Refugee Follow

TONY BLAIR wants to force the victims of war on Iraq back into the path of bombs and bullets. He announced last week that he wanted to halve the number of refugees coming to Britain by September. Iraqis are the single largest group of refugees who come to Britain.

Helen Shooter went to Salford in Manchester to talk to refugees and find out what their lives are really like.

THE MOST right wing and privileged forces in society are trying to create hysteria over people fleeing persecution to come to this country. They are even trying to turn the death of a policeman in Manchester into a campaign against asylum seekers. The logic is barking. The fact that the three suspects arrested at the Manchester house had claimed asylum says nothing about the overwhelming majority of asylum seekers.

THE WEEKEND'S newspapers had some of the most uplifting coverage for ages-and some of the most disgusting. On the one hand, there was extensive coverage of the mushrooming anti-war movement across the globe. On the other, there was a deluge of bile against asylum seekers, linking them with terrorism and whipping up a frenzy whereby every refugee could be a killer with a vat of ricin in their flat.

AS A result of recent changes in government policy, asylum seekers are being evicted from their homes, having all benefits removed and being denied the right to work. Most are Iraqi Kurds. We challenged my local MP and immigration minister Beverley Hughes to say what the government expects Kurdish refugees to do in such circumstances.

THE MEDIA have whipped up hysteria against refugees from Algeria after last week's killing of a police officer in Manchester. They paint a picture that those coming here from the North African country are all potential killers, linked to a dangerous network of Islamist terrorists. This is racist nonsense. And the real reasons people are fleeing Algeria are rarely even discussed.

PROTESTERS AGAINST the government's brutal new laws on refugees took to the streets of London, Glasgow and Manchester last week.

OVER 60 people held a soup kitchen protest last Saturday outside the flats Blair has bought his son Euan in Bristol. It was organised by the Bristol Defend Asylum Seekers Campaign to highlight government policies which will leave refugees on the streets

An angry demonstration gathers outside a detention centre to protest against the deportation of refugees, chanting "To send them back is murder!" A young refugee, traumatised by war, sits in a stark room being screamed at by insensitive officials. These are just two of the powerful scenes from the first episode of a new BBC TV drama, Face at the Window.

TWO DISGUSTING attacks this week brought home the reality of what the "racial problem" is in Britain. It isn't the failure of immigrants and refugees to "fit in". It's the racism and violence they face.

THE IDEA that refugees in Britain drive down wages and cause unemployment has been blown apart by research released last week. "Immigration is found to have, if anything, a positive effect on the wages of the existing population. Using the most robust data source available, an increase in immigration of 1 percent of the non-migrant population leads to a nearly 2 percent increase in non-migrant wages," says the research summary.

THOUSANDS OF asylum seekers will find themselves on the streets and starving in bitterly cold weather over the coming months. That is the only present from New Labour this winter for people fleeing war, persecution and torture.