate everyday activities. For example, in preparing to introduce such technology in the United States, the American biometrics firm Global Rainmakers Inc. (GRI) turned the city of Leon, Mexico into a virtual police state by installing iris scanners, which can scan the irises of 30-50 people per minute, throughout the city.
Police departments around the country have begun using the Mobile Offender Recognition and Information System, or MORIS, a physical iPhone add-on that allows police officers patrolling the streets to scan the irises and faces of suspected criminals and match them against government databases. In fact, by 2014, the FBI plans to launch a nationwide database of iris scans for use by law enforcement agencies in their efforts to track criminals.
Corporations, as well, are beginning to implement eye-tracking technology in their tablets, smartphones, and computers and the technology is likely to hit a mass market at least by 2015. It will allow companies to track which words and phrases the user tends to re-read, hover on, or avoid, which can give insight into what she is thinking. This will allow advertisers to expand on the information they glean from tracking users’ clicks, searches, and online purchases, expanding into the realm of trying to guess what a user is thinking based upon their eye movements, and advertising accordingly. This information will come in handy for police agencies as well, some of which are working on developing predictive analysis of “blink rates, pupil dilation, and deception.”
In ideal conditions, facial-recognition software is accurate 99.7 percent of the time. We are right around the corner from billboards capable of identifying passersby, and IBM has already been working on creating real world advertisements that react to people based upon RFID chips embedded in licenses and credit cards.
FICTION: In Minority Report, John Anderton’s Pre-Crime division utilizes psychic mutant humans to determine when a crime will take place next.
REALITY CHECK: The Department of Homeland Security is working on its Future Attribute Screening Technology, or FAST, which will utilize a number of personal factors such as “ethnicity, gender, breathing, and heart rate to ‘detect cues indicative of mal-intent.’” At least one field test of this program has occurred, somewhere in the northeast United States.
FICTION: In Minority Report, government agents use “sick sticks” to subdue criminal suspects using less-lethal methods.
REALITY CHECK: A variety of less-lethal weapons have been developed in the years since Minority Report hit theaters. In 2007, the Department of Homeland Security granted a contract to Intelligent Optical Systems, Inc., for an “LED Incapacitator,” a flashlight-like device that emits a dazzling array of pulsating lights, incapacitating its target by causing nausea and vomiting. Raytheon has created an “Assault Intervention Device” which is basically a heat ray that causes an unbearable burning sensation on its victim’s skin. The Long Range Acoustic Device, which emits painful noises in order to disperse crowds, has been seen at the London Olympics and G20 protests in Pittsburgh.
FICTION: A hacker captures visions from the “precog” Agatha’s mind and plays them for John Anderton.
REALITY CHECK: While still in its infancy, technology that seeks to translate human thoughts into computer actions is slowly becoming a reality. Jack Gallant, a neuroscientist at UC Berkeley, and his research team have created primitive software capable of translating the thoughts of viewers into reconstructed visual images. A company named Emotiv is developing technology which will be capable of reading a user’s thoughts and using them as inputs for operating machinery, like voice recognition but with brain signals. Similar devices are being created to translate thoughts into speech.
FICTION: In Minority Report, tiny sensory-guided spider robots converge on John Anderton, scan his biometric data and feed it into a central government database.
REALITY CHECK: An agency with the Department of Defense is working on turning insects into living UAVs, or “cybugs.” By expanding upon the insects’ natural abilities (e.g., bees’ olfactory abilities being utilized for bomb detection, etc.), government agents hope to use these spy bugs to surreptitiously gather vast quantities of information. Researchers eventually hope to outfit June beetles with tiny backpacks complete with various detection devices, microphones, and cameras. These devices could be powered by the very energy produced by the bugs beating their wings, or the heat they give off while in flight. There have already been reported sightings of dragonfly-like robotic drones monitoring protesters aerially in Washington.
http://tenthamendmentcenter.com/2012/09/07/minority-report-fiction-has-become-reality/
Minority Report is Real!
Scottish toddlers to be tested to see if they will grow up to be drug addicts or criminals
TODDLERS are to be tested to see if they are likely to grow up to be thugs or drug addicts.
TODDLERS are to be tested to see if they are likely to grow up to be thugs or drug addicts.
