Immigration news

Nigerian military in heavy fighting with Boko Haram militants

Tue, 21 May 2013 18:27:09 +0000

Army says it has faced fierce resistance in its offensive against Islamist insurgents who are armed with weapons from Libya

Nigeria's military has been involved in heavy fighting with Islamist insurgents armed with sophisticated weapons from Libya as it steps up an offensive aimed at flushing out Boko Haram from its north-eastern bases.

"They have been putting up fierce resistance and they are very, very well-armed with weapons from Libya," a senior military official told the Guardian, adding that most of the militants who have waged a bloody four-year battle to create an Islamist state have scattered across the region's semi-desert borders.

A renewed military campaign, including aerial bombardments of Boko Haram training camps in three remote states which were put under emergency rule this month, has led to the capture of almost 200 militants and the death of dozens in a week, according to the military. In one raid, a helicopter gunship was hit by anti-aircraft and anti-tank fire, a military source said.

In a sign of increasing concerns about jihadist movements jumping borders, Nigeria has also asked neighbouring Niger for military support as it seeks to police 870 miles of shared desert borders. With phone lines cut off across most of the three north-eastern states as advancing soldiers try to prevent militants from warning of approaching raids, residents fleeing across porous borders also risks destabilising a region already reeling from a separate Islamist insurgency in Mali.

"It's only by the goodwill of soldiers and by virtue of my position I was able to leave the city. All the entry points to and from [Borno state capital] Maiduguri are blocked by the military but they let me through," said Suleiman, a civil servant who quit the city at the epicentre of the insurgency with his family of four. Outside the city walls, he said, trucks carrying food and market produce were lined up awaiting entrance.

"We have been used to seeing soldiers and checkpoints for the past two years in Maiduguri, but it is having a real impact on the economic activity," he added.

In Maiduguri, where militants are deeply enmeshed in the population, soldiers carrying out house-to-house searches after placing a 24-hour curfew in some neighbourhoods discovered stockpiles of weapons including rocket-propelled grenades, a defence spokesperson said.

"Life has still not returned to normal in these areas, shops aren't open. People are just sitting at home scared and sweating," said Amina, a secretary in the 202 neighbourhood. "They arrested a lot of people here in operations in the night."

Nigeria's military, already assisting a west African-led force in Mali, has asked for help from Niger. "We currently have military operations under way in Nigeria in three federal states to combat terrorism and we would like to have Niger's support in the common fight against these terrorists," said Nurudeen Muhammed, Nigeria's minister of state for foreign affairs. He did not specify what kind of military co-operation that might mean.

Fighting in border areas has prompted a wave of refugees into landlocked Niger, ranked the world's least developed country. "We have already had a huge flood of refugees from Mali, which has had an impact on food security," said Artur Mallam of Save the Children in the Nigerian capital, Niamey, who estimated at least 500 Nigerians had settled in frontier towns in five days.

The tough stance against Boko Haram has proved largely popular so far, with many seeing it as a welcome acknowledgement of the disintegrating security situation in parts of the north. Nigeria has previously used military means to quell religious uprisings, including one in the north's main city of Kano that left some 5,000 dead in the 1980s.

"Our people have no problem with the soldiers coming here as long as they follow the rule of the law," said Ahmad Sabo, a village elder in Borno.

The Nigerian military said it would release all female Boko Haram suspects to help peace efforts.

A spokesperson said: "The measure, which is in line with presidential magnanimity to enhance peace efforts in the country, will result in freedom for suspects including all women in custody."

Monica Mark

Mothers from China, Philippines and Australia give birth to fewer girls but 'no evidence' of sex-selective abortion

Rowena Mason — Tue, 21 May 2013 18:19:04 +0000

Immigrant mothers from China, the Philippines and Australia give birth to fewer female babies than is considered normal but there is "insufficient" evidence of sex-selective abortion in Britain, a Government study has found.

French historian kills himself at Notre Dame Cathedral after gay marriage rant

Tue, 21 May 2013 18:13:03 +0000

Far-right essayist Dominique Venner, 78, shoots himself at altar after writing blogpost condemning same-sex marriage law

A far-right French historian has killed himself at the altar of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris after declaring that more radical action was needed in opposition to same-sex marriage in France.

Dominique Venner, 78, walked into the building at 4pm and put a letter on the altar before shooting himself through the mouth, according to local media reports. Hundreds of visitors were immediately evacuated from the site, which is the most visited Catholic monument in Paris.

The motive for the suicide and the contents of the letter were not immediately clear, although Marine Le Pen, head of the far-right Front National, tweeted her "respect" for Venner and said his death was an "eminently political" gesture.

Manuel Valls, the French interior minister, arrived as officers cordoned off the site. He told French TV: "At the time of this act, the suicide of a desperate man, there were 1,500 people in the cathedral. These people were evacuated very quickly."

He said worshippers and tourists must have been in shock, adding: "Notre Dame is one of the most beautiful symbols of the capital and our country, and we can measure the impact of such an act."

The rector of Notre Dame, Monsignor Patrick Jacquin, said it was the first suicide in decades at the 850-year-old cathedral, which is visited by some 13 million people each year, and perhaps the first time anyone had taken their own life in the building. "It's unfortunate, it's dramatic and it's shocking," he said.

Venner, a historian and former member of the Secret Army Organisation that opposed Algerian independence in the early 1960s and waged a terror campaign against Charles de Gaulle's government, had written on his blog on Tuesday about his anger over the recent legalisation of same-sex marriage, which he called vile.

Referring to a rally planned for Sunday against the law, which also amended adoption rights, he said the demonstrators were "right to shout their impatience and anger".

He also wrote of what he described as the risk of "a France fallen to the power of Islamists", saying that for 40 years all governments and parties, except the Front National, businesses and the church had accelerated north African immigration. He added that there needed to be "new gestures, spectacular and symbolic" to "reawaken the memory of our origins". He added: "We're entering a time where words should be authenticated by actions."

The bill became law on Saturday after a parliament vote and months of street protests, political slanging matches and a rise in homophobic attacks.

François Hollande had made the legislation his flagship social reform, but the move triggered the biggest conservative and rightwing street protests in 30 years, followed by skirmishes near parliament that led to more than 200 arrests.

France is the ninth country in Europe and the 14th globally to legalise same-sex marriage. A concert to celebrate the law was scheduled to be held at Bastille in Paris on Tuesday night.

The country's first gay marriage is scheduled to take place in Montpellier, in the south, on 29 May between Vincent Autin, 40, who works in the tourist office, and Bruno Boileau, 30, a public sector employee.

More than 172 hours of heated debate in the parliament and senate meant the bill was one of the most debated in recent history, with furious clashes and a near fist-fight in the National Assembly.

One rightwing MP claimed the government was "killing children" by allowing same-sex married couples to adopt, while a senator said gay marriage would pave the way for people being able to marry animals or objects.

MPs in favour of the bill – the most significant social reform since France banned the death penalty in 1981 – suffered death threats; skinheads attacked a gay bar in Lille, while rights groups reported a surge in homophobic attacks.

One victim of such an attack, a Dutchman who lives in Paris, Wilfred de Brujin posted a picture of his bloodstained face on Facebook. The image was captioned: "Sorry to show you this. It's the face of homophobia."

Angelique Chrisafis

While the Tories head right, the Republicans are beginning to modernise

Tue, 21 May 2013 14:07:19 +0000

The GOP is embracing immigration reform and is under grassroots pressure to reverse its opposition to gay marriage.

When staring down the barrel of a gun, most political parties seek drastic change to reverse their electoral fortunes. Such is the case with both the Republicans in the United States and the Conservative Party here.

The former has sought to alter its image following a presidential election it should have won. The Tories are still reeling from not winning an outright majority in 2010; still disgusted they share power with the Lib Dems; still concerned that a resurgent Labour Party and UKIP will render them useless in 2015.

These right-leaning parties have taken different routes in order to become winners. One has become more reactionary, peddling its old messages in a drastic attempt to excite the base; the other is accepting that the political parameters are shifting and that it needs to modernise its message.

Yes, that’s right; the Republicans are becoming more liberal than the Conservatives. The Tea Party had its day in the US in 2010; now it’s having its day in the UK in 2013. Two major issues – gay marriage and immigration – clearly show this shift in conservatism on both sides of the Atlantic.

Gay marriage, an issue many in Britain thought had been resolved, once again came to the forefront due to rebellious Tory MPs. One doesn’t need to go far to witness the dread in Conservative eyes at the issue and what it could mean. Gerald Howarth yesterday declared, "There are plenty in the aggressive homosexual community who see this as but a stepping stone to something even further." One can dismiss this as the ramblings of a backbencher, but members of the cabinet have their own gripes: Welsh Secretary David Jones said that gay couples "clearly" could not provide a "warm and safe environment" in which to raise children.

The GOP may not seem as if it is leading the charge in terms of marriage equality, with the Republican National Committee voting to reaffirm the party’s commitment to upholding the definition of marriage as between a man and a woman. Yet there are growing calls for it to embrace gay marriage to attract younger voters. While in Britain Tory activists complain about Cameron’s stance and protest against the reform, grassroots Republicans in the United States are doing the exact opposite: they’re mobilising to embrace gay marriage.

When Rhode Island State Senate passed a same-sex marriage bill in April, all five Republicans in the chamber voted in favour. They had been extensively lobbied by the American Unity Fund, a Republican advocacy group that pushes its elected officials to embrace the gay equality agenda. Contrast what fund organiser Paul E. Singer told The New York Times with the words of David Jones above: "The concept of gay unions fits very well within our framework of individual liberty and our belief that strong families make for a stronger society."

Embracing change is something Conservative Party members appear unwilling to do. A letter signed by 30 present and former local party chairmen ignored the fact that more than 60 per cent of the British public have consistently supported same-sex marriage. It read: "The Prime Minister's bizarre drive to ram this legislation through Parliament, without any democratic mandate and without the support of party members has been a disaster and has driven thousands of voters to Ukip." Do they believe that if put to the vote, the UK would side with their stance?

This focus on the electoral advantages of supporting gay marriage brings us to the immigration debate, something that, alongside withdrawal from the EU, has been a staple of the UKIP manifesto.

One difference between Tory activist attitudes towards immigration and gay marriage is that a tougher stance on the former is supported by large sections of the public, whereas their stance on the latter is a vote loser. While in the US, the GOP is embracing immigration reform to allow illegal migrants to become citizens, in Britain, our public discourse has taken a negative turn. Whereas Tory activists are the Tea Partiers when it comes to gay marriage, the British public is increasingly becoming the Tea Party when it comes to immigration.

A NatCen Social Research back in September showed that British attitudes towards immigration had hardened over the years, with 51% wanting to see immigration levels "reduced a lot", a rise of 12% since 1995. Britons focus particularly on illegal immigrants. Recent Pew Research in the US shows almost 75% of Americans believe that there should be ways for illegal immigrants to stay within the country legally. The United States, a country born through immigration and proud of it, clearly has a different perspective on the matter – but now the GOP, a party whose immigration line was previously similar to that of the Conservatives, is embracing immigrants as potential voters.

In his New Yorker article "The Party Next Time", Ryan Lizza detailed the growing non-white American electorate and how traditionally red states, like Texas, were, in demographic terms, becoming more like blue states: growing numbers of Hispanic, African-American and minority voters who tend to lean Democratic. While some conservatives on Fox News bemoaned the decline of white America, others realised the need to approach these growing minority bases.

