Damian Green, above without the blurry face, was the chappy at the centre of the police raid at Westminster in November 2008 for 'aiding and abetting misconduct in public office'. He's now the new Tory-LibDem Immigration Minister. With a stroke of his mighty Ministerial pen he has managed to do what Jim Murphy failed to achieve despite giving his assurances in October 2008 that no child would be held in Dungavel in the future.
You have to ponder over why Mr Murphy never managed to fulfil his pledge, what hurdles did he encounter, that made the decision to stop weans with Glasgow accents being bundled into vans in the middle of the night and dumped in a former prison in the Scottish countryside? Was it an insurmountable problem of cost? How about a lack of alternative facilities? Maybe it was a cheap sound bite in fitting with his whole persona of telling people what they want to hear but never really finishing the task? Hey maybe I'm wrong and this pledge was sitting at the top his to-do list and only kiboshed by the small blip of a general election....Maybe.
The problem now is that these children will instead be taken to Yarl's Wood Detention Centre which is supposedly better equipped for the children of 'failed' immigrants. Although better on the surface, this is really a cosmetic change and does nothing to confront the basic problem that whereas south of the Border, the three main parties appear to revel in playing the anti-immigration-we're-full-up-go-elsewhere card. Yet in Scotland faced with another period of depopulation we're rather keen on welcoming new faces who want to work and contribute to life here.
So history will record that the last baby ever detained at Dungavel was 11 month old Wania Shebaz, here she is with her 25 year old mum Sehar.
Well, she was guilty of being a Pakistani girl forced into an arranged marriage to a man she barely knew, whom she claims, drank excessively, was violent and predictably sexually abusive. Shebaz has been living in the UK for 3 years. In December last year after hubby threatened to kill her, she escaped the family home in Blackburn and sought refuge in Glasgow. She was placed in homeless accommodation and helped to apply for asylum. Hubby followed her and again she had to be moved.
She and her baby daughter were removed from Dungavel at midnight and stuck in a van marked destination Yarls Wood. It's a nine hour drive, she should be arriving fairly soon. On Saturday morning she and Wania will be driven to the airport and put on a plane back to Pakistan and the problem will no longer be ours, hands wiped, another human tragedy bundled out of sight and sound.
Wania will celebrate her first birthday in Pakistan, who knows what future her and her mum face. As is tradition in Pakistan, her husband's family will demand the baby, her own family have lost face and will not support her. What harm did she do?
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2 comments:
This is a shocking decision to send this young girl and her baby back to Pakistan, and the decision is completely incompatible with the ruling made earlier that two Pakistani men, considered by the authorities to be security risks, could not be deported to Pakistan because their human rights could be breached.
Now they may or may not be security risks, I tend to think the authorities make a lot of stuff up, but they are clearly viewed by the government as unfriendly to the state.
You cannot say the same about this woman who has co-operated with the state in every way. What she did - her crime - was to take advantage of the fact that she was in the UK, to flee from a violent man, something she would find immensely difficult to do in the part of Pakistan she hails from.
This is the same government that has troops stationed in Afghanistan, one of the faux excuses being that they wish to support the emancipation of Afghani women.
What kind of message is this action sending out to women living in male dominated cultures where they are not allowed to assert their independence?
That we will talk a good game, but deport you if you dare to try and assert yourself without being in possession of a UK passport.
This is a shocking and disgraceful decision and it should anger anyone who supports women and children's rights.
E-mail Damian Green and tell him what you think about it:
greend@parliament.uk
Who knows what might happen tomorrow when Sehar is returned to Pakistan tomorrow.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8696188.stm
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