Xenophobia - they are all in it together

In the wake of the threatened invasion by Romanians and Bulgarians that never was, anti-immigration demagogy continues to darken the political horizon. There is no shortage of politicians eager to exploit xenophobia of all kinds in the hunt for votes.

It’s not surprising, of course, that Nigel Farage, leader of the populist-nationalist Ukip should keep banging the anti-immigration drum. He insisted the other day that his hero Enoch Powell’s notorious “rivers of blood” speech in 1968 remains relevant for today.

But Labour is a close second to the Tories who are raging on about EU benefit claimants. Top of the list is former home secretary David Blunkett, who said in an interview aired last night that he stood by inflammatory remarks made last November. Then he singled out the vulnerable Roma community in impoverished parts of his Sheffield constituency as his target.

Blunkett demanded that Roma immigrants should make more of an effort to fit in with British culture. If not, he warned, there could be a repeat of the 2001 riots in northern cities. He subsequently claimed that his comments had been “misused” by the media.

Poet Benjamin Zephaniah, who interviewed Blunkett, gave him the chance to make a retraction. But no, Blunkett insisted that “I am saying it as it is” and “people need to know you are listening”.

The reasons for tensions between immigrant communities in the Page Hall/Fir Vale area of Sheffield are not hard to fathom. It is a deprived area that has some of the highest levels of poor quality housing in Sheffield, according to a recent report. 

Zephaniah’s programme showed that Page Hall’s poor conditions date back far longer than recent EU immigration. Its cramped streets and 19th century terraces reveal decades of neglect from central and local government (Blunkett was once leader of Sheffield Council).  

But lest anyone thinks we are singling out Blunkett unfairly, the Labour leadership as a whole is stoking up xenophobia, especially amongst working class and poor communities in a grubby search for votes from people they don’t care a jobt about.

Shadow cabinet ministers David Hanson (immigration) and Yvette Cooper (defence) were preying on workers’ fears just as the so-called “mass migration” from Bulgaria and Romania was being talked up.

To sweeten her anti-immigration stance, Cooper claimed the government had ignored calls to strengthen existing legislation that could stop employers undercutting British employees' wages by recruiting cheaper staff from overseas. Hanson concentrated his fire on recruitment agencies that recruit solely from eastern Europe. But ultimately, they were trumpeting the infamous “British jobs for British workers” line of former prime minister Gordon Brown.

Labour’s poster-boy, shadow education minister and historian Tristram Hunt has joined in with his colleagues to say that immigration should have been more controlled in the past. He claimed that “white British boys are not getting the education they want”.

And when asked in an interview for the Fabian Society if he thought that poor attainment in some schools was because of high levels of EU migration, Hunt said: 'Exactly. And that comes back to the supply side, we have to get in there.” 

The fears of the poorest and most vulnerable in society which are easy to stoke up into hatred, as researcher Paul Quinn notes: “There will be an eternal availability of receptive terrain for populist political forces that wish to rally support via negative stereotyping of vulnerable groups. Succumbing to the temptation to cast aspersions on such groups is analogous to lighting matches in a hayfield.”

Scapegoating Roma migrants is now so bad that a cross-party group of MPs has warned about provocative language after Tory council leader Philippa Roe accused tiny groups of Roma in Westminster of causing “a massive amount of disruption and low level crime”. Ironically, inflamer-in-chief Blunkett sits on this parliamentary group.

Of course, the rich are treated quite differently to Romanian workers. The government is inviting 100 wealthy foreigners to join a new visa service which the Home Office says will ensure their passage through the UK border system is “swift and smooth”. No racism where they’re concerned, proving once again that this is a class issue which demands unity in the face of a concerted campaign to divide and rule.

Corinna Lotz

AWTW secretary

Blunkett targets Roma in another shocking outburst

Demonising migrants and minorities is not just the privilege of the Tories. You only have to listen to the latest reactionary remarks of former New Labour cabinet minister David Blunkett to realise that.

Blunkett achieved notoriety during his time as home secretary in the Blair governments for all the wrong reasons. In November 2001, he persuaded parliament in a 90-minute debate to derogate – partially revoke – a section of the Human Rights Act dealing with lawful detention.

Blunkett declared that there was a permanent “public emergency” in the wake of the 9.11 attacks and Britain had to be able to intern terror suspects without due process. 