This is particularly important in Texas, a huge state whose large number of electoral colleges is needed by every Republican presidential candidate. Steve Munisteri, the chairman of the party in Texas, told Lizza: "You cannot have a situation with the Hispanic community that we’ve had for forty years with the African-American community, where it’s a bloc of votes that you almost write off." As Republicans begin to transform their approach towards Hispanics and other minorities, Conservatives in Britain are beginning once more to bemoan immigrants, pander to UKIP over the EU, and vocally oppose gay marriage. Worrying, large sections of the public also agree with some of these stances.

The British press always loves to focus on the ridiculousness of America: its gun culture, its capital punishment, its racism. Yet as we have laughed and ridiculed those across the pond, we have become blind to the fact that as the GOP has started to move away from its own loony past, the Tories are becoming the new heirs of Sarah Palin and her dropouts.

Torture victims win test case over detention in UK immigration centres

Tue, 21 May 2013 13:23:51 +0000

High court orders Home Office to compensate four asylum seekers and says it failed to follow own policy on torture victims

The Home Office has been ordered by the high court to pay compensation to four torture survivors who were unlawfully held in British immigration detention centres.

More than 100 other torture victims who have been wrongly detained are expected to make compensation claims following the test case ruling. A fifth case was settled at the doors of the court. The amount of compensation is being negotiated.

Mr Justice Burnett, who made the ruling, said he found it disturbing that the Home Office's own rules, which require those who claim to have suffered torture to be medically examined and released from detention, had not been followed.

The case, brought by Medical Justice, a network of asylum detainees and doctors, and the Helen Bamber Foundation, followed the publication of a dossier of 50 cases of torture survivors who had been routinely detained in immigration detention centres.

Medical Justice says it has issued more than 100 "medico-legal" reports prepared by volunteer doctors for detained torture survivors each year who may now claim compensation.

The campaigners say rule 35 of the 2001 detention centre rules, which were designed to prevent torture victims being locked up, have been routinely flouted. Rule 35 requires that those who have been tortured should be identified by medical staff, medically examined and a report sent to UK Border Agency officials who should decide whether to order their release.

The ruling also follows criticism from the United Nations high commissioner for refugees that inadequate screening processes meant rape victims and torture survivors who claimed asylum in Britain could find themselves being led off to a detention centre in handcuffs.

The case has already led to a change in the Home Office guidance on the operation of rule 35.

A Home Office spokesperson said the findings of the complex judgment would be considered very carefully. "Although we are disappointed with aspects of the ruling, we note that the high court has endorsed our wider policy regarding the detainment of former torture victims."

She said that those who had survived torture were normally only considered suitable for detention in very exceptional circumstances "but there may be times when it is necessary to detain individuals before they are removed from the UK."

Burnett said the Home Office had failed to apply its own rules, with independent reports of evidence of torture not being recognised or acted upon.

Jamie Beagent, of the law firm Leigh Day, who represented the torture victims, said that in each of the cases the Home Office had failed to follow its own rules. "Obvious physical evidence such as scarring was missed and reports were not prepared on time or at all. In most cases a detainee's allegation of torture was recorded without any actual medical assessment or concerns raised. In turn, Home Office caseworkers simply accepted these reports without seeking more information and dismissed allegations on the basis that the caseworker did not believe the detainee."

Natasha Tsangarides, of Medical Justice, said: "This judgment demonstrates the contempt in which the Home Office holds the rule of law. All the victims were found to have been imprisoned unlawfully, which shows that Home Office safeguards to prevent the detention of torture survivors are not working."

The cases included that of a Nigerian who had been the driver of a politician who had been forced from office and believed his employee was involved in some way. The victim's father had been killed and he had been tortured and severely beaten and still had injuries and scarring. The high court judge said a DVD of a failed attempt to remove him which included a struggle and the man being handcuffed made for "disturbing viewing".

Another case involved a woman who had fled Bolivia after being raped and repeatedly beaten by an armed drug trafficking gang who had shot her partner after they arrived in London.

Alan Travis

Three former pupils complain of sex abuse by adults at school linked to late Cyril Smith MP

Tue, 21 May 2013 11:58:57 +0000

Three former pupils at a residential school linked to the late Sir Cyril Smith have complained they were sexually and physically abused by adults.

'Shocking example of incompetence' over stockpiled flu drug Tamiflu

Tue, 21 May 2013 11:38:06 +0000

Health officials spent £424 million stockpiling a flu drug that has divided experts over how effective it is, a public spending watchdog found.

Labour should cut its ties with the illiberal Henry Jackson Society | James Bloodworth

Mon, 20 May 2013 10:42:55 +0000

Born of a desire to tackle totalitarianism, the society is increasingly intolerant, yet some Labour MPs still support it

Ever since the Iraq war, and to a lesser extent prior to it, popular perception has had it that humanitarian intervention is a cause célèbre of the right rather than the left.

One might even go so far as to say that, until the 2008 financial crisis hit and reignited the squabble between Keynesians and austerity hawks, the single biggest area of disagreement between left and right was on foreign policy.

"Hawks", "neocons" and "imperialists" were invariably of the right whereas "doves", "peaceniks" and "stoppers" were, with a few exceptions, on the left.

As with most attempts at compartmentalising political ideologies there were of course glaring exceptions. While many on the left were instinctively uneasy at the concept of George W Bush's "war on terror", others conceded that, to paraphrase American author Peter Beinart, liberal principles could be threatened by forces other than western conservatism.

In other words, totalitarianism – whether in its Islamist or secular guise – required a firm, and where appropriate, military response.

When it was first created in 2005, the London-based Henry Jackson Society (HJS) appeared to offer a base for those on the centre-left and right who believed in a variant of "muscular liberalism". Much like the senator after whom it was named, the HJS sought to fuse a concern for social justice at home with a hardline approach to totalitarianism and autocracy abroad.

As a result the organisation attracted broad parliamentary support, including 11 Labour MPs, who continue to sit on the organisation's advisory council to this day.

In February, Labour's shadow secretary for defence, Jim Murphy, even gave a speech on policy at an event organised by the HJS.

According to those who've worked behind the scenes at the HJS, however, in recent years the organisation has degenerated into something that is anything but liberal.

The associate director of the HJS is Douglas Murray, a columnist for the Spectator and Standpoint, who joined the organisation in April 2011. In March, Murray wrote an article following the release of the results of the 2011 census in which he bemoaned the fact that in "23 of London's 33 boroughs 'white Britons' are now in a minority".

It wasn't so much integration that Murray wanted to talk about, however, but skin colour:

"We long ago reached the point where the only thing white Britons can do is to remain silent about the change in their country. Ignored for a generation, they are expected to get on, silently but happily, with abolishing themselves, accepting the knocks and respecting the loss of their country. 'Get over it. It's nothing new. You're terrible. You're nothing'."

In 2009 Murray also described Robert Spencer, the leader of a group calling itself "Stop the Islamization of America (SIOA)", as a "very brilliant scholar and writer".

A number of years before Murray saw fit to praise this "brilliant scholar", the latter wrote that there was "no distinction in the American Muslim community between peaceful Muslims and jihadists".

And just to keep you up to date, this week Murray effectively endorsed Ukip in an article for the Wall Street Journal.

The spirit of intolerance at the HJS appears also to extend to those who have taken issue with Murray's rhetoric.

Marko Attila Hoare, a former senior member of the Henry Jackson Society who left the organisation in 2012, told me that his opposition to Murray's anti-Muslim and anti-immigration views saw him driven out of the organisation.

"It rapidly became clear that Murray had not tamed his politics, and that actually they were becoming the politics of the whole organisation," Hoare told me.

Murray's boss, HJS executive director Alan Mendoza, has form too. In March of this year he claimed that the increasing European Muslim population was to blame for Europe's "anti-Israel feelings", adding that the voices of Muslims "are heard well above the average Europeans".

Eleven Labour MPs are still associated with this organisation. How, one wonders, do the views of the Henry Jackson Society sit with one-nation Labour?

I wrote to all 11 Labour MPs with my concerns about the Henry Jackson Society but none were available for comment.

James Bloodworth

Mandelson's "search parties" are the sort of immigration policy the Mail should adore

Mon, 20 May 2013 09:58:55 +0000

How do you make sure that migration helps? Pick and choose who you invite.

The Daily Mail's Tim Shipman quotes Peter Mandelson at a rally for the think-tank Progress:

In 2004 when as a Labour government, we were not only welcoming people to come into this country to work, we were sending out search parties for people and encouraging them, in some cases, to take up work in this country.

Shipman frames the comments as "a stunning confirmation that the Blair and Brown governments deliberately engineered mass immigration", but I see no evidence of that. Instead, it sounds like Mandelson is talking about the sort of programmes which were aimed at getting high-skilled immigrants to come to Britain – you know, like that one that David Cameron went to India to promote.

The fact is that programmes to attract migrants who could bring rare skills or high investment to Britain are the absolute least that a minister with a portfolio like Peter Mandelson's should have been doing. The BMA estimates a cost of £270,000 to train a doctor, rising to over half a million pounds for a consultant. Those costs are "for the most part, borne by the wider NHS"; so if nothing else, it makes sense to "send out search parties" for foreign doctors to encourage them to come here. So long as the search parties don't cost £200,000 a person, at least.

And it gets even better if you encourage entrepreneurs to come over to Britain. We're talking about people who will bring money to Britain and spend it on creating work. That's basically the holy grail of immigration policy, and something that even the Daily Mail usually supports.

In fact, the extent to which Britain should run "search parties" is entirely linked to the extent to which the Daily Mail's preferred migration policy becomes law. If we have an open borders policy, it doesn't really matter which people apply to work in Britain – the idea is that the growth in working-age population provides a boost to the economy almost regardless of who comes over. But when we start capping the number of migrants, then it becomes much more important that we encourage those who'll provide the most economic benefit to Britain to apply for visas, while discouraging those who might provide only a marginal boost to the economy. That's the logic of the Government's negative advertising in Romania and Bulgaria, for instance.

Of course, none of that matters if your reasons for not liking migrants aren't economic but, er, "cultural". But the argument that Mandelson's search parties "made it hard for Britons to get work" isn't based in fact, but in that curious sort of common sense economics which has little relation to the real world. In reality, they were exactly the sort of policy which the Daily Mails should adore.

The Five Main Issues Facing Modern Feminism

Mon, 20 May 2013 09:11:23 +0000

Despite our collective achievements, sexism today can seem an insurmountable obstacle. These are the fronts we are fighting on.

What exactly is "modern feminism"? Whether you’re with the Times and see it as "hot, rude and self-confident", with that ubiquitous pub-goer who remonstrates on how it’s "unnecessary" because we’re not throwing ourselves under horses anymore, or more inclined to agree with this magazine and say that we’re all just obsessed with gin and cake, there’s no denying that we’re seeing something of a new wave.

"But where is the focus of this new wave?" we hear you cry through mouthfuls of Tanqueray and Black Forest Gateau (which, FYI, is making a comeback), "All anyone seems to do is argue on Twitter!" Well, yes, quite. Turns out that, horses aside, there remain some hefty barriers on the road to 21st century equality. Of course, there are the obvious ones: gin, cake, the inability of many of its members to take the piss out of themselves, that douchebag who is suing his gym, and certain bloggers who think the hashtag #killallmen is the embodiment of empowerment rather than straightforward hate speech (apparently it’s the same as "tremble hetero swine" or "die cis scum" in a good way, both maxims that are unlikely to overtake YOLO as the phrase du jour anytime soon.)

Obviously, the one main issue facing modern feminism is men, and, though we don’t want to kill all or even any of them (nor start a hashtag implying that we might), there’s no point hiding behind words like "sexism" or "patriarchy" when considering who’s really in charge today, and who has the power to prevent us from climbing up there on the phallic plinth beside them. It’s men, pure and simple. But before you start calling us aggressive-looking man-hating harridans (again), let’s break that down a bit for the uninitiated. By the end of this article, you’ll basically be a Gender Studies graduate.