Children aged between 24 and 30 months will be examined to determine their capacity for violent crime, drug abuse and mental illness when they are older.
Health officials will look for emotional and behavioural problems under the scheme, which will be launched in Glasgow this year.
Scottish toddlers to be tested to see if they will grow up to be drug addicts or criminals
I was also going to say that this is another sad example of David Camerons “Something for nothing” policy, because the asylum seeker was contributing nothing to society she should get nothing back. Also applicable here is IDS’s “Tough love – Deny them welfare and make them stand on their own two feet” policy.
This is murder, plain and simple, murder brought about by this vile NAZI governments policies. It is absolutely SHAMEFUL that the British Public are supporting these policies, as they talk about hatred for the BNP, but what IDS is doing is no better than what Nick Griffin would do.
I despair at what is coming next year – people will be dying on the streets and in tent cities like those in the USA.
Yep- I just wanted to comment that ironically it is Cameron and his inbred greedsters that want and have “something for nothing”. They have the inheritances and privileges passed down from generations that intimidated and slaughtered their way through Africa, India and more, in order to feed their gigantic and psychopathic sense of entitlement. For Cameron to say the poor and disabled want something for nothing is pure “projection” on his part. What a mindfuck he is.
Cameron is a Kinky Mindfuck and he enjoys it. Remember the tory mp some years ago who was found dead with a dark binliner over his head and an orange in his mouth. Verdict misadventure due to kinky goings on. They, Cameron and his cronies will receive judgement one day, the sooner the better.
As the planet heats up and the climate becomes more unstable due to climate change, there will be more and more crop failures like this: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/jul/22/americas-corn-farmers-dry-harvest which will cause global food production to decrease. We will see dramatic food shortages in the developed world in the near future.
I suspect that our ruling elite are preparing for this eventuality, which is why they are enacting policies that force working families to have to increasingly rely on government funded foodbanks, which they are rapidly expanding all over the country, with the food being issued by electronic cards and also why their media mouthpieces are beating the drum for “welfare” to be given to the “benefit scrounging scum” in the form of electronic foodstamp cards, so they can’t waste taxpayer money on fags and booze. The government want to be able to decide exactly what food you are given and how much food you are given.
I suspect they are putting into place a system of rationing for the majority of the population and are getting us used to being issued our ration of food so that when there are major food shortages, they can ensure that the rich have plenty of all the best food, by making sure that the majority are given just the bare minimum.
That conjures up images of Oliver Twist going, empty bowl in hands, up to the big fat man with the gruel pot, and saying “please sir, can I have some more?” “More? MORE? you cant have any more, boy!”
The equivalent today:
Poor starving claimant who has had benefits sanctioned goes to Trussel Trust foodbank official and says” Please sir, can I have another food parcel?”
” Name and Number please? ” “YG527392H, Smith sir” “Sorry but you have had you 3 parcels this year, now go away and get a job!”
Familiarities?
Yep, 19th century treatment for the plebs, in 21st century Britain.
“Forgive me for noting that conservatives seem to believe that the rich will work harder if we give them more, and the poor will work harder if we give them less.” E.J. Dionne Jr
Ever seen the film Soylent Green, Google it. It is interesting futuristic film where people ” (us) The Plebs” are processed into biscuits those biscuits being called Soylent Green.
I have it on DVD– I also have a film from the same era; Logan’s Run – In that people are killed at 30, But and every one was born attractive.
Such is the level of contempt the British establishment has for us “plebs”, I think it’s more than possible that they could start turning our corpses into biscuits to feed us with, like in Soylent Green.
Of course you are right and first they would train the nations Undertakers (ATOS would have the franchise rights I am sure) to take forward such a lucrative enterprise
Cameron lost a child so he ought to know what that feels like. If people said to Cameron ‘your child is worthless so should die’, he’d probably have been furious. Now his government starves a child to death but because the child is from another country and probably has darker skin than Cameron and his child and Cameron’s friends and Cameron’s bank manager… it is OKAY for the child to die? This system is so racist. This morning I heard the radio in Spar, it said the missing child was believed to have been murdered. In days ‘a nation’ mobilised behind a campaign about this child. But a dead refugee child is really seen as worthless.