In April 2002, Blunkett turned his fire on another vulnerable group when he claimed that the children of asylum seekers were threatening to “swamp” some local schools. His incendiary remarks were denounced as “emotive” by the chair of the Commission for Racial Equality (since abolished).

Blunkett’s remarks then were compared to Margaret Thatcher’s talk of Britain becoming an “alien nation” by being “swamped by” newcomers. Now Blunkett has gone one further by declaring that Roma immigrants are responsible for community “friction” and “understandable tensions” in his Sheffield constituency.

Unless the Roma “change their culture” the community could “explode” and there could be rioting on the streets. "If everything exploded, if things went wrong, the community would obviously be devastated,” Blunkett said.

“We saw this is Bradford, Burnley and Oldham all those years ago when I first became Home Secretary. If things implode it’s not outside here that cops it, it’s the community.”

No, this is not UKIP, or a spokesman for far right parties. This is a senior figure in so-called One Nation Labour. Blunkett claimed he did not want to “stir up hate”, but his calls for police to intervene to discourage Roma people “not to spend all their time in the street” points the finger in a provocative fashion.

His remarks on BBC Radio Sheffield came the day after an anniversary of an historic attack on a minority that presaged murder on an industrial scale. On 9th/10th November 1938, Nazi storm troopers led a wave of violent attacks on Jewish people and property throughout Germany and Austria.

Many Jews were killed, thousands sent to concentration camps, synagogues destroyed and Jewish-owned shops smashed. Many fled abroad but as a statement by prominent British Jews points out, Britain was already in the grip of an “aliens scare”.

Newspaper headlines declared: “Alien Jews Pouring In”, and claimed that “Refugees Get Jobs, Britons Get Dole”. The media accused Jewish asylum seekers of “over-running the country. Sounds familiar? In a statement to mark the attack on German Jews, they say:

“75 years after Kristallnacht, racists and fascists inspired by the Nazis continue to attack minorities in Europe. In Hungary neo-fascists target Gypsies and Jews. In Greece Golden Dawn members and supporters brutally attack migrants and political opponents. Here in Britain, minority communities, especially Muslims, have been targeted in an atmosphere that is increasingly hostile towards migrants and refugees. 

 “As Jewish people mindful of this history, we are equally alarmed at continuing fascist violence and the toxic sentiments expressed by many politicians and much of the media against migrants, asylum seekers, Gypsies and travellers. 

“We stand shoulder to shoulder with migrants, refugees and asylum seekers in their efforts to live here in freedom and safety, to contribute to society, and be treated as equals. As Jews we stand together with all communities seeking to combat racism and fascism here and elsewhere.”

When it comes to the statement’s reference to “toxic sentiments”, Blunkett’s are notoriously up there with the worst of them.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Immigrant checkpoints are naked state racism

Today is Roma Holocaust Memorial Day, marking the start of the liquidation by the Nazis of the “Gipsy” camp at Auschwitz on August 2 1944. Today is also being marked by racist, illegal state targeting of immigrants on the streets of Britain.  The parallels are clearly not exact, but the sentiments are.

At a time when most people are struggling to pay their bills, when wages have been driven down by zero hours and other slave-like “contracts”, when the ConDems are fighting for votes against the nationalist Ukip, it comes as little surprise that the Home Office has unleashed its dogs.

They may not be wearing brown shirts, but the UK Border Agency officials might as well be. Setting up checkpoints at key locations around London, Durham, Manchester, Wales and Somerset, they have patently targeted non-white citizens for identity checks.

This is racial profiling with a vengeance.  Stopping people on this basis  to ask them for their identity is patently unlawful, as is the Home Office boasting that they have caught “offenders” before people detained have even been charged.

Rule of law? Forget it! We’re the state and, hey, who cares.

This is how it begins. Find scapegoats and make them the target for society’s problems. The fact that the state long ago failed to process properly immigration and asylum claims, leading to a backlog of hundreds of thousands of cases, is ignored.

Wind it up, Lynton Crosby, the notorious adviser to the prime minister would have said, bringing all his wretched experience of running similar campaigns in Australia. Wind it up, says home secretary Theresa May, who is shutting down the incompetent UK Border Agency to take it in-house.

So send out vans around London with billboards on top declaring, “Go home or face arrest”. In the days when sponsorship is everything, I am surprised that the Home Office has not asked the British National Party or English Defence League  to pay for the campaign. They would be only too delighted.