1. The Division of Domestic Labour

Otherwise known as "the final feminist frontier", we actually see it more as the first, because without this one down, gender equality is pretty much a no-go. Our feminist foremothers succeeded in getting some women out of the kitchen and into the workplace, but eight out of ten women still say they do more housework than their male partners, and those with dependent children are even more likely to be slaving away. Contrary to what the Telegraph might say, being part of a couple where you both do an equal amount of housework doesn’t condemn you to divorce, depression, and a dead husband by 33. What we’re talking about when we talk about housework are entrenched ideas that housework and childcare are women’s work and, because women are paid less than men, they’re more likely to give up their jobs to enter a world of underpaid drudgery. It should go without saying that making the choice to stay at home is as admirable as any work, and a choice that deserves social recognition rather than eye-rolling snipes about "desperate housewives", but the point is that many can’t make a choice when their hand is forced financially or socially. Obvious solutions, such as improved provisions for paternity leave, subsidised childcare, equal pay, and just generally being more like Sweden are frustratingly still a long way off.

2. The Media

Yep, that thing that we’ve been banging on about for over a year now: the media does a lot to perpetuate unhelpful stereotypes, and culprits range from Weetabix (whose sexist ad implies your lad can be a superhero but your daughter can’t), to Unilever (skinny women aren’t "real" women and/or dark-skinned women should get paler), to fashion magazines (skinny women are the only women), to the Daily Mail (eight year old celebrates her curves in unauthorised bikini shot - hasn’t she inherited her model mother’s legs?) to the sexist scrutiny of female politicians, to the tellybox (just 18 per cent of TV presenters are women over 50), all of which have real-life implications. One study showed that 70 per cent of girls under 7 say they want to be thinner, for example, with the average British woman worrying about their body every 15 minutes. With body anxiety this pervasive, it can be hard to know where to start when it comes to media sexism (though more women in top positions is a big one). Campaigns against lads’ mags and the Sun’s Page Three have been gaining ground for a while now, and adding your signatures to these is a step in the right direction. Organisations such as Media Smart, Endangered Bodies, UK Feminista and AnyBody are campaigning hard on these issues, while young feminists are lobbying advertisers and engaging in sticker sabotage. Every little helps.

3. The Glass Ceiling

As many commentators rightly pointed out after the death of Margaret Thatcher that Maggie "made it through the glass ceiling, but pulled the ladder up after her": a phrase that reminded us all of how reinforced that glass really is. Thatcher herself wanted none of the feminist cause, frequently referring to herself as an anomaly amongst the weaker sex; women successes of the modern age are slightly more charitable, with Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg ostensibly helping to winch her sisters through the ceiling with her bestselling career advice book Lean In. Although Lean In is based around the idea that - in the words of Eleanor Roosevelt - "No one can make you inferior without your permission", the reality of the workplace in numbers is that 22 out of 197 global heads of state are women; the percentage of women at the top in job sectors ranging from government to journalism to law in the UK and US levels out at 22 per cent; 18 of the Fortune 500 CEOs are female; women returning to work after having children are likely to see their careers progress downward rather than upward. Personal ambition is undoubtedly an asset, but acknowledging that we must fight overarching sexist structures in the workplace - yes, even through "positive discrimination" - is key.

4. Social Inequality

Around 58 per cent of carers are female according to the Office of National Statistics, with women in full-time work still more likely to be carers than men in full-time work. Transgendered women remain extremely likely to be prejudiced against; lesbian women tend to experience higher levels of discrimination in the UK than gay men. Black African women who are asylum seekers in the UK have an appallingly high mortality rate, estimated at 7 times higher than for white women. The most persistent health disparities, according to the latest EHRC report, were best illustrated by the fact that a quarter of Bangladeshi and Pakistani women reported a disability in the last census, rising to two thirds of Pakistani women in older age groups. This rather depressing state of affairs shows that issues of race, disability, sexual orientation and gender (amongst many other things) often combine to create a reality of extreme disadvantage for certain groups. Most of the time, these groups are female.

5. Violence Against Women

Although it is no longer the case in Britain, a large percentage of the world refuses to recognise rape within marriage as a criminal offence. Meanwhile, here in the UK, 89 per cent of regular domestic violence victims are women, and two women a week are killed by a male partner or former partner. The "banter" culture that surrounds violence against women - jokes about "rape as surprise sex"; "I’d have sex with her" recast as "I’d smash it" - doesn’t do this state of affairs any favours. So long as women are disproportionately targeted for violence, our work is never done - which is why the great work of charities like Women’s Aid is so encouraging.

Put like this, sexism today can seem an insurmountable obstacle, despite all of our past collective achievements. But it’s worth remembering that often, just drawing attention to inequality can be enough to get people on board with tackling it; consider the huge popularity of Everyday Sexism. If you don’t know where to start, places like UK Feminista have a campaign for every form of stigma, ranging from discussions of why people assume that Muslim women wearing headscarves "don’t have a voice", to policing plastic surgery adverts in magazines. It’s still a tough world out there for The Ladies, and we hope that we’ve demonstrated how sexism remains at work in 2013. Here's hoping modern feminism will tackle it; as we all know, a fight on many fronts greatly improves our chances.

Who lives in central London now?

Mon, 20 May 2013 08:43:45 +0000

52 per cent of all £2m+ homes in central London are bought by overseas buyers.

Who lives in central London now? Anybody who has strolled the stuccoed streets of Belgravia and the verdant squares of Mayfair will have inevitably asked this question. The streets are filled with imported supercars and the sound of foreign languages, not to mention the thoroughly un-British clothes, shops and restaurants. Belgravia, Knightsbridge, Mayfair and, to an extent, Chelsea are no longer desirable addresses for the well-to-do British, such is the extent to which their prices have been driven up by foreign buyers.

There has been a tidal wave of recent research to underpin this point. Earlier this year, Savills announced that all the property of London’s 10 most expensive boroughs are more expensive than the entire combined worth of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. The capital sees more house deals in excess of £100m than anywhere in the world and in the past year.

Then, releasing its April figures, Knight Frank revealed that London’s ‘super-prime’ market had risen again – 0.7 per cent in April and 7.7 per cent over the past 12 months. This, estate agency revealed, was driven by foreign demand: 52 per cent of all £2m+ homes in central London were bought by overseas buyers from March 2012 to March 2013.

Last week, further research was published by WealthInsight that shows London contains the most multimillionaires (individuals with over $30 m) in the world and the third most billionaires after New York and Moscow. Savills say that 32 per cent of these individuals are not UK domiciled. In fact, only 45 percent of buyers in central London are UK nationals.

Furthermore, anyone who has flicked their way through this year’s Sunday Times Rich List will have noted that most of the top 10 are not British born.

Most of this research tells us what we already know, but who are these overseas multimillionaires who are dropping £50K on an Eton Square apartment. Researching this is no easy task due to the amount of London that is owned through offshore corporate vehicles. Only after months of laborious research could Vanity Fair reveal who actually owned One Hyde Park – the capital’s most expensive condominium.

Of the research that has been published, it should come as no surprise that most overseas buyers are Russian. Knight Frank says that 33 per cent of purchasers of properties over £10m between 2010 and 2012 were Russian. In second place were Middle Eastern buyers at 15.4 percent – in 2012, buyers of properties above £10m, 6 per cent were Omani and 3 percent from both Qatar and Kuwait. Again, no surprises here to anyone who has visited Knightsbridge in the summer, a migration focal point when the heat gets too hot in the Gulf. Buyers from the US are further down the list at 7.7 per cent, but estate agents expect the number to rise significantly over the next five years as the dollar exchange continues to favour such buyers.

Predictable as this research may be, we know one thing – it is not the British who are buying central London. And, as long as prices rise, the more the central London becomes an exclusive domain available only to the capacity of international wealth.

But how long can this continue? Surely there is only so much someone can pay for a studio apartment in Belgravia and finite number of overseas shoppers. The truth is London has an international appeal not only for finance, tax and business, but also lifestyle, education and, importantly for some, political exile. As long as London retains this edge, the longer prices are set to rise.

Cameron has not only lost control of his party, he has lost sight of the national interest

Mon, 20 May 2013 08:26:52 +0000

The chaos in the Conservative Party is a distraction from the real priorities for people across the country: jobs, growth and living standards.

David Cameron had a difficult week - with over 100 of his own MPs rebelling over Europe - but he should listen to the wise advice of former Tory foreign secretary Geoffrey Howe, who savaged his approach to Europe in an article for the Observer.

Given the other headlines - a new low for the PM as "loongate" dominates - the broadside from Lord Howe must almost have felt like light relief. But it comes from the man whose gentle but deadly attack on Margaret Thatcher's approach to Europe marked the point when she lost control of her own party.

Geoffrey Howe is right that the UK's EU membership is "a key point of leverage for this country in the modern world." He is also right to underline that the Conservative leadership is "running scared of its own backbenchers".

During a week in which David Cameron hoped for positive headlines about his visit to the United States, the Tory civil war on Europe at home left his leadership in tatters. It was ironic that while many in his party were calling for the UK to leave the EU, including two of his own cabinet ministers, he was discussing the great benefits of an EU-US free trade agreement with President Obama.

The joke in Westminster last week among Tory MPs was that they did not need to worry about acting against the leadership because it was only a matter of 24 or 48 hours before their position would become Conservative party policy. The rushed publication of a private member's bill order by the PM from across the Atlantic was designed to quash the Tory rebellion on the eurosceptic amendment lamenting the absence in the Queen's Speech of legislation for an in-out referendum. Yet 116 Tory MPs rebelled anyway, effectively declaring that they don't trust their party leader to deliver.

The last seven days are only the latest demonstration of what Howe aptly describes as the "ratchet-effect of Euroscepticism". Cameron thought that his promise in January to hold an in/out referendum at some point in the next four years would satisfy the eurosceptic beast in his party, but it hasn't.

The real lesson of the local elections, and of the UKIP surge, however, is that sections of the electorate are distrustful of mainstream politicians and are concerned above all about jobs, immigration and welfare. The disappointing and worrying unemployment figures published last Wednesday were drowned out by the Conservative row on Europe. The government needs to get a grip and focus on getting the economy on track.

Our EU membership is crucial to our future prosperity. As Howe underlines, given the UK's three per cent share of global GDP and one per cent share of the world's population, the UK's EU membership magnifies our voice in the world, economically and diplomatically.

The CBI's director general John Cridland was right to stress last week that leaving the EU would be bad for British business. Shrinking our domestic market from 500 to 60 million consumers simply does not make sense. The EU also gives us greater weight and bargaining power in free trade negotiations with big and emerging economies. Foreign direct investment, particularly in the automotive and aerospace industries, is attracted to our shores because we are a gateway to the world's largest single market.

The arrest of one of Britain's most wanted fugitives in Spain last week also served as a reminder that our EU membership is vital to the fight against organised crime and other challenges, like climate change, that are impossible for us to tackle alone.

Last week's chaos in the Conservative Party was a distraction from the real priorities for people across the country: jobs, growth and living standards. As Howe points out, it is the national interest, not party management or political advantage, which should guide decisions about our membership of the EU. Cameron has not only lost control of his party, he has also lost sight of the national interest. It falls to Labour to act responsibly, make a pragmatic and positive case for our continued EU membership and warn against the dangers of sleep-walking towards exit.

"Loongate" shows some Tories want to be insulted by Cameron

Sun, 19 May 2013 12:56:24 +0000

There are Conservatives who need routine evidence of treason to justify perpetual rebellion against their leader.