A few years ago there were stories about boys from India hiding in the wheel arches of planes. A few made it to the UK alive. Some suffocated, froze, passed out and fell to their deaths, or were crushed by the landing gear. Asylum seekers including kids suffocate or starve in the backs of lorries and in shipping containers. Others die on sinking or capsized, overloaded or unseaworthy boats – or from dehydration/starvation/heat/cold
at sea – or are thrown or pushed overboard by the traffickers. Others are forced to be sex slaves, and killed for rebelling or trying to escape. Some starve in the streets. Some pay traffickers who turn them over to the authorities to be paid a reward. Some die in detention centres. Some get deported to their country then killed by the people or government they were running away from. Some people die from falling off the underside of trucks. Some are beaten or killed by racist thugs.
If you face all those dangers and more, and make it to the so-called ‘civilised’ country, you might expect to be treated at least like a human being, even after not having been treated like one before. You might expect some food, water, shelter, a friendly word.
Instead you get the UKBA (how about a FOI request to ask if they know how many of them are in the BNP or EDL?). You get people spitting at you, kicking you, and starting to judge you even before you have arrived here. Before you have done anything here either good or bad. You get literal and metaphorical doors shut in your face. If you are not legal you cannot get housing, food, benefits, a job… things other people take for granted. Many of the richest, white, people around you actually have more than one house?! If you ever asked them to share their ‘spare houses’ they’d look at you like you were mad. Even though some of them own more houses than they could ever possibly simultaneously live in. Perhaps you could offer to work in one of their big houses and clean it, for minimum wage? For less than minimum wage? For an illegally low wage? For food and a room? For free just to show you are ‘contributing to society’? Even if in your country you were a highly skilled professional like a doctor. No, apparently any work you do is illegal?
If, nearly 70 years after you came to this country as a refugee, as a very young child, with your refugee parents, your British-citizen UK-born English-speaking now-adult children are STILL spat on in the street and told to Go Home… Even if your born-here grandchild is technically regarded as an alien and could theoretically be deported to different parts of the world, chopped into tiny bits. (Where incidentally IS home? How do you ‘go back where you come from!’, when it is firstly somewhere you have never been, and secondly several different parts of the world very far apart.) If to relocate just 5 of the adults in this group, would mean splitting up 2 married couples and sending the 5th adult to their death due to lack of healthcare.
If you are elderly and from Pakistan, having lived here most of your life, but are firebombed by people yelling ‘Paki’, though you came to the UK because its government TOLD you to because of the recruitment of Asian workers.
If you are a single mother who volunteers for the community, does everything right, cleans, isn’t on benefits, works in centres for similar women; and you help friends in your spare time, but because you wear a hijab – a really funky/cool one BTW – and are Albanian, and people say you should not be here… [but the white people around you can buy houses, timeshares or holiday homes in Slovenia or Croatia and nobody nearby says ‘you horrible immigrant’]
Refugees really do not ‘have it easy’, whether from Europe or from outside it. If the papers that really fit the definition of ‘bumf’ (=bumfodder,
that is to say toilet paper, or as Rabelais preferred, ‘torche-culs’ and ‘arse-wisps’. If bemused, try searching Google under ‘Stephen Fry’, ‘Sandi Toksvig’, ‘QI’, ‘What use is a goose?’, ‘Gargantua’, etc.) actually knew anything about immigrants… If their ‘writers’ had a clue about the socioeconomic, religious, political, cultural and other conditions that force a person to flee their own country and head into the unknown…
They don’t know even that everybody in the British Isles is an immigrant.
The very first people arrived from continental Europe. At times Britain has been too cold and covered in ice for anyone to live there. The Europeans’ ancestors were Asians from India and the Near East/Middle East. THEIR ancestors were black Africans. All humans came from one black woman in East Africa. It is not ‘them and us’ it is ‘us and us’.