While comedians have led the protests, mockery won’t be enough. The silence of Labour and the trade unions is shameful. Chris Bryant, Labour’s immigration spokesman, has only queried whether May’s tactics are legal – but not the whole campaign itself.

Labour figures like David Goodhart, Demos director and former editor of the Blairite Prospect magazine, actually lend their explicit support. Goodhart wrote this week that  the billboards “are necessary precisely because so few do face arrest thanks to today’s legal obstacles. But there is nothing inhuman or racist about encouraging them to come out with their hands up.”

People were clearly angered by the UKBA checkpoints. Onlookers described their shock at the operations, with one member of the public saying it was akin to “Nazi Germany”.  Phil O’Shea told the Kilburn Times: “They appeared to be stopping and questioning every non-white person, many of whom were clearly ordinary Kensal Green residents going to work. When I queried what was going on, I was threatened with arrest for obstruction and was told to ‘crack on’.”

On the eve of last year’s Roma Holocaust Memorial day, United Nations Independent Expert on minority issues, Rita Izsák who is herself of Hungarian Roma origin, said not enough was being done to challenge “a rising tide of hostility and discrimination against Roma in Europe that shames societies.” She added:

“Genocide in Europe began by dehumanizing the other, blaming them for the problems of society, ridiculing their differences, excluding them and surrounding them within the walls of a ghetto, labelling them as evil, filthy and unworthy of the rights and opportunities afforded to others. Today in much of Europe, nearly 70 years after the Holocaust, many Roma experience all of the above on a daily basis.”  

We can add that many minorities in Britain justifiably feel the same way as the Roma, facing a hostile state and becoming a target for the mainstream parties who play on anti-immigration in search of a few grubby votes. We should totally reject this ugly state racism and, if you’re in London this evening, go along to Hyde Park to show your solidarity with the Roma.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

'Virtual' Romanistan the way forward

The commemoration of the murder of Romani prisoners by the Nazis in the Auschwitz concentration camp in August 1944 is a chance to reflect on the future of the Romani people in the UK and around the world. But instead of being overwhelmed by their history, Roma campaigners see their history as offering a way forward not only for themselves, but for the world community.

For the first time, the Nazi genocide of their people, the Porajmos (destruction), is being linked to a ceremony in Hiroshima to remember victims of the atomic bomb dropped on the city.The event is timely. It comes just as the European Roma Rights Centre has detailed attacks against Romas in Hungary, Bulgaria and the Czech and Slovak Republics.

In these and other EU countries, including Italy, a wholesale suppression is “operated from behind a smokescreen of rules over documentation, planning law and even people trafficking,” says campaigner Grattan Puxon,

Amongst the acts of violence are firebombings, shooting, stabbings and beatings, which have left eight people dead and many others injured. The report says there is an increasingly racist climate and that offenders are not being successfully prosecuted.

And lest we think the UK is exempt from anti-Roma attitudes, prejudice is being fuelled by Channel 4’s “observational documentary” Big Fat Gypsy Wedding, now being marketed around Europe. UK Romani campaigners are rightly enraged by the humiliating depiction of Irish and English Travellers and Romany Gypsies in this crass portrayal of their culture. 

Mike Doherty, of the Irish Travellers Movement, in a penetrating deconstruction of BFGW, describes it as “car-crash television that feeds into - and inflames - the extremely visible political and social conflict around Gypsy and Traveller site provision in the UK and nods towards…the death of the idea of multiculturalism.  in Europe”. He adds:

“It uses sleight of hand to allow the viewer to laugh at cartoonish and seemingly racist representations of some of the most marginalised and persecuted ethnic minorities... the prejudiced tropes fly thick and fast.”   

Romas see the 1971 World Romani Congress, held in Orpington near London, as a key historical moment, which placed their culture on the map. It established April 8 as Roma Nation Day. Then in 2000, the Fifth Romani World Congress put forward a ground-breaking claim: non-territorial nationhood.

An extraordinary statement in 2001 rejected the “consubstantiation” of concepts of state and nation, which, it said “is still leading to tragedies, wars, disasters and massacres”.

The history of the nomadic Roma nation cuts through the merging of state and nation. The Roma nation’s dream, could offer to the world community and individuals belonging to other nations a new way for the “new world” of the 21^st century, it added.