There is a curious paradox to the commotion over alleged remarks from within David Cameron’s inner circle that Tory activists are all “swivel-eyed loons.” The newsworthiness of a statement is normally defined by its being surprising or unusual. The scale of a gaffe is also conditional on the celebrity of its author.

"Anonymous person says precisely what such a person might well be expected to say" is not, under normal circumstances, a front page story. Except on this occasion the vagueness and predictability are precisely the point. There is a fuss because someone in the Prime Minister’s gang – and it doesn’t really matter who because we are supposed to imagine them as a homogenous clique of braying posh boys – said just the kind of thing they would say, wouldn’t they.

Very few people outside Westminster have heard of Andrew Feldman, the object of much speculation in connection with the offending remarks. He is not identified as the speaker in the original news stories and vigorously denies saying anything along those lines. He must, then, be presumed innocent. As indeed Andrew Mitchell deserved to be when he insisted he had never called a police officer a “f**king pleb.” (Some of us said as much at the time.) He is now vindicated.

But as in the “pleb-gate” case, the charge of swivel-eyed lunacy is deadly not because someone actually uttered that formula but because so many Tories want it to have been uttered. The essential charge that the embittered anti-Cameron caucus in the party levels against their leader is that he is not a genuine Tory. His treason has a number of steps. First, he led the party away from the policy preoccupations that traditionally give it moral nourishment – Europe, crime, immigration – with the claim that election victory would be the reward. Second, he failed to uphold his side of the bargain in the 2010 general election. Third, he exploited that result, which should have been his own personal humiliation, fashioning from disappointment a weapon to further punish his party faithful – coalition with the Liberal Democrats.

Viewed from a certain angle, and filtered through sufficient layers of thwarted ambition, this begins to look like a conspiracy. Cameron, it is supposed, must actively wish the truest and bluest section of his party ill. What has been missing to complete the grievance is evidence of malice. Strategic ineptitude has a certain redeemable quality. The path of righteousness is still available to the errant leader if he is open to persuasion, harassment and threat. (As it happens, Cameron has proved himself remarkable amenable to all three.) But a leader who despises his party – who speaks of it with supercilious contempt – cannot be cajoled. He is beyond redemption and must be replaced.

The reality is that a resolute hardcore of Tories, nurtured by the truculent mood in their local associations – and I pass here no judgment on the angle or rotation of their eyes – long ago passed from disappointment with Cameron to venomous hatred. That is probably an unreasonable response to man making tricky political calculations in complex circumstances. It feels more rational to hate someone, however, if it can be plausibly claimed he hated you first.

And it is in this psychological affirmation that the potency of “loon-gate” lies. Cameron definitely didn’t say it. Andrew Feldman insists he didn’t say it. If anyone said it at all, the circumstances were a private dinner of the kind at which incautious remarks are often made by senior politicians about their rank and file. I once heard a very prominent figure in Ukip describe his own party as full of “people who have failed at everything else in life and are feeling angry about it and want someone to blame.” I have seen plenty of Labour shadow ministerial eyes roll in despair at the views held by their own activists.

This alienation of the high command from the rank and file is as normal in political parties as it is in any large institution. One test of leadership is how the arising tension is managed and, in critical moments, eased. Cameron is dreadful at this bit of his job. Why? Partly it it is complacency that flows from his instinctive sense of entitlement. Given his background, there is no more natural vehicle for his ambitions than the Conservative party. Combined, those elements make it inconceivable to him that his Tory credentials could be somehow inauthentic. He is right, of course. If David Cameron doesn't count as proper Tory anymore, who or what does? It is the question to which Ukip fancy themselves the answer.

But the vast majority of Tories are still loyal to their party. They don’t want to be apostates or turncoats. Yet many want to carry on being Conservatives while also rejecting the elected leader of the Conservative party. Tricky. What they need is reassurance that such a sentiment is not rebellious or disloyal; that it is, in fact, a mark of decency and fidelity. They need, in other words, a sign that true Conservatism is antithetical to Cameronism – and what better proof could they have than an expression of withering scorn for true Conservatives from within the Prime Minister’s cosy cabal. Activists and members say they are outraged by the claim that they are mentally unhinged in some way. Justifiably, they feel insulted. Many are shocked. But many also feel vindicated; few are really surprised. The political force of this affair lies not in the wounding nature of the words supposed to have come from one of Cameron's chums, but in the voracious appetite of the Conservative party to feel wounded by them.

People are told migrants stole their jobs – in truth bosses want cheap labour | Deborah Orr

Sat, 18 May 2013 10:41:18 +0000

The Conservatives are determined to be seen as the anti-Europe party, but an EU referendum that took Britain out of the union would be a disaster for the party

Having a referendum on membership of the EU is a bit like having a referendum on membership of the moon's gravitational pull. You can vote to leave it all you like, but it will still be there, exerting the natural influence of its mass. Even China has EU regulations on its statute book, because it needs them to trade with Europe. The best that can be said of a possible withdrawal is that at last Westminster will have only itself to blame. Oh, and of course there will be an end to the regular convulsions of drama over the possibility of having a referendum on membership of the EU. Which admittedly does sound nice.

The poor old Tories – Europe drives them so bonkers. They're like cartoon characters whose eyes turn into pound-signs, except their pupils are shaped like crosses, for votes. The Conservatives are keen to be seen as the anti-Europe party. But Ukip has stolen their thunder. This is a disaster for the Tories for two reasons.

First, it destroys a carefully cultivated Tory image, whereby they can make tough-looking gestures to play to the grassroots.

Second, it destroys the second most important electoral advantage the Conservatives have left (the most important being the first-past-the-post voting system). The coalition has weakened the left's long-standing electoral problem, which was that the leftish vote was split while the rightish vote was a one-stop shop. Ukip has provided a protest vote for disenchanted Tories, just as – up until the moment when David Cameron promised Nick Clegg a rose garden – the Lib Dems provided an alternative to Labour. Now, they are more likely, if anything, to provide another alternative to the Conservatives. Oh, the irony.

Beyond party politics, however, there is not much logic in Conservative Europhobia. In fact, it runs contrary to many of the Conservatives' other long-cherished beliefs. How can people who were so against devolution for the UK's member states be so determinedly in favour of devolving away from Brussels? That's an easy one, isn't it? Devolution within the UK takes power away from Westminster, while leaving the EU will, the poor darlings imagine, give it more. But Scotland will want to stay in Europe, as Nigel Farage's short shrift in Edinburgh this week demonstrated. Wales will want to stay in Europe. Northern Ireland will want to stay in Europe. Withdrawal from the EU won't isolate the UK. It will isolate England, making lukewarm support for full independence, especially in Scotland, a great deal more attractive. The Conservatives, despite their interminable resentment of Europe, really haven't thought this through.

More intractable is the Conservatives' supposed commitment to globalisation and free trade, and supposed horror of protectionism and restrictive practices. Europe, for all its reputation as some kind of dastardly machine for the promotion of crypto-communism, is really just a hothouse environment in which the promised fruits of neoliberalism are forced into ripening more quickly. Whether or not it was right to huddle under the glass with so much of the rest of the continent (and at the risk of labouring a metaphor to death), the process of hardening off out in the global garden is likely to kill a few tubers.

Not Conservative tubers, though. The most deep hypocrisy of the right is seen in its attitude to immigration. The Conservatives are keen to promote themselves as the anti-immigration party, and shake their heads in disgust over the mass immigration that took place under Blair and Brown. However, Labour policy on immigration dates back to the "prawn cocktail offensive", under which New Labour persuaded the City of London that it would look after its interests. Look after them, Labour did, not only turning a blind eye to all kinds of tax dodges, but also obliging the Confederation of British Industry and the Institute of Directors, both of which are institutions stuffed with Tories whose political views took a poor second place to their passion for keeping wages down. Were the Tories to manage to get a referendum on Europe, win it, and put a curb on EU immigration, then, yes, there would be British jobs for British workers, probably alongside a nice non-EU regulation setting the minimum wage at the same level as universal benefit in order to make employing someone pay. People are told that immigrants stole their jobs. In truth, it was employers who wanted a ready supply of workers unused to the living conditions that it took the second world war for the ordinary people of Britain to achieve. The goal of neoliberal globalisation is supposedly a redistribution of wealth around the planet. It also, as the EU itself is discovering, redistributes poverty.

There can be no doubt that the EU is not an entirely successful experiment. It most definitely went too far, too fast. Certainly, there can be few people in Britain who are not now relieved to be outside the eurozone. But, even within Britain one can see the trouble with having disparate parts of the country, with disparate economic needs, all dancing to the same economic tune. Only too well.

The truth is that what's needed is for devolved and local government to be strengthened, and given more fiscal powers. But although the Conservatives like to proclaim their hatred of centralised and distant government, they are not too keen on that. Again, of course, it's all about power. If local government were to become more powerful, then Westminster would find itself either the government of the home counties or simply a mini-EU, passing legislation that allowed the regions of Britain to trade fairly and equally; legislation that would no doubt look uncannily similar to EU legislation. Because it's not the EU that is an extra layer of government that no one really needs – it's Westminster. The European parliament is an institution with a democratic deficit precisely because it exists only to enact what the heads of member states have agreed. Local government in Britain is similarly hampered by the directives of Westminster. Across Europe, national governments are struggling against the advent of their own irrelevance, desperate to stop the leak of any more power either above or below, even as countries fall to government by technocrat. The nation state itself is in crisis, and the denizens of Westminster are the people least likely to see or accept that.

A Britain outside Europe would be governed by multinationals, who would be attracted by low taxes and a population compelled to work, however disabled or ill or elderly they may be. Of course, the Conservatives are keen on a referendum. But they fail to understand that if they got their way, it would be a pyrrhic victory. All those who believe that mass immigration was some sort of politically correct leftwing conspiracy would soon get wise to the fact that they'd been had. In the end, if the Conservatives got their wish, and took Britain out of Europe, they'd be finished.

Deborah Orr

Ukip: the battle for Britain

Fri, 17 May 2013 23:11:01 +0000

They worship Churchill, Thatcher and the right to smoke, they hate gay marriage and Europe: is Ukip the lunatic fringe or the shape of things to come? We meet Britain's newest political tribe

Susan McCaffery lives in Billericay, in Essex. She's 72 and, thanks to the UK Independence Party, a member of the local town council. It's a hot Wednesday afternoon and she is talking to me in her sitting room, where there's an organ in one corner and a few piles of bumf from the Pentecostal church of which she's an enthusiastic member.

Until 2007, she was also the minutes secretary of Basildon Conservative Association. "But I was just so unimpressed with their discussions, with the lack of initiative," she says. "There was no desire to go forward. No vision. In the end, I thought, I can't stand this any longer.

"People want, in a sense, to revert back to how we were," she says. "You know: we won the second world war, only we've lost it now, because Germany's taken over… But we had people then, ready to stand up like Churchill and say, 'This is what we're going to do.' A lot of people in this country are saying, 'Where are the leaders? Where are the people prepared to take a stand?' "

As well as the awfulness of modern politicians, immigration, the amount of money Britain pays into the EU, the alleged failings of multiculturalism, the need drastically to cut the UK's foreign aid budget and the dazzling brilliance of the late Margaret Thatcher, Ukip members mention the second world war a lot. But McCaffery's take on 1939-45 is that bit more interesting. Unprompted, she explains her support of the theory that Britain eventually saw off the Germans thanks to the power of prayer. "The soldiers at Dunkirk were able to come back on a calm sea, whereas the German aircraft couldn't take off from their places because the weather was so bad… There were all sorts of changes that happened, and part of it was a result of people praying and asking God for help."

