Remember the ruckus Labourites made about Ruth Turner being arrested in a “dawn raid”:
High-level Labour figures have characterised Mr Yates’s techniques as intimidatory, claiming that Ms Turner,Mr Blair’s head of government relations, was forced to dress in front of the police when they knocked at her door at 6.30am.
One Labour official angrily said: “We do not live in a banana public, whatever Assistant Commissioner Yates believes.”
The police insist they are using normal police techniques and are simply not giving anyone any preferential treatment.
From the screams of outrage you’d think this sort of thing wasn’t standard police practice, but in fact it’s used regularly on people whose only crime was applying for asylum in Britain and not getting it, as Labour MP Austin Mitchell explains:
A second dawn raid took place on 9 January at 6am. Used on Ruth Turner this appalling practice produces howls of protest. With asylum families it’s an everyday part of the game. Vicious and cruel but a good way of catching kids before they go to school. Public protests had forced an end to dawn raids in New Zealand when Labour came in in 1984. Here New Labour sees them as the norm.
Mrs Bokhari rang a friend but was cut off. The friend went round but wasn’t allowed to speak to the family who were dragged off, Mr Bokhari kicking and screaming to the horror of the neighbours who liked the family and disliked the din.
Bokhari is a diabetic but no health check had been made beforehand so the raiders didn’t believe him and his insulin was left in the fridge. They were taken to Yarl’s Wood, arriving unfed and uninjected at 6pm. Next day Bokhari was taken off, I hoped, for treatment, though the family weren’t told where, and it was three days before he was brought back with bad bruising.
Mitchell goes on:
It leaves a nasty taste. An out-of-control Immigration and Nationality Directorate is doing what it wants to get deportations up. The minister goes along, ratifies its decisions (he hardly ever rejects them), observes its deadlines and strings MPs along, pretending to listen while doing nothing. Perhaps scarring young souls will teach them not to come here when they grow up.
Perhaps it will win votes to Labour from the lumpen lunatics who’ve deluged the Grimsby Telegraph’s website with abuse of their soft, immigrant-loving, geriatric, fool of an MP. Perhaps we’ll win enough National Fronters to compensate for the loss of the many liberals this has alienated. I don’t know. But I do know how I feel. Ashamed.
I can sympathise with Mitchell. If only there was a political party
which was serious about defending the right of asylum seekers mr. Mitchell could join.