DCSF: Participation in Education, *Training* and Employment by 16-18 Year Olds in England.
New Labour and the Façade of Respectability
Ethnic Cleansing in the 21st Century
The determination to stamp out asylum seeking in Britain has heralded a new era for human relations. Yet again racism has featured on the front page of tabloid newspapers, politicians have found a market for racially inflammatory speeches and policies have discovered the space to peddle oppression in the name of immigration. Commitments to values of decency and humanity have been compromised in the search for control as we avoid our responsibility to protect the vulnerable. Today’s message is simple: Britain has found its own brand of ethnic cleansing.
Michael Howard’s speech in Burnley openly announced the Conservatives intention to free the country of asylum seekers once and for all, signalling the end of Britain’s commitment to uphold the principles of the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. This will find favour with New Labour’s plans for asylum seekers which have been consistently heading in this direction since the publication of the white paper Secure Borders, Safe Haven in 2002. The racism inherent in this document speaks volumes of New Labour’s lack of commitment to humanitarian principles and their willingness to abuse people’s basic human rights in the removal of those identified as unacceptable. This is ethnic cleansing as we have defined it; this is the policy of New Labour.
Recent Research on Secure Borders, Safe Haven, has shown the manipulative attempts of New Labour to persuade its citizens that a threat to what it means to be British is being perpetuated by the very existence of asylum seekers. The research shows that building on images of serious crime, the white paper repeatedly (on 219 occasions) refers to criminal acts, from entering the country without the necessary paperwork to that of ‘gangmasters’ and ‘organised crime’. With...