She's sitting on a small sofa. To her right is James Moyies, Ukip's eastern counties regional chairman, an urbane Scot with a background in Conservative politics, who's also the director of a "field marketing" firm. On her left is 21-year-old Carl Whitwell, who splits his time between working for a secondhand electrical goods outlet in Southend and assisting with Ukip's youth wing (his Twitter feed features the slogan "My only faith is common sense"). Neither looks very comfortable with the conversation, but McCaffery gamely carries on. Ukip members, she says, may not all be Christians, but the party has "a Christian ethos" and a constitution that "goes alongside what the Ten Commandments would say".

A good example, she says, is the party's opposition to gay marriage. "There's lots of Christians standing against that because it's not right," she says. "How can you have two people of the same sex and call them married?" She lets out a sarcastic guffaw.

Britain, she says, should be a Christian country, like it used to be. Should it be a country with other faiths as well? "Well, it is, isn't it? But, you see, other faiths bring with them different… spirits. And that's the problem. God loves all people: he loves Muslims, he loves Hindus, he loves Sikhs and so on. But it's the spirit that humans are not particularly aware of that causes some of these extreme Muslims to get bomb equipment" – there's a brief detour into the recent case of six Islamist fanatics, jailed for plotting an attack on the English Defence League – "and they send hate messages about the Queen and David Cameron. That's a different spirit to the spirit that we're used to. Because it's not a Christian spirit."

Looking ahead, what does she think of Ukip's prospects? Intentionally or not, she uses biblical language. "Oh, you can't stop it. It's a flood."

Perhaps it is. Less than 48 hours after I leave Billericay, Ukip will win nine county council seats in Essex and 147 across England. Its national share of the vote will come in at 23%, only two points behind the Conservatives and nine ahead of the Lib Dems. The face of the party's leader, Nigel Farage – always locked in some expression of extreme merriment and usually inches from a pint of bitter – will once again be staring from all the newspapers. The following week, the government will emphasise measures in the Queen's speech aimed at tackling immigrants' access to benefits, medical treatment and housing. And the Conservative party will be in a state of tortured angst, with at least one MP proposing a Tory-Ukip pact and dozens of others wondering if they should now advocate not just one referendum on the EU, but two. For a day or two, in fact, it will feel a bit as if Farage is getting close to running the country.

Out in the real world, meanwhile, Britain's newest political tribe carries on growing. Ukip, founded in 1993, currently claims a membership of around 26,000, and its spokespeople say that around 1,000 new people are joining every month, many from the Conservative party. As things stand, its key heartland lies in the east of England, a part of the country that has attracted relatively large numbers of migrants from eastern Europe. Ukip's home turf stretches from Kent, through Essex, up to Norfolk and across to Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire; in the latter county, the party is now the official opposition.

Encouraged not just by local election results, but also by its habitual second place in recent parliamentary byelections, the party is in ebullient mood, believing it can top the poll in the European elections of 2014. Even if it is squeezed at the 2015 general election, it has hopes of getting its first properly elected MPs. To some, even though its self-authored Google listing brands it as a "libertarian, non-racist party", it will always give off the whiff of a kind of rightwing politics that often blurs into the lunatic fringe. To its supporters and members, though, it represents an exciting revolt against the metropolitan consensus: not so much a breath of fresh air as a sharp gust of that very British booze-and-fags smell that once wafted from our pubs.

In the Essex town of Wickford, I meet two more UK activists: Paul Downes (64) and Nigel Le Gresley (62), who are having a coffee in the local Co-op supermarket. Until February this year, Downes – a former estate agent – was a Conservative activist, but he had long felt his loyalty dwindling, thanks partly to David Cameron and George Osborne's silver-spooned backgrounds. Le Gresley, whose last job was with BT, says he has voted for the Liberals, Conservatives and even New Labour, but now thinks the political class has floated into its own orbit. "You need to have people who've been there, done that and got the T-shirt," he says. "The lot we've got now haven't been there or done anything. And they haven't got the T-shirt."

There is talk of "the British way of life". As Downes sees it, "A lot of people of our generation – the grey pound, sort of thing – really feel, why has our culture become unimportant?" There is also unease about same-sex marriage. "The problem is, you're going to put churches in a position where it won't be long before someone will go to the European court and say they're being discriminated against," he says. "So it opens up a whole hornet's nest."

The two also talk, at some length, about the EU – once again with the seemingly obligatory references to Hitler and Churchill. "My father fought in the second world war, as millions of people from this country did," Downes says. "We fought to free Europe from tyranny. And we're now in a position where we're almost being… controlled by a communist regime, in my view, where the EU controls everything."

"It may not necessarily be communist, but it's authoritarian," Le Gresley offers. "It's no longer non-democratic: it's anti-democratic."

For some of the Ukip tribe, the need for Britain to leave the EU still pushes all other issues to one side. For others, it takes its place in a mess of grievances shared by many British people. Some of these issues – immigration, wind farms, even the smoking ban – are reflected in Ukip policy. Some aren't: there is an obvious tension between, say, Ukip members' and voters' complaints about the low end of the job market, and the party's avowed belief in free-market economics. But for the time being, such tensions come down to matters of mere nuance: Ukip is now the party for a lot of people who have simply lost patience with politics and, as such, its supporters can apparently project on to it anything they like.

Keith Gibbs, 65, joined in 2012. He's an ex-policeman and another disciple of Margaret Thatcher. "She looked after the armed forces and the police, and I'm all for that," he tells me, nursing a lunchtime pint in a pub garden in nearby Rayleigh. "I mean, we're becoming a third world country really, the way we're going."

How? "Our military's going down and down, and you're going to get to a stage where we won't be able to defend ourselves."

Throughout this conversation, Whitwell from Ukip's youth wing maintains a slightly irritating presence, perching on the edge of the table and trying to put a PR gloss on what Gibbs says. "If that happens," he says, to no one in particular, "we'll have to rely on the European Union."

We move on to immigration. "There's lots and lots of people coming here, and they're just coming for the benefits," Gibbs says. "Take something like that woman who came here: she's got four kids already, she's expecting twins, and that cost the government – us, taxpayers, the NHS – £200,000, to treat her to have twins."

"We don't blame the people for doing it," Whitwell says.

"You can't blame them," Gibbs adds. "It's the bloody system."

Once home, I spend time trying to find anything online that corresponds to Gibbs' tale about the woman with four kids and twins on the way, but find nothing. The same goes for his claims about what he has seen at a major public-sector employer in Southend.

"I used to watch people come in, to the pay desk," he says. "Every Friday, they used to come in, and sign, and get a brown envelope. I had a look one day. There was a big list, five pages long – people who just used to come in and get paid money." A pause, for effect. "All immigrants."

Next, I am introduced to 52-year-old Jamie Huntman, a native of Barking who owns a timber business near Thundersley, a few miles south of Rayleigh. His pride and joy is a prefab dog-grooming parlour that he has put up on one side of his yard and handed over to a local woman who now turns a £1,000-a-week profit. Neatly dressed in a shirt, tie and green-brown slacks, Huntman explains his long fight over this new venture with Essex county council's planning department, which seems to have nudged him in Ukip's direction.

As with so many Ukip members, he pines for the days when politicians had tasted at least a flavour of lives like his. "They go straight from Eton into Oxbridge and into Westminster," he says. "I've always been of the opinion that you never judge a man until you walk a mile in his moccasins. But what do they know about standing in my yard, serving wood or grooming a dog?"

A few days ago, I remind him, the somewhat notorious Ukip MEP Godfrey Bloom appeared on 5 Live, reiterating his previous claim that employers could not be blamed for not wanting to give jobs to women who might then get pregnant. What did he make of that?

"He's a very entertaining man. I always watch his clips on YouTube. He makes his point; he overstates his point sometimes. But the fact is… the hardest job a small business has is finding staff. And remember: if someone comes to us and then gets pregnant – if they're off work for quite a number of months, it's very difficult to survive. It's just pounds, shillings and pence, really.

"It's very difficult running a small business," he says. "There was something in what he said. Maybe the way he said it was… Well, who am I to say? He's an MEP and I'm just a man in Thundersley."

Two days later, Huntman is a little bit more than that. Alongside Keith Gibbs, Nigel Le Gresley and six others, he is a freshly-elected Ukip county councillor and the party's deputy leader in Essex, having beaten a sitting Tory called Bill Dick. When I speak to him on the phone, he sounds amazed. "I've got to admit I was shocked," he says. "Though not as shocked as the Tory, who seemed to go very pale. My feet haven't touched the ground." As far as national politics is concerned, he sounds equally surprised. Ukip, he says, "seems to be steering the Tory agenda at the moment. They can't say anything without mentioning one of our policies. It's a force for good, I think."

"It all started in Huntingdonshire," Farage said recently. He was referring to the miracles worked by his party in the small Fenland town of Ramsey. It's now the party's key eastern redoubt, as proved by the sign that greets you as you enter the place: a huge board on a patch of grass that carries two messages: "Let's put Britain first for once" and "Thank you" – a reference to the avalanche of votes that came Ukip's way on 2 May. Since 2011, Ukip has run the town council here, with nine out of 17 councillors – and as things stand, it remains the only elected authority the party controls.

For the past six years, Ramsey has been the home of Lisa Duffy and her partner Peter Reeve, who moved here from Manchester and have been Ukip members since 2004. She is the mayor of Ramsey and Ukip's national campaign director. He sits on the town council, the local district council and Cambridgeshire county council: on 2 May, he scored 67% of the local vote, the highest share managed by any Ukip candidate. As well as working full-time for a Ukip MEP, he serves as Ukip's national nominating officer, the person ultimately responsible for signing off its candidates for elected office; his mother, Shirley, is one of Ramsey's Ukip town councillors. Among Duffy and Reeve's six children is Jazmine, 13, who has already spoken at Ukip events: her mother says proudly that she recently gave Farage six years' notice, suggesting she wanted to be the leader before she turned 20.

Reeve, 36, is an animated, engaging presence, dressed in a suit, waistcoat and yellow and purple Ukip tie. He comes from a farming family in Norfolk; he says his father would always put up Conservative hoardings at election time, until the fall of Margaret Thatcher. "That hurt my family, absolutely," he says. "They said they wouldn't help the Tories any more." His basic politics, he explains, is "libertarian". He goes on: "If you're asking me rather than the party, I think all taxation is immoral… I genuinely believe that if there's a real need for people to give money, then people will give it if they're not forced to."

This takes me aback. He really thinks that an entirely voluntary system could fund, say, schools, hospitals, the police and the roads? "If people needed roads and there wasn't this comfort blanket of the state providing everything, they'd be built." What about the NHS? "I'm probably straying too far off policy now. But people would donate to make sure people were fit and healthy."

I came to Ramsey a couple of months ago and spoke to local people about Ukip's success: I half-expected to find a boiling hotbed of anger about immigration and Brussels bureaucrats, but instead found a sleepy, apparently almost apolitical place, where people's biggest moan was the dire effect a big Tesco has had on local shops. On the high street named the Great Whyte, where most of the shops shut at 3pm and human traffic is usually no more than a trickle, people tended to put the party's rise down to the hard work put in by its activists, and Reeve in particular.

He is renowned for coming into town every morning and evening to open and shut the public toilets, which now feature signs displaying his mobile number. Before Ukip won control of the town council, Duffy says, he would "clear up dog muck, do litter-picks and clear out the cemetery – if someone had a problem, they could turn to him". Among his most frequent phone calls, she says, are those from people who have locked themselves in the loo.

I speak to both Duffy and Reeve outside a local cafe with the worryingly European name the Rendezvous. Immigration, Duffy agrees, is much more of an issue up the road in Peterborough, though in Ramsey "it's getting stronger. There are more people talking about it now than when we moved here. Class sizes are going up. They're seeing more immigrants come into the town. But it's not on the same level as, say, Peterborough or Corby. When someone says to me, 'There's three immigrants in our class' and they're worried that their child might be kept back because they've got to have extra support to help them speak English, I'm just like, 'You're actually quite lucky that there's only three.'" Does she know, say, any Polish people? "One or two. But purely because they're in the same class as our children."