Granting the Roma’s request for nationhood, the statement proposes, could enable all of humanity to make a substantial step forward. “We offer our culture, our tradition, the resource which is in our historic refusal to search for a state: the most appropriate awareness of the contemporary world.”

Puxon, spokesperson for the  April 8 movement, is calling for co-ordinated mass action, voter power and an “upgrade in self-representation”. He notes that anti-Roma injustice and abuse is being confronted by activists in Germany, Paris, Prague and Skopje.

Roma numbers within the European Union are set to double by 2050. Puxon believes this will make their demands irresistible. But, alongside other people’s movements, Roma writer Ronald Lee’s dream of a Romanistan – a nation with or without a token state – is gaining momentum.

As Puxon notes, “long-term survival has been the single greatest achievement of the scattered Romani communities” but now the communities can come together to create a virtual Romanistan.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

Roma made scapegoats for the crisis

As unemployment rises and austerity measures bite, the scapegoating of minorities is growing across Europe. High up in the firing line are, as always, members of Europe’s 12 million-strong gypsy and Roma communities.

Small surprise then that a new report commissioned by Oxfam outlines the scale of discrimination levelled against the Roma community in Glasgow.

Having left their native countries in eastern Europe where they face rising levels of violence, sometimes aided and abetted by local politicians, Roma and gypsies from eastern Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Romania have settled legally in Scotland, many of them in Glasgow’s Southside.

But Scotland’s Roma have discovered their reception is sometimes worse than the conditions they left behind. A whistleblower at the Laurieston Jobcentre Plus (JCP),  who has chosen to remain anonymous, was shocked at the levels of prejudice that prevailed.

Staff routinely referred to Roma people as “gypos, scum, beggars, suicide bombers and paedos”, she told the report’s author. They were blatantly discriminated against and not provided with benefits to which they were legally entitled.

Using evidence provided by more than 60 families about the treatment by the job centre staff, the authors say that HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) often treated claims by Roma as fraudulent. Sometimes it held on to passports and birth certificates for several years. The authors found that more than half of all Roma-related benefits decisions were subject to unreasonable delays. The result was that some one in five claimants faced homelessness.

The Govanhill report’s findings bears out the harsh truth about the treatment of Roma throughout western Europe which are detailed in a major new survey carried out by the European Union and the United Nations. The researchers found that:

• only 15% of young Roma adults surveyed had completed upper-secondary general or vocational education, compared with more than 70% of the majority population living nearby
• on average, less than 30% of Roma surveyed were in paid employment
• about 45% of the Roma surveyed lived in households lacking at least one of the following: an indoor kitchen, toilet, shower or bath, or electricity on average
• about 40% of Roma surveyed lived in households where somebody went to bed hungry at least once in the last month because they could not afford to buy food.

And their situation is worse than that of their neighbours regarding jobs, education, housing and health. All in all, "the results present a grim picture of the situation of the Roma surveyed," the report said.

Disadvantages for Roma were apparent across all 11 countries included in the surveys, which polled more than 22,000 households. "That is precisely what we find most shocking. We would have expected to find significant differences, but from the responses of the Roma people themselves and their neighbours, we see few differences,” Ioannis Dimitrakopoulos of the EU Agency on Fundamental Rights said.

Earlier this month, Roma were forced out of a Belgrade settlement by masked attackers who shouted: "Serbia for Serbs! Roma out of Serbia!". Blatant persecution against travelling people has seen the French government defy European law by forcibly deporting Roma back to Bulgaria and Romania.

In Italy, leaders of the Northern League have encouraged attacks while city authorities bulldozed a gypsy camp outside Rome. Meanwhile, in Essex, Basildon council is defying the EU’s commissioner for Human Rights with a new round of evictions.

History is full of ugly examples of how in times of economic crisis, high unemployment and political bankruptcy, racism is the name of the game. We urgently need to develop alternative economic and political solutions to dislodge the 1% who exploit society as a whole and target those at the bottom of the scale seeking safe havens from racism and discrimination.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

Essex council set for ethnic cleansing at Dale Farm

Tensions are mounting as the August 31 deadline for the forced eviction of up to 400 Travelling people from their homes in Basildon, Essex draws near. Campaigners are appealing for a mass attendance at Camp Constant from tomorrow.

