Our Barbaric Country

Published: 26/02/2007

Whizzing through emails on Saturday, a name flashes by and draws me back. One Colin Firth says he admires my writing and requests me to write on an issue that moves him to rage. Readers, T’was him, Mr D’Arcy to me, Mark Darcy to my daughter. Like moths we flutter around the computer, so strong is the light of stardom. Seized your attention too didn’t it? I told Firth his name would lure readers to his cause, deeply unpopular though it is- the plight of asylum seekers and migrants forcibly deported everyday to confirm John Reid is a real He-man.

Reid has declared war on some of the most oppressed of the world. His department operates policies and practices of institutionalised savagery, re-branded as efficiency. On Tuesday tough John will tell us his office is deporting more people than the numbers of ‘bogus’ asylum applicants coming in. To get to target, they pick low hanging fruit- babies, tots, mums who will go quietly weeping. Today a planeload- 23 adults and 19 children- will be on charter flight no. XLA4334, off to the Democratic Republic of Congo ( DRC) where since 1998, over 4 million people have been murdered, many in internecine battles tacitly encouraged by western powers for whom African countries become more easily penetrable if fragmented and corrupt. In January, oleaginous New Labour politicians marked Holocaust Memorial day promising yet again ‘never again’ while sending off blacks to be incarcerated or obliterated. Is there an adequate world in English to describe such fraudulence? These postures are repulsive to Firth: ‘Blair likes to talk about an ”epochal struggle” between the forces of progress and darkness. Looking at our asylum policies, one wonders which side he’s on’.

Firth is queasy about becoming another Bono and expects to be dismissed as a champagne do-gooder. No matter, to be silent now would be to consent to an abomination. His mother Shirley ( a middle Englander) is President of the South West Visitor’s Group ( SWVG) supporting asylum seekers demonised even more than Muslim men who do have vocal campaigners on their side. Who speaks for disbelieved and despised asylum seekers? Nobody in politics, a handful of religious leaders and journalists and some ordinary Britons of conscience, too few. The national mood is toxic and even nice liberals now choose to believe that the majority who flee here are scum or cunning terrorists. These newest recruits to Close Brittania have never met a single asylum seeker in person which is why their generic condemnation is so guilt free.

Shirley Firth knows the deportees she fights for. On today’s flight is a man she’s helped for five years. Pierre ( a pseudonym) was a nurse in the DRC when militiamen ordered him to inject political nuisances with excessive morphine. He refused, was imprisoned and tortured until a bribe freed him and he fled here. Dr. Isabel Casson, a psychiatrist who has worked in Africa has assessed him; SWVG has commissioned research to prove the Congo and other countries disgorging citizens are pits of anarchy and insecurity. British embassies do not accept NGO assessments of danger. Places they advise Britons not to visit are deemed havens of peace for deportees.

Our government has in effect torn up the Geneva Convention. It embodied the repudiation of barbarously efficient Nazis who believed some were born less human than others. That barbarism is back again. Can we stop the flight of shame tonight and save ourselves? Lord Thomas Macaulay once described Britain: ‘the sacred last refuge of mankind’. That is the heritage we must reclaim from the bully boys of New Labour.

Published in The Independent