Duffy – who's 44 and used to be a store manager for TK Maxx – has been in charge of Ukip's campaigning in all those recent parliamentary byelections, where it has sounded its customary loud notes about the supposed multitudes soon to arrive from Romania and Bulgaria. Given that in some places there are real tensions around immigration, not to mention outbreaks of violence, does she ever worry that Ukip's campaigning might make things worse?

"I think it's how you put that message across," she says. "It's about talking to people, showing them what the effects are, how it's having an effect on the benefits system, on the housing system: talking through real-life situations. Saying, 'It's not the people – it's the open-door, mass immigration policy the country has got. That's what's got to change.' "

In Eastleigh, where the campaign Duffy commanded led to Ukip beating the Tories to second place, its electioneering included one leaflet claiming: "Next year, the EU will allow 29 million Bulgarians and Romanians to come to the UK." The number was derived by simply adding together the two countries' populations. Which is alarmist, to say the least, isn't it?

"It's not a lie," she says.

But the implication is that a lot of those 29 million people will soon arrive. And that's not going to happen.

"We were very clear in that leaflet that the projected numbers are currently sitting at around 4 million," she says. "That was based on the research that Paul Nuttall [MEP and Ukip deputy leader] did when he went over to Romania."

Back at home, I'm reminded that official figures have estimated initial numbers at around 13,000, though government ministers have expressed doubts about that number. The famously hardline pressure group Migration Watch reckons that numbers of new arrivals from both countries will be in the region of 250,000 over five years. Back in Ramsey, I ask the same question again: isn't Ukip needlessly scaring people?

"It does scare people. But not unnecessarily. It's just being honest."

But 29 million is its headline figure. And if you didn't know any better, you'd look at that leaflet and think that many people were about to arrive.

"Yeah," Duffy says. "But the whole point is, you grab the attention with the headline and then hope people will read the article underneath and find out more about it."

One or two Ukip candidates in the local elections were accused of very rum doings, and some were dropped. One woman was suspended after online posts were discovered blaming the second world war on "the Zionist" (she claimed her account was hacked); another had saluted Russia for banning gay pride marches and offered the opinion that homosexuality could be kept at bay via vigorous exercise. Another was alleged to have been pictured giving a Nazi salute, though the Ukip leadership accepted his claim that he was actually trying to stop his girlfriend taking a photograph of him "imitating a pot plant".

Given Reeve's job as the national nominating officer, he must have had an interesting time. "We were expecting a significant amount of risk from fielding a lot of candidates," he says. "We didn't have the capacity to vet every candidate at council level… We had to take people at face value, and we let the local branches vet them as much as they had the capacity to do it." The selection procedures for next year's European elections, he says, are much more rigorous – and as far as the past histories of members are concerned, the BNP and the English Defence League are both proscribed organisations.

So how often has he had to throw out people's membership applications? "Oh jeez," he says. "All the time. There have been some really sad cases of kids, 19 or 20 years old – a couple of years ago, they joined the BNP, and when they went to a meeting they were all racist nutters, and they left. I've had numerous conversations with these kids and said, 'Look – as much as we would defend your right to join a nutty organisation, you will have to take responsibility for that.' "

At the general election of 2015, Duffy thinks Ukip's share of the vote will be higher than the Lib Dems'. "Realistically, wouldn't it be nice to get between 10 and 15 MPs elected?" she says. And in terms of the big forces of history, she knows why she and her comrades put all the effort in. "Why did my grandad go to war?" she wonders. "What did he fight for?" From there she's off, into familiar themes: how much money we give to the EU, Britain's foreign aid budget.

From the next table, there comes a sudden movement. The two women sitting at it are probably old enough to remember the era of Spitfires, rations and prayer supposedly stilling the Channel; given Ukip's local successes, I'm half-expecting them to come over and offer Duffy and Reeve their congratulations. But no: they are trying to enjoy a quiet al fresco fag. "Do you think you could keep it down a little bit?" one says, suddenly looking angry. "We can't hear ourselves." •

John Harris

Jimmy Mubenga security guards had racist jokes on their mobile phones

Fri, 17 May 2013 23:07:07 +0000

Inquest hears jokes deriding blacks, Asians and Muslims when G4S officers are asked to read from their mobile phones

A G4S security guard who was restraining an Angolan man who died as he was being deported from the UK had 65 racist jokes on his mobile phone when it was seized by police.

Terry Hughes, one of three detention custody officers in charge of Jimmy Mubenga's forced deportation in October 2010, was told at an inquest at Isleworth crown court on Friday to read out a selection of the texts, which included offensive language directed at black, Asian and Muslim people.

Karon Monaghan QC, the assistant deputy coroner for Hammersmith, west London, said the texts contained "very racially offensive material". The court heard that some of the texts had been sent by other detention custody officers.

Hughes is the second G4S officer involved in Mubenga's case to be found with racist jokes on his mobile phone. This week, Stuart Tribelnig was found to have a string of texts deriding black, Pakistani and Muslim men.

When questioned in court, Hughes and Tribelnig said they had not read all the texts, although both had forwarded some of the material. They also said they did not know how to or never bothered to delete texts from their phones. Hughes said that, although the texts suggested "a great deal of racial hostility", he was not at all racially hostile.

Mubenga, 46, died on a plane at Heathrow as it waited on the runway. He had been restrained by three G4S officers – Hughes, Tribelnig and Colin Kaler – for about 35 minutes.

The Angolan had been in the UK since 1994 and lived in London with his family. He was convicted of actual bodily harm in 2006, and a decision was taken to deport him at the end of his sentence. By September 2010 the appeals process had expired. Two weeks later he boarded the plane at Heathrow, at about 7.30pm, accompanied by the three G4S guards.

Once on the plane he was allowed to go to the toilet and use a mobile phone. The guards said he had acted as a gentleman up to that point. However, the jury was told that shortly afterwards he began a struggle in an attempt to get the deportation cancelled.

Hughes described how the three guards had tried to restrain him by using handcuffs and forcing him to sit in his seat. He said Mubenga at some stages had his head below the level of the television screen on the back of the chair in front, but insisted it was Mubenga himself who had forced his body into that position, one that is known to carry the danger of asphyxiation.

Hughes told the court Mubenga was shouting thoughout the restraint although he could not remember what Mubenga was saying. But in an earlier police interview read out in court he had said: "All the time Jimmy is shouting and screaming, 'They are killing me – I am going to my death'." After hearing the statement, Hughes accepted that Mubenga "must have been shouting that".

Henry Blaxland QC, representing Mubenga's family, asked Hughes whether Mubenga had complained about being unable to breathe during the struggle and whether one of the guards had replied: "If you cannot breathe how can you talk?"

Hughes said he did not remember that exchange taking place.

Blaxland asked if Hughes and the other guards had been trying to "teach Mubenga a lesson" after he had betrayed their trust by starting the struggle on the aircraft.

Hughes denied the allegation and also denied that any of the guards had pushed Mubenga's head down during the struggle, insisting that Mubenga forced his own head down.

But Blaxland asked Hughes if he and the other guards had "come up with this" to explain what passengers on the plane might have seen: "Were you trying to come up with an explanation for what you thought people would have seen – a man bent double in his seat?"

"No sir," replied Hughes.

Blaxland said the truth was that the guards had been pushing Mubenga down. Hughes again replied: "No sir."

The struggle between the guards and Mubenga continued for more than half an hour before Mubenga went quiet and Hughes thought he had become "resigned" to returning to Angola.

However, he said the guards realised something was wrong before the plane took off and raised the alarm. The plane taxied back to the terminal stand, where emergency teams were called.

Mubenga was pronounced dead some time later.

In court Hughes broke down as he recalled the moment, that evening, when police told him Mubenga had died, and the inquest had to be suspended.

He was asked by counsel for Mubenga's family if he had been crying because he knew he had caused the death. He replied: "Not at all, sir, no."

The three guards were subsequently arrested "on suspicion of criminal offences" relating to Mubenga's death. However, the Crown Prosecution Service decided not to press charges and no further action was taken.

The inquest, which is due to last eight weeks, continues.

Matthew Taylor

NHS: Poles, paracetamol and the myth of health tourism

Fri, 17 May 2013 23:06:21 +0000

Migrants' cost to the NHS is far smaller proportionally than Britons because they are younger, less likely to be ill or to have started a family. The service is also not quite as good as in Poland, apparently

Never mind the stupid EU referendum, there were some truly regrettable things about the Queen's Speech: chiefly, the proposals to tackle benefit and healthcare "tourism" (modern Conservatives use this previously bland word, used for simply exploring foreign countries, as a euphemism for deliberate exploitation. Who knows where tourism tourism will stand, once this mucky debate is over?)

There are classic arguments against the whole premise. EU and non-EU migrants combined cost the NHS only £7m; their cost is far smaller than their number, proportionally, because they are younger, on average, than indigenous Britons; they are less likely to be ill and they are less likely to have started a family.

But a subtlety has been missed, which is the assumption that EU migrants, specifically Polish people (as the largest single group) are coming from a third-rate health service of their own to a first-rate one of ours. This is, apparently, not the case; indeed, many Polish immigrants will go to some lengths to avoid NHS "tourism", up to and including paying for their care.

Since 2007, private Polish medical centres have sprung up all over the UK; there are at least 20 in London, they exist in Manchester, Reading, Bristol and Glasgow. Nobody collects a database of them, but wherever there's a Polish community, there's a private clinic.

Ewa Rybol, 27, is the practice manager at Tooting Medical Centre. "We get Canary Wharf Polish here. They're developing their career here, they probably work in a bank. But we also have people who do simple jobs, waitressing, building, cleaning." The dermatologist at the practice (who wished to remain anonymous) agreed: "90% of the people I see don't make a lot of money, but they are still willing to pay, even when they speak good English."

The language barrier is usually raised first, when people are asked why they'd go private, but I think that's out of politeness. Certainly Alicja, 25, who paid £60 to see a dermatologist in Tooting for her eczema, sounded less than plausible when she explained: "I wasn't sure that I would be able to understand a GP. Medical language can be quite specific." (her English was perfect).

The dermatologist elaborated: "I wouldn't want to make a generalisation, but where language isn't a problem, there is sometimes disappointment. GPs don't refer people to specialists. There must be a reason for that, and I guess it's economical."

Piotr Miklewski, a 29-year-old practice manager from PMC in Ealing, said: "There is this stereotype that the UK prescribes paracetamol for everything."

Wiki, 29, who broke her rib ice-skating, said: "And they don't x-ray you. In Poland, you would always be x-rayed for a broken rib in case it was endangering your lung". She added, "The doctor told me to take a paracetamol".

Miklewski said the differences between the two health systems, Poland's and the UK's, were most noticeable when it came to pregnancy. "In the UK, you don't do the ultrasound scans until a certain age of the pregnancy, which we do almost from the very beginning.

This is one of the things that mainly drives people to go to see our gynaecologist. They can expect to have a scan from the very first moment that it is required."

Theresa Drzewiecka, 55, is a nurse at the Tooting practice, and said that people also saw her because they were confident of her training. "They think maybe if you go and get a blood test from an inexperienced nurse, it will hurt. If you see a Polish nurse, you know it won't hurt" (in Poland, they train for five years and then have three to four years' apprenticeship; this is somewhat longer than the three-year degree course it takes in the UK).

Many people bring up waiting times, both for a doctor's appointment – "you can wait a week for an appointment," Alicja said, "you would never wait more than a day in Poland".