The aim is to show support for the 86 beleaguered families, with 100 children between them, who have been living there peacefully for many years. Ranged against them are Tony Ball, Conservative leader of Basildon Council in Essex, communities minister Eric Pickles, the Essex police and notorious bailiffs Constant & Co. In a joint council and police eviction, the Home Office will be paying half the £9.5m bill.

On the other side of the divide are the nearly 400 Gypsies who have the support of the Gypsy Council, human rights campaigners including Liberal peer Lord Avebury, Amnesty International, as well as many other groups and organisations.

The entire area is due to be sealed off while the police-backed bailiffs do their worst. Oak Road, which runs through the Dale Farm site is to be sealed off at both ends except for access to travellers’ homes. Further closures and no-stopping zones are being introduced. Speed restrictions are planned for the adjacent A127 for up to 18 months while the eviction operation takes place.

There are clear signs that Constant & Co, backed by the Essex constabulary and cheered on by local racists and British National Party members, will have their gloves off during the operation. As Gypsy rights activist Grattan Puxon has warned in the Travellers’ Times:

“A dirty, neo-fascist wave, a tsunami of social exclusion is to break over the peaceful Dale Farm community, smashing up lives and drowning the hopes of another generation of Traveller children, presently attending local schools... the ugliest yet act of ethnic-cleansing by a British local authority against an outpost of Europe's nascent Roma nation.”

At a time of huge cuts, when Essex county council is axing 450 jobs and 12 youth centres, why has this council chosen to spend an astronomical £18 million to evict the Gypsy families who have lived peacefully on their site for many years?

It’s clear that Conservatives in Essex feel challenged by rising support for the British National Party shown in recent elections. In Basildon alone 4,000 voters backed the BNP in the last election. You only need to read the comments on the local paper’s website to get a feel for the racist hatred for travelling people. There are those who think that the council’s draconian measures are not extreme enough: “Half a dozen large army bulldozers and a platoon of SAS and it will all be over in half hour”, says one reader.

Last-ditch efforts are being made to avoid the rapidly looming confrontation. Jerzerca Tigani from Amnesty International has pleaded that “the authorities must ensure that their actions do not break international law. They should instead talk to the residents at Dale Farm and reach a negotiated solution.”

Some are taking heart from a victory by a Gypsy who has just won a planning appeal by Basildon. The government inspector reminded the council that it had a duty to provide 62 new pitches for homeless Travellers by the end of this year. But council leader Ball has already shrugged off the inspector’s recommendations in anticipation of the Coalition’s Localism Bill coming into force.

There can be no doubt that the confrontation at Dale Farm, which has been years in the making, is more than an nasty squabble between a Conservative local council and travelling people. It has the makings of a major, military-style, operation backed by local and national state forces against a vulnerable group of people who seek only to live in their traditional way.

We have been here before! Mainstream political leaders of all parties seeking to outflank their rivals on the right in ethnic cleansing will stop at nothing. By doing so, they will open the door to even more sinister forces.

Corinna Lotz

AWTW secretary

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

Protests and strikes are mounting throughout Europe as governments begin to carry out the austerity measures required to attract the investment funds needed to postpone state bankruptcy.

Mounting civil unrest is undermining investors’ confidence in European governments’ ability to impose the brutal measures on their populations.

It is patently clear that agreement on a €750 bailout package to prevent the collapse of the euro is hopelessly adequate to stem the attack on the currency.

Panic moves in the USA, Germany and Venezuela yesterday against speculative investment markets are adding to the global instability as hedge funds look to move their headquarters and activities to the less-regulated East.

The German government banned “naked shorting” – the selling of shares and bonds that the sellers neither own nor have borrowed.

In the US, Chris Dodd, the Senate banking committee chairman, proposed letting regulators decide whether banks should be banned from dealing in all derivatives in a last-minute amendment to the financial regulation bill

Venezuela's Chavez-led government took control of foreign currency trading in an attempt to prevent further attacks on the bolivar.

The International Monetary Fund has forced Romania’s six-month old centrist government to promise cuts to state wages of 25% and to pensions of 15% as part of an effort to meet the requirements for the release of the next tranche of loans in a 20 billion-euro bailout package. This scale of attacks on living standards will prove to be just the down payment.