The other week my friend went on a train journey, and unfortunately the first person he sat with on the way there said he was going to a demo. My friend was going to something political too, and thought it could be the same one. So he asked “which one?”. The man was thinking the same thing, that my friend was going to HIS demo. He said, ‘Oh, it is a march to get rid of the Muslims, the Pakis, and the immigrants’. He asked my friend to come! It turned out he was EDL. On the way back my friend’s train filled up with hundreds of very drunk, very crazy EDL and BNP in a frenzy. The nazis were shouting and singing nasty things about non-whites. It got worse and worse with nobody stopping them, in the end they were just fighting eachother ‘for the hell of it’, to avoid getting hurt my friend, who is also disabled, was forced to get off the train along with loads of other passengers. They were stranded in the dark at a station with no shelter, in the rain, for hours. They got the next train and my friend got home after midnight, 4 hours later than the train he’d paid to be on would have taken him to get back. I doubt anyone checked if the nazis had bothered to buy tickets. Plus, ‘there were nazis on the train’ isn’t likely to be accepted as an excuse by ticket people if you get off even under duress. If the nazis really like fascism so much they should get a time machine and go and live in Germany around 1933-1945. Who is the disruptive one in society, or on this train?
Wasn’t Einstein an immigrant? Refugee?
I got attacked on a platform the other year by racist thugs. They chased me onto the train and continued the attack. In the end a cop came and removed them – result. But then the cop blamed ME for having told the civilian train staff about the attackers! Ironically it was an Islamophobic attack and I am not even Muslim and none of my family are Muslim either.
More recently I got attacked on another train and nobody caught the people.
The Celts lived in Britain after the last major ice age when it became warm enough to move here. They came from across Europe and ultimately from India. (Celtic languages are Indo-European languages so are related to Sanskrit and Hindi). The Welsh lived across England. When the Romans came even their army was mixed race from around their empire, and they also brought black servants. The Saxons were from Germany; the Angles and Jutes from Denmark. Frisians also came over centuries. The Swedish Vikings went to France and became the Normans; Danish and Norwegian Vikings came to Britain then were conquered by the Normans. The French were a mix of Romans, Gauls, Gascons, Bretons/Cornish, Basques, Franks, Germans, Belgae, Swedish Vikings (Normans), and many more peoples. When the French came to Britain, for the next few centuries Britain ‘owned’ or occupied large chunks of France. Our kings were French then German. We brought (later) Flemish weavers and German traders, Dutch and Frisian drainage engineers, French craftsmen and advisors. (Check out Billy Bragg’s song about ‘Half English’) Since the Middle Ages the British Isles were home to settlements of Jews, Danes, and others. The English language came from Anglo-Saxon, from Saxon before that. It had 3 grammatical genders and lots of case endings, was very similar to German, and fused elements from French and Latin, and Celtic languages, and from Norse, and other Scandinavian/Germanic languages: Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Dutch, Flemish, Frisian. We only speak what is now ‘English’ because of thousands of years of immigrants. Without them the BNP etc would probably all be speaking Welsh. (Yeah there might be a Welsh Defence League but somebody said it is in the middle of a divorce. Really they just bus in EDL from England.) There have been Muslim traders in Britain for centuries, the first mosque was built by a white British man who converted to Islam (this was MUCH earlier than the recent BBC documentary said it started). If Britain is for ‘whites only’, then everyone darker than this white screen should leave. I.e. everybody. (Have seen neonazi groups into the whole nordic myth, with polar bear as an emblem of a heroic white animal. The joke is on them. As I learned from QI, a polar bear’s hairs are white because they are transparent. AND if you shave a polar bear its skin is
BLACK.) When Britain took over other countries the people sometimes became soldiers in British forces or servants. I read Baluchi men from Asia were armed guards on British expeditions in Africa.
The UK asked Asians to come in the 1950s, with Africans and Caribbeans, for work. Asians fleeing deportation in East Africa came later. There had been communities of African and Chinese sailors in Britain since the early 20th century. Oh don’t forget the American servicemen (some stayed), they are immigrants too. Now people from every country are here, we are the richer for it.
okay. Nick Griffin is perfectly right…the day that he agrees that he will take a DNA ancestry test, and for himself to then be proportionally repatriated everywhere each bit of him is from. A bit can go to Africa, another bit to Asia, a bit to Europe, some to North America…
It is ‘alright’ for Brits, with lots of money or with no spare change, to go all over the world. If Brits can go anywhere, then everyone else has the right to be anywhere. Unless we are trying to say that British people are the only real human beings! Surely that is not what we are saying?!