And there is much more acquiescence in Poland to the idea of paying for some things but not others.

You can see this from the clinics themselves. In Tooting, it is certainly sprucer than the local GP's surgery – more like a beautician than a doctor – but it doesn't look like Harley Street and there is none of the thick-carpeted hush that bankrupts you. "We have really nice prices," the receptionist, 28-year-old Marta Baczewska says. "English customers come in here as well, when they hear about us."

Personally speaking, I would never knock the NHS for its paracetamol name, the reputation it has for never referring anybody, never prescribing antibiotics, never scanning anyone and trying not to waste x-rays. It makes us sound thrifty and stoic.

But if we think people are travelling here to make the most of our health service, we're dreaming.

Zoe Williams

Asylum-seeking children are being disbelieved – and classed as adults | Diane Taylor

Fri, 17 May 2013 16:30:40 +0000

Social workers, tasked with protecting vulnerable children, should not be drawn into the culture of disbelief around asylum

A report published today says that hundreds of vulnerable children have been put at risk because social workers and others have disbelieved them when they told the truth.

In the report by Coram Children's Legal Centre, social workers have been found to have wrongly classified hundreds of asylum-seeking children as adults. As a result, some of these children have been left homeless, denied the right to go to school, unlawfully locked up in adult detention centres and placed unsupervised in adult accommodation where they've been abused.

Social workers have a very difficult job to do and whenever an appalling child death hits the headlines implicating social services, one or two social workers are named and shamed, sometimes unfairly. While thankfully there have been no gruesome child deaths here, it is disturbing that some social workers are getting things wrong far too often. The report reveals that one London borough alone – Croydon – has paid out £1.2m in legal costs between 2010 and 2012 after social workers wrongly assessed children to be adults. The council is thought to have been involved in hundreds of legal challenges on disputed-age children. The Home Office has been guilty of this practice too and is still detaining children unlawfully in adult detention centres. According to the Refugee Council, 24 children were unlawfully detained as adults last year and nine in the first three months of this year.

Classifying asylum-seeking children as adults saves councils money as they don't have an obligation to support them, and allows the Home Office to forcibly remove them from the UK.

Taking a tough line against migrants is a vote winner for all parties and the Home Office is keen to flex its political muscles here. But social workers, tasked with protecting vulnerable children, should not be reinforcing this tough political stance.

"The extent to which the UKBA culture of disbelief appears to have crossed over into social work is striking," the report states.

The importance of believing children has been emphasised recently by the director of public prosecutions, Keir Starmer, in relation to child sex abuse cases. He has warned that the pendulum has swung too far against children. Recent high-profile child abuse cases have showed that initially the child victims were not believed, at least in part because of their troubled backgrounds and lifestyles. For different reasons the odds are stacked against people believing asylum-seeking children too. It is disturbing to think that children who have fled conflict zones, suffered persecution and perhaps witnessed atrocities against their parents and other family members, arrive here all alone seeking protection and are turned away and told they are liars. One Nigerian girl who was trafficked to the UK as a domestic slave at the age of five was not believed when she finally escaped and told social workers she was 15. She was told she was lying and placed unsupervised in adult accommodation where she was sexually abused and became pregnant. Only after that was it accepted she had told the truth about her age all along. Another 15-year-old boy from Afghanistan was deprived of schooling for three years and placed in two adult detention centres where he was terrified and traumatised. Only after three years was he finally believed.

Coram Children's Legal Centre is calling for national statutory guidance about these age assessments and a shift in emphasis so that children are believed unless there is a real reason not to accept what they say.

The Home Office insists that the wellbeing of children is paramount and that they are working to improve the system. Croydon council acknowledges there are difficulties "exacerbated by the current legal framework".

Let's hope the rhetoric translates into real changes so that hundreds of children who have had the trauma they suffered in their home countries compounded by their treatment here can at last be dealt with fairly.

Diane Taylor

'One Nation' Labour's policy blueprint

Fri, 17 May 2013 10:48:36 +0000

Party faces tough decisions on spending cuts, migrant labour exploitation and repealing government health reforms

Economy

Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor, is determined not to make premature commitments and his primary goal remains to destroy the credibility of George Osborne. Two years ago he offered a five-point plan, including a temporary VAT cut – at the time seen as an emergency measure. The aim is to show that Osborne's austerity plan was too quick for a slow economy to absorb.

Balls faces two big moments. The coalition summer spending review will set out the spending totals for 2015-2016, and Balls will be asked whether he will match the departmental numbers. He intends to say something more about this thinking shortly. But he faces a decision on whether he is willing to cut spending as fast through the next parliament as the coalition or instead raise extra taxes, or countenance extra borrowing.

Immigration

The party has promised action against employers who exploit migrant labour to undercut domestic labour, to tackle gangmasters and for a more rigorous enforcement of the minimum wage laws. It has backed ending immediate claims for jobseekers allowance by new migrants and stopping child benefit payments to those with children in other EU countries.

It is looking at requiring any employer taking on EU migrant labour also to take on a British apprentice.

The shadow home secretary, Yvette Cooper, has not said yet if she will retain a coalition target to get net migration down below 100,000 per year by the time of the next election. Cooper has hinted Labour would remove overseas higher education students from that target so making it more obtainable.

Health

Andy Burnham, the shadow health secretary, faces the dilemma of repealing the government health reforms and integrating health and social care without imposing another top-down reorganisation.

A single personal budget to fund services rather than simply paying hospitals for admitting patients, would create a powerful incentive to shift services out of hospitals into the community and at home, and towards prevention and early intervention. Burnham has appointed an Independent Commission on Whole-Person Care led by former Department of Health clinical lead for efficiency and productivity Sir John Oldham. Its first report will be this Autumn.

Labour supports a minimum alcohol price, standardised cigarette packets and is consulting on maximum salt and fat contents, as opposed to fat taxes.

Transport

Policies include: banning rail companies from raising fares beyond a cap set by ministers; a legal right to the cheapest ticket; bringing station car parking charges within regulation for the first time; enabling councils to set bus fares and requiring bus companies to deliver a concessionary-fare scheme for 16-19-year-olds in education or training. There is a proposal to run the InterCity East Coast rail services on a not-for-private-profit basis as a public sector comparator.

Support for third runway at Heathrow has been dropped.

Welfare

Labour backs a cap on individual welfare benefits, and will require the current 155,000 people who have been unemployed for over two years and who are over the age of 25, to work. The same applies to the 77,000 young people who have been unemployed for a year or more. It also says it supports a regional welfare benefit cap.

The aim is to look at the drivers of higher benefits – a mix of ageing society, more people living in high priced social housing and unemployment, rather than the level of benefits. The party is also looking at a greater contributory element before benefits are made available, but only in limited areas.

The party has criticised the introduction of universal credit, but is unlikely to tear it up.

Police and Justice

Lord John Stevens, the former head of Metropolitan Police, is chairing Labour's independent commission into policing looking at different responses needed at local, regional, national and international level to deal with changing patterns of crime and disorder. It is likely to find police and crime commissioners are a waste of money and create confusion. Cooper has raised the idea of a new Police Standards Authority to replace the IPCC, with stronger powers to investigate claims of dishonesty.

The shadow justice secretary, Sadiq Khan, has spoken of greater emphasis on restorative justice, reinstating the youth justice board, and introducing a similar body for women offenders. Clegg's travails on constitutional reform have reduced Labour appetite for such changes.

But Angela Eagle, shadow leader of house is looking at political alienation including voting on Sundays and in supermarkets.

Education

Labour is likely to back creating a new middle tier between the Department of Education and schools on the basis that Whitehall cannot monitor underperformance in thousands of independent academies. They say that local authorities should be a voice for local communities and parents, a planner and commissioner of school places and provider of schools especially in the primary sector. But the party wants to increase collaboration between independent academies so that they share experiences. They are critical of free schools if unplanned – but say 240,000 new primary school places are needed by the next election.

It also supports incentives for teachers to work in challenging schools or poorer communities by providing a rebate on teacher tuition fees. Supports a new Royal College for Teachers to provide advice on high quality teacher training and professional development. Labour child care commission, set up in May 2012 will propose expansion of hours for 2 and 3 year olds.

Industry

Labour is now willing to embrace an industrial policy as part of its responsible capital agenda. It supports a properly funded British investment bank with funds distributed through a new network of geographically mandated regional banks, a British version of the German Sparkassen.

The party wants strengthened Local Enterprise Partnerships built around city region clusters, modelled on Lord Adonis's plans for the north-east. Labour's Cox review proposed extending the governance code so that sufficient long-term incentives are incorporated in the pay of executive and non-executive directors; changes to takeovers rules and reporting requirements , including an end to quarterly reporting, improving the functioning of equity markets through changes to the tax system;

It plans measures to encourage support for, and investment in, small businesses; infrastructure investment decisions possibly farmed out to an independent commission, currently being examined for Labour by Sir John Armitt, who headed up the Olympic Delivery Authority; proposals on apprentices and proposals for a "Technical Baccalaureate" in schools and colleges to be achieved by students by the age of 18.

Other issues to be addressed

• Trident replacement – whether to back a full-scale replacement being proposed by the Conservatives, or a more scaled-down option similar to the one expected to be proposed by the Liberal Democrats in a review led by Treasury chief secretary.

• Votes at 16 – Ed Miliband supports it, but it has yet to be formal party policy.

• Abolition of zero-hour contracts, one of many areas of employment law the unions will seek to repeal.

• Restrictions on concentrations of media ownership, and any outstanding issues on newspaper regulation.

Patrick Wintour

Jimmy Mubenga repeatedly called for help before he died, inquest hears

Thu, 16 May 2013 23:30:02 +0000

Passenger on British Airways flight on which Angolan man was being deported says he begged for help about 50 times

Jimmy Mubenga, the 46-year-old man who died on a plane while being deported from the UK by private security guards, begged for help around 50 times, according to a member of the public who witnessed the struggle that led to his death.

At the inquest into Mubenga's death the jury at Isleworth crown court heard that a passenger on the British Airways flight told the police they had heard the Angolan repeatedly plead for someone to help him.

Stuart Tribelnig, the senior detainee custody officer in charge of Mubenga's forced deportation, insisted he had not heard the father of five young children calling for help during the 35 minutes he estimated Mubenga was handcuffed from behind and bent forwards in his aeroplane chair.

He admitted that for up to 10 minutes of that time, Mubenga had his head below the level of the tray on the back of the seat opposite. But he insisted that it was Mubenga himself who forced his body into that position, known to carry a risk of death through asphyxia.

Mubenga was pronounced dead by paramedics who had been called to help after three security guards, including Tribelnig, applied restraint as the plane was preparing to leave Heathrow airport on 12 October 2011.

Tribelnig, a former heavy goods driver, became a deportation custody officer (DCO) for the private security firm G4S after a four-week training course in 2007. He was in charge of the other G4S security guards during Mubenga's deportation.

At the inquest, he told coroner Karon Monaghan QC how G4S had failed to teach him any so-called "control and restraint" techniques suitable for small spaces, such as planes.

Instead, he said, trainee deportation officers were taught how to subdue deportees, using techniques including "pain control", in a large gymnasium. He claimed he had asked the security firm to give them additional training for small spaces, such as planes, but his requests had been ignored.

But Ian Duckers, another G4S DCO, earlier gave evidence saying although trainee DCOs were not specifically taught how to restrain deportees in a small area, "the techniques are the same".

Tribelnig also explained how G4S paid DCOs a small monthly retainer and an hourly rate for every deportation or job they completed. Duckers had earlier said he was on a retainer of £1,000 a month and a £6 hourly fee.