Trade unions in Romania have called a mass demonstration in Bucharest today. If their forecast turnout of 60,000 proves correct, the protest outside government headquarters will be one of the biggest since the revolutionary overthrow and execution of the Stalinist Nicolae Ceauşescu and his wife Elena in 1989.

Greek unions have called the fourth in a series of general strikes for tomorrow against a 10% cut in wages and spending in the public sector, an increased retirement age, VAT increases and the freezing of pensions.

A group of left-leaning members of the European Parliament – the United Left / Nordic Green Left (GUE/NGL) – are attempting organise co-ordinated protests in the week of 21 to 26 June against the power of the financial markets.

The MEPs have put together a series of left-sounding demands:

• Workers must not pay for the crisis - Make the super rich and bankers pay

• Solidarity with the Greek workers and for the unity of working people across Europe

• No to cutbacks, wage cuts, unemployment and increases in the retirement age

• No to privatisation of public services

• End the dictatorship of the financial markets, credit ratings institutions and the IMF

• Stop the bailouts of the banks - nationalise the banks and financial institutions in the interests of working people

But their intention to send use these protests to send “a clear message to the European establishments” and “building a European-wide resistance to the ongoing neo-liberal agenda” is wholly inadequate.

Financial markets are not susceptible to protest or even actions of the German state, representing the most powerful economy in Europe. Shares on European markets tumbled further, as did the euro, after Germany’s attempts to ban short-selling.

One London-based bond trader commented: "Nobody ever thought they'd do this in a million years and it raises the long-term question of who is now going to want to buy their debt."

A World to Win has a different set of aspirations to the MEPs. We’ll be discussing our plans to replace the dictatorship of financial market and the for-profit capitalist system with collectively owned, democratically managed not-for-profit system at our conference on Saturday.

Gerry Gold

Economics editor

Mafia and Italian state target minorities

A Kafkaesque decree handed down by a magistrate in the town of Pesaro on the east coast of Italy has sentenced two human rights defenders, Roberto Malini and Dario Picciau to prison or payment of a heavy fine.

Their crime? That they interrupted “or at least disturbed a police operation aimed at identifying three foreign citizens and used abusive language towards the officers from Pesaro-Urbino Police Headquarters and interfered in the carrying out of their duty”.

Malini and Picciau had offered support to a young Roma man who was being verbally abused by a police officer. They are joint presidents of EveryOne group, an organisation supporting Roma people and refugees in Italy. Italy’s Roma gipsy communities, which until recently numbered around 150,000 have seen their settlements around the country attacked. According to one estimate, three quarters of Roma camps have been razed to the ground over the last year. The physical attacks followed the introduction of fingerprinting of the Roma community in 2008.

In the south of Italy, it is not only the Roma but large numbers of African migrant workers, the backbone of much of the economy, who face mass removal actions by the authorities. In January riots broke out in Rosarno, Calabria after two African workers were shot. In shocking scenes of ethnic cleansing, 1,000 workers were removed.

But as the anti-Mafia investigator and journalist, Roberto Saviano has noted, the police work in tandem with Mafia rule. In Naples and Calabria, the Camorra and the Ndrangheta control all economic activities, he has shown. Saviano’s book Gomorrah revealed that the tentacles of these mafias run from Italy to China and around the world. In his YouTube film, he describes how the Camorra “is a European problem”.

Unfortunately Saviano is mistaken on one count. He believes that immigrants in the UK have “real and tangible rights”. In grim reality, there almost appears to be competition between Italian and UK authorities to mistreat Roma people plus other desperate migrants and asylum seekers.

Gipsies in Kent are currently threatened with a massive eviction operation at Dale Farm while the treatment of asylum seekers at detention centres run by the UK Border Agency (UKBA) is now so bad that a hunger strike at the notorious Yarl’s Wood detention centre has entered its third week today.

Between 22 and 30 women are now in the 18th day of their hunger strike and fears for their health are growing. The All African Women’s Group (AAWG) and the Black Women’s Rape Project (BWRAP) are appealing for a moratorium on all removals of women involved in the hunger strike at the huge detention centre in at Yarl’s Wood in Bedfordshire. They have documented the ill treatment, including racist abuse, of these vulnerable women and the enforced separation of mothers from their children.

But never fear, all is well. David Wood, strategic director for criminality and detention at the Home Office claims that all the detainees are "treated with dignity and respect, with access to legal advice and healthcare facilities". The women on hunger strike (restyled "food refusers") still have access to shops and vending machines. Looks like Coca Cola is still on tap.

