From The Observer, via TenPercent (emphasis his and mine):

At Yarl’s Wood [detention centre for asylum seekers] in Bedfordshire, more than 100 women are refusing to eat, and there have been recent reports of major disturbances at Lindholme, South Yorkshire, and at Colnbrook in Middlesex. Self-harm is particularly acute at Yarl’s Wood, which reopened in September 2003 after half of it was gutted by fire during rioting in February 2002. It now houses hundreds of women, many of whom have attempted to claim asylum in Britain after fleeing war zones.

Amid growing concern over Britain’s overstretched asylum system, the campaign group Liberty will call tomorrow for the Home Secretary, John Reid, to order a public inquiry into the large-scale riot at Harmondsworth detention centre in west London last November. If Reid refuses, the group says that it intends to seek a judicial review of his decision on behalf of seven detainees it is representing - an unprecedented move that would see Britain’s immigration system placed under scrutiny in the courts.

An investigation last year into conditions at Yarl’s Wood found 70 per cent of women at the centre had reported rape, nearly half had been detained for more than three months and 57 per cent had no legal representation.

Conditions have not improved, according to campaigners. Assaults are said to be commonplace. One woman was stripped and thrown naked into a van taking her to the airport for deportation only for the pilot to refuse to allow her to fly as she had no clothes.

The women also allege staff regularly refer to them as ‘black monkey’, ‘nigger’ and ‘bitch’. They claim vital faxes from solicitors are going missing and information on basic legal rights is being withheld. Detainees also complain they are given days-old reheated food in which they have found hair, dirt and maggots.

Campaigners are also concerned about conditions at Harmondsworth, where detainees rioted after being banned from watching news coverage of a damning report on the centre.

The Liberty report, to be published tomorrow, contains a clutch of testimonies from detainees about the conditions in Harmondsworth before the riots. One man interviewed for the study told how he was taken to the centre’s medical clinic suffering from a bad back. ‘They just abandoned me,’ the man said. ‘There was no doctor and, when I asked where the doctor was, the detention officers laughed at me … One of them stepped on the hem of my trousers to make me fall over. He then started laughing and called me a “fucking negro”.’

Solitary confinement as a punishment for speaking out at Harmondsworth is common, according to Liberty. ‘If we made a complaint we would be given a warning,’ one man known as ‘K’ told Liberty. ‘If we were given three warnings, we would be put in an isolated cell. We were scared of making complaints against officers because we expected to be treated badly if we did. We were treated like pigs and very unfairly, as if we were serious criminals.’

Does anyone think this is in any way acceptable?

Though it frames the asylum debate very much in terms of how we intend to deal with the problem posed by these people, the BBC has more shocking stuff in its archives.

• September 2003: Immigration centre ‘not safe’.  An immigration detention centre is “unsafe” for the families held there, according to the prisons watchdog.
• April 2006: Immigration cells ‘like kennels’.  Say no more.
• November 2006: Fires started in detention centre.  A classic BBC example of the headline-writer having a different agenda to the journalist, this story is less about fires and more about spelling out “HELP” with bedsheets in the folorn hope of finding a sympathetic helicopter.  That and more suicide, obviously.
• March 2007:  Riot in detention centre ‘contained’ - and the follow-up article reassures us that none of the foreign scum escaped.

I could go on - there’s more, don’t think there isn’t more - but I’m getting more bored and disgusted by the minute.

Meanwhile in the next room sits a copy of the official, Home-Office-sanctioned guide to British history and culture.  In his smarmy foreword, John Reid boasts of how it became an instant bestseller, without mentioning that he made it compulsory for anyone settling in this country to memorise it and regurgitate on demand.

Gordon Brown, and the merry men he is set to inherit, worry that all our problems stem from a lack of pride in being British.  Small fucking wonder: with their hypocrisies, their wars, and their concentration camps on British soil, they make me ashamed to the point of nausea.

Update: May 22

RickB, from whose blog I found this article, finds the story being largely ignored by the press. No surprises there.

He also provides a link to the letter from pressure group Liberty to the Home Secretary, on behalf of several detainees whose testimony is included, along with extracts from the Prison Inspector’s report on the centre. The report describes the relationship between staff and detainees as “worse than any we have seen elsewhere” - elsewhere, that is, in the nation’s prison system including high-security rapist’n’murderer joints.

Liberty’s legal case against the government seems pretty solid. To preempt this story somehow getting out into the public eye and provoking the popular outcry it merits, the government is drumming up anti-immigrant sentiment that further legitimises the BNP. Not enough council houses? I thought that might be because they were building them too slowly and selling them off too quickly, but not so - it’s those bloody immigrants again.