Immigrants we failed to deport:
-Christopher Columbus, explorer
-John Cabot, explorer
-Benjamin Disraeli
-Yoko Ono
-Kylie Minogue
-Elizabeth Windsor (@buckpal.com)
-Archbishop Sentamu
-Meera Syal
-Lenny Henry
-Nigel Farrage
-Michael Portillo
-Tom Stoppard
-Benjamin Zephaniah
-‘Jedward’
-‘The Cheeky Girls’
The other night I mentioned the Zephaniah poem ‘Walking Black Home’. In the 80’s we used to make jokes and sketches in the family about when racists say ‘go home’ and people say ‘but I was born here!’ The most usual line given to the family member satirising the racist, was ‘You had no RIGHT to be born here!’. We had another one, called ‘Go back where you come from’. It would start with one person (playing the racist) going ‘Where do you come from?’ The other person would look confused and say ‘London’, or ‘Birmingham’ or wherever, sometimes with a regional accent. And the ‘racist character’ just keeps on getting more and more insistent, ‘Where do you come from?!’ until both players dissolve in tears of laughter.
When I was at school my teachers told me to tell the other kids I was SWEDISH because it was easier to say! I refused but had to do it once at an international ‘come as where you are from’ event. Then it happened again: I was told to pretend to be RUSSIAN. ‘Nobody can spell or pronounce where you are really from and that will traumatise them’. Then they said pretend to be ENGLISH. Years after that, I got called a BOSNIAN; though had been born in the UK and the war in the Balkans was still going on. How I was meant to have grown up in zero months and learnt fluent English, they were unable to explain. (I was 5 when it was the Falklands War, you idiots!) Then as an adult getting beaten up on a train, they were yelling that I was a Muslim Arab terrorist in Al Qaeda! (Make up your very tiny little mind…) I’ve been called towelhead, Chechen, Paki, clearly nobody in the racist world can read a map!
One Planet! Full of all different colours of people. And anyone who doesn’t like it can always leave.
EDL=Extremely Dirty Laundry
Evidently Didn’t Listen
Every Dumb Lump
England Doesn’t Like…
Eight Decades Late
Enoch’s Death Lice
Evolution’s Dead Line
Enid Dorothy Lucy
Extrapolated Data: Lousy!
BNP=Brains Not Provided
Britain Needs Petunias
Bring New Panties
Better Nuke Peckham
Breakfast Now, Please
Breivik Narcissist Party
“Big Nappy Poo!”
Bullets Nives Pinheads (with an inability to spell)
Basically Nice…Posthumously
We are all mixed race and there is really only one race, the human race.
We need only one border, The Ozone layer – this is not a promotion for Communism , it just makes sense. It is our God given right to breath air no matter where it is, unfortunately the majority of human kind is too primitive to see this.
Utterly ridiculous in this day and age. I do have some issues with asylum seekers, but no child, no matter their background, should be forced to starve to death by this government. I can only hope that someone takes notice of this appalling tragedy so that nothing like it is allowed to happen again. One child starving to death in such a manner (or anyone for that matter) is one too many.
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You who live safe
In your warm houses,
You who find, returning in the evening,
Hot food and friendly faces:
Consider if this is a man
Who works in the mud,
Who does not know peace,
Who fights for a scrap of bread,
Who dies because of a yes or a no.
Consider if this is a woman
Without hair and without name,
With no more strength to remember,
Her eyes empty and her womb cold
Like a frog in winter.
Meditate that this came about:
I command these words to you.
Carve them in your hearts
At home, in the street,
Going to bed, rising;
Repeat them to your children.
Or may your house fall apart,
May illness impede you,
May your children turn their faces from you.
“If This Is A Man” – Primo Levi
Iain Duncan Smith charged with the child of asylum seeker murder
A politician has been charged with the murder of the child of the child of an asylum seeker. Known locally as IBS, Duncan Smith is also charged with perverting the course of Legislation. A “neighbour” described Duncan Smith as a “strange little bald-headed man” who used to go around muttering that “the poor sick and disabled had no place in society”. Another neighbour said he told her he had a “Masterplan” to “eliminate” the most vulnerable and weakest members of society. Other neighbours described how he had built a fully operational gas chamber and a model “work-camp” in his back yard.
On a variable level as the Nazi’s “Final Solution” and yet far less obvious and…is this the work of the tories and Babylonian Brotherhood?. 🙂
Reblogged this on Myblog's Blog.