More seriously, in the Manifesto of Revolutionary Solutions, A World to Win calls for a Bill of Rights to protect the rights of all, especially minority communities, and calls for the free movement of people, based on “no borders” principles.

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary

Dangerous days in Italy

It’s been an odd week for the “Il Cavaliere”, as Italy’s prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, is known. In a single day, a key group of top judges attacked his government whilst Italy’s highest court approved racist measures against Roma gypsies.

On Tuesday, Italy’s Superior Council of Magistrates voted 21-2 to denounce legislation which, if passed, would give Berlusconi immunity from prosecution. Berlusconi’s cabinet has approved the legislation and it could be agreed by the Italian parliament by the end of this month.

Antonio Di Pietro, the most respected former anti-corruption magistrate and leader of the opposition Italy of Values party, accused the government of seeking to "destroy the trial system to save only one person” and insisted that Berlusconi should stand trial. Berlusconi has retaliated with a denunciation of what he termed "left-wing" magistrates, calling them a "cancerous growth" in Italian democracy. He is trying to evade prosecution for allegedly arranging a £300,000 bribe to David Mills, estranged husband of New Labour’s Olympics minister Tessa Mills, in return for misleading evidence in earlier corruption trials in the 1990s.

While magistrates in Rome denounced the prime minister’s attempts to evade prosecution, the country’s highest appeal court, the Court of Cassation, ruled that it was acceptable to discriminate against the Roma on the grounds that they were thieves. The ruling follows an announcement by interior minister Roberto Maroni, that all Roma – many of whom are Italian citizens - including children, were to be finger printed.

Leaders of Italy’s Jewish community, among others, have protested at this blatant racism, with its echoes of the past. They pointedly referred to Mussolini’s fascist regime which in its last days helped organise the deportation of Jews to Nazi death camps. Berlusconi, of course, works closely with the Mussolini’s political heirs. The neo-Fascist National Alliance Party leader, Gianfranco Fini, president of the Italian Chamber of Deputies, admires Mussolini as “the greatest Italian statesman of the 20th century”. The National Alliance party is Berlusconi’s main ally in Italy’s ruling People of Freedom coalition. The Northern League, another partner in the government, is also from the ultra-right.

In reality Berlusconi, despite his third election victory, is not even control of his own football club, let alone the southern half of Italy and the island of Sicily. Milan football club fans, the Tifosi, are plotting to overthrow Berlusconi’s ownership of their club. And there is the still-unresolved rubbish crisis in Naples and its surrounding area, Campania. This has raged since December, when dumps overflowed and residents banded together to prevent dangerous incineration near their homes. According to the Italian environmental group Legambiente, illegal dumping in the south of Italy would form a mountain weighing 14 million tonnes if it were collected in one place.

Berlusconi claimed this week the problem will be resolved by the end of July. But the heaps of rotting rubbish are a potent symbol of his inability to tackle any major problem facing the country. And, the rubbish crisis in Campania is much more than municipal mismanagement. It is the visible sign of a secret Italy which neither Berlusconi nor any politician in Rome or Milan controls. The Neapolitan Mafia, the Camorra, according to journalist Robert Saviano, became European leaders in waste disposal in the late 1990s.

In his book, Gomorrah, Italy’s other Mafia, Saviano documents how powerful Camorra clans have seamlessly merged with capitalist globalisation. The Camorra controls contraband goods and pirated goods passing through the port of Naples, in particular shoes, handbags and clothing from China, not to mention drugs and money lending and laundering. Its tentacles reach as far as US, Canada, Brazil, the Canary Islands and Australia.

Last Sunday’s Observer remarked that Berlusconi’s re-election showed the “paradox of democracy” – that “nations get the leaders they deserve”. But surely Italy’s predicament shows more sharply than most that the empty parliamentary charades are the foam on the surface, indicating a deep crisis and instability within the heart of the state as a whole.

As the political shenanigans continue, the Italian economy is plunging into recession, brutally exposed by the global credit crunch and there is nothing Berlusconi’s government can do about it. The state-organised attacks on the Roma are a sinister indication that as the parliamentary system fails to get a grip, the iron fist of Italy’s fascist past is rearing its ugly head once more .

Corinna Lotz
AWTW secretary