Tribelnig denied suggestions from Henry Blaxland QC of Garden Court, one of three lawyers representing the Mubenga family, that this payment structure meant he put Mubenga in danger by continuing with the deportation when Mubenga became agitated rather than abort the operation.

In a police interview given shortly after Mubenga's death and read out in court, however, Tribelnig admitted that there were consequences if deportations were cancelled.

"You always got the co-ordinator shouting at you: 'You have to make this flight,'" he told the police interviewer. "They were probably getting it from higher up but I don't know how high up it goes. I just know you have to get the job away so the boys get paid and you get paid."

The three security guards, Tribelnig, Terence Hughes and Colin Kayler, were arrested on suspicion of having committed criminal offences in relation to the death of Mubenga, but the Crown Prosecution Service decided not to proceed with the case.

But the family believe the officers used unreasonable force while detaining Mubenga on the plane. Specifically, they want questions answered as to whether the guards pushed Mubenga into a position in which he suffocated, a claim substantiated by 21 passengers and crew members who say they heard Mubenga repeatedly cry out during the struggle that he could not breathe.

The inquest is expected to continue for eight weeks.

Amelia Hill

UK Census: almost half of foreign-born population hold UK passports

Thu, 16 May 2013 16:49:41 +0000

At least 46% of foreign-born residents in England and Wales are British citizens, according to the latest set of 2011 Census data
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Just half of the foreign born population of England and Wales hold a non-UK passport and the vast majority of the non -white British population consider themselves British, according to new figures from the 2011 Census.

45.6% of usual residents born outside the UK hold a British passport, or 3.4m of the 7.5m foreign-born population.

When certain sections of the UK media debate immigration, there has been a tendency to equate "foreign born" with "not British" – but the new, more detailed, census figure shows this is seriously misleading: not only are at least 46% of foreign born people on these shores British, many of the rest consider themselves as such.

At country level, six of the top 10 foreign countries of birth have UK passport rates of over 50%, with Jamaica (72.8%) leading. Only one - Poland, with 4.9% - has a rate below one in five.

This matches figures for length of residency in the UK, with just one in 25 current Polish-born having arrived before 1981, compared to 59.8% of Jamaicans.

Anybody who holds a valid UK passport is a British citizen, but it is possible to become a citizen without a passport - most commonly when born to a parent who is a British citizen at the time.

In fact, the proportion of those from non -white British and mixed ethnicities who consider themselves British in some way is far higher than that indicated by type of passport.

It is actually only among those defining their ethnicity as Irish that less than half consider their national identity British, English, Welsh or any other combination of UK nationalities.

96.8% of mixed race White and Black Caribbean residents identify as British, with a further six minority ethnicities showing British national identity rates of over 80% (see chart below).

As you might expect, the general pattern suggests that the longer spent in the UK, the more likely somebody is to self-identify as British.

Alongside the Irish at the lower end of the scale are other white ethnicities (38.8%) - chiefly European - and Chinese (51.9%), other Asian (55%) and Arab (56.6%) groups.

The majority of the 'other white' group are relatively recent arrivals from the expanded EU, while the latter three groups have high representation in the student population.

85.9% of residents in England and Wales are white, compared to 81.2% of UK students, while 1.6% of students are Asian and 0.7% Chinese against population figures of 1.5% and 0.7% respectively.

Age profiles also vary considerably between ethnic groups. The median age across England and Wales as a whole is 39, with only three ethnic groups - white British, white Irish and those defining as Caribbean or Caribbean British - having a higher average.

Mixed ethnicity groups typically have the youngest populations, with white and black African (16), white and Asian (17) and non-British white and black Caribbean (18) all under 20.

National identity also varies with age - the 30-34 age group has the smallest proportion of UK-born members of all 5 year age groups in England and Wales, and also the lowest percentage who profess a British national identity of some form - 19.

This is the first of three posts on today's 2011 Census data release. Our analyses of the latest figures on unpaid carers and religious groups will follow.

A huge amount of census data was published today, so let us know what you've spotted – or what's been missed out – in the comments below, or via Twitter to me directly @jburnmurdoch or to the official @GuardianData account.

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John Burn-Murdoch

Britons obsess about immigration, Germans focus on education | Martin Kettle

Wed, 15 May 2013 23:05:29 +0000

Before descending further into hysteria about Europe, we'd do well to look to Germany. They tend to get their priorities right

Every German politician I have spoken to this week watches the chaos in David Cameron's government over Europe with something close to horror. This is a very dangerous game, says one. It's like the US Republicans with the Tea Party, says another. There will be a terrible awakening, says a third. The three, all members of the Bundestag, will be opponents in September's German general election, but they see the Conservative implosion over Europe through the same lens.

"The current situation in the UK is not positive at all," Michael Fuchs of the CDU – Chancellor Angela Merkel's centre right party – told me this week. "You have a very large deficit. Your industry is almost nothing. Your economy is too dependent on the City of London. You need to realise it won't get better if you leave Europe. It will get worse."

And that, mark you, is the verdict from a German MP who likes Britain and sits for what is still supposedly the Conservatives' sister party. But you hear the same verdict from a German Liberal, or from a German Social Democrat, or from a German Green. That convergence in Berlin doesn't mean, of itself, that all these German politicians are always right – the German political class can and does deceive itself, just like ours. But German distress at Britain's psychodrama over Europe is palpable. On this, maybe the Germans can see us as we are – better than, in our current hysteria, we can see ourselves.

Political visitors can deceive themselves too, of course. Eighty years ago some went to Soviet Russia and returned saying they had seen the future and it worked. I've lost count of the British politicians of all parties who have crossed the Atlantic and left their critical faculties behind at Heathrow. Even so, it is hard to spend time in Germany and not feel that this is still, for all its faults, a better, more balanced place than Britain. Particularly in a week like this, to travel from London to Berlin feels like leaving the madhouse and arriving in a world inhabited by rational beings once more.

This is not – repeat, not – to embrace every German government policy or everything about the German way. Germany is changing, not always for the better. Inequality is rising there too, especially since the financial crisis. In particular, it is not to endorse Merkel's rigid austerity policies for the eurozone – though one understands why she will not bend with only four months to polling day. If she is re-elected, as even opponents expect, Merkel may have to loosen the bonds. Being a consummate pragmatist, she may do so. A lot depends on the coalition she eventually forms.

But it is to say, without donning rose-tinted glasses, that Germany continues to get a lot of big things right that Britain continues to get very wrong indeed. Germany has a balanced economy. Britain, still hooked on the financial services drug, does not. Germany has a strong manufacturing sector. Ours is less than half the size. German economic strength is based on the middle-sized company. Ours is constantly undermined by merger mania. German companies prosper on industrial co-determination. Ours pigheadedly regard any limit on management autonomy as regulation and red tape. Germany's housing market is under strain, expecially in Berlin and Hamburg. But Britain's is broken. Germany's current account is in the black and they have a balanced budget. Britain's is deep in the red, and now we are borrowing more.

A fugitive from British populist politics immediately notices a less fevered and more widely cast public debate too, particularly in response to the financial crisis. Less dependent on the financial sector, Germany can contemplate regulatory actions from which Britain, still deep in the shadow of Thatcherism, shies away. Germany's finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble, a free-market conservative, told British Tories in London last week they should embrace a financial transaction tax. But his counterpart George Osborne remains the City's frightened prisoner.

This better balance makes other things possible. In recent weeks, both the SPD social democrats and the Greens have proposed new taxes on incomes, assets (including houses) and inheritance. The amounts involved are not massive, a few points on the top rate of tax, currently 42%. Perhaps the SPD and the Greens have caught the mood, or perhaps – as they even admit themselves – Merkel will see them off. The CDU and FDP are certainly delighted by the turn to the left. But at least the debate is out there, between alternatives, rationally argued, not distorted by a frenzied and malicious press, as it would be in Britain. Compare and contrast, too, the issue that most voters think is the biggest facing the country. In Britain, the economy aside, that issue is immigration. In Germany, also full of migrants, it is education. Germans are worried that their schools are falling short in reading, maths and science. Yet German schools actually compare better on the OECD's international tables than Britain's. We too should be worrying about schools, but instead we fixate on immigration.

There's more. Germany is a greener society. It has a fairer voting system. A cautious, though toughening, approach to military action. Respect for — no, love of — the arts. An often serious press. A readiness to speak other languages than their own. And – glory be – it is a society that doesn't live in the imperial past and has managed to get over the war. Oh, and football clubs – two of them contesting the Champions League final in London next week – built on youth policy, supporter ownership and long-term strategy, not mercenary millionaires, foreign oligarchs and instant gratification. A rich metaphor for much larger contrasts.

Germany is not perfect, absolutely not, any more than Britain is wholly dire. Germany is not a social democratic paradise, and many of its most attractive features are under genuine threat. It is sometimes as blind to the faults of Europe as we are to Europe's benefits. But Germany still puts post-Thatcher Britain to shame on so many really important fronts on which we repeatedly fail. It is still a nation trying to come together rather than one which is trying to drive itself apart. With all its limitations and contradictions, Germany retains a largely shared conception of a solidarity-based nation state far better attuned to the modern world than our increasingly broken one.

All our parties and interest groups can learn from this. Germany rightly looks at us with concern and disbelief. Britain should urgently look back at them, this week in particular, with no little humility and with a much greater readiness to discuss, to learn and, like it or not, to work together.

Martin Kettle

The noise on immigration is drowning out real problems | Polly Toynbee

Wed, 15 May 2013 07:56:19 +0000

Desperate to sound tough, politicians are in fact making it harder to improve the plight of domestic slaves in Britain

Can governments ever be tough enough on immigration? Ask any canvasser and they report grim news from the doorstep: whatever the issue – housing, jobs, benefits – in these hard times the blame has been successfully diverted on to migrants for taking jobs and homes. Tighten the screw, pull up the drawbridge, cut off the attractions that draw them to the UK, but no political action is ever enough to sate the demand for tougher border defences.

The government frequently takes noisy public action, even when it knows some things are far worse than useless. Economically, it's madness to cut off valuable students from China and India for the sake of hitting a meaningless "net" migration statistic. Morally, some "action" means deliberately turning a blind eye to some abuse that would shock many of the same people who want immigration cut, if they knew.

Britain is importing domestic slaves and ignoring what becomes of them so long as they vanish from the official figures. Wealthy foreigners are encouraged to come to London to spend their money, and last year they brought with them 15,745 domestic servants on overseas domestic worker visas. Rich families from India, Nigeria and the Middle East bring servants from the Philippines, Indonesia or elsewhere, usually not their own country. A year ago the government changed the visa requirements, making these servants the absolute slaves of their employers, with no escape from frequently appalling abuse.

In 1998 Labour took action to give these servants – almost all women – freedom to escape employers who often physically and sexually abuse them. And although they were still pitifully vulnerable, their treatment improved once they had the essential freedom to change jobs. The visa still had strict conditions: they had to find similar domestic work, with no recourse to public funds, proving their employment for annual visa renewal. But a year ago the government turned these women into powerless chattels of their employers by binding their visa to work only for the family that brought them in. The inevitable result has been a dramatic worsening of their lives as bonded slaves.

The charity Kalayaan acts as advocate and haven for foreign domestic workers: it lobbied Labour hard to win the visa change and won a Guardian charity award. Its figures tell the story of the effect of the new visa. Since it came in, all those arriving at its door are paid less than £100, compared with 60% before the new visa requirements came in. In all, 95% are paid less than £50 a week with 62% never paid at all, up from 14% unpaid on the old visa. Why would employers pay when workers have no freedom to leave? Before the new visa, 31% had no room of their own; this has risen to 85% who often sleep in the kitchen or lounge with no bed or place for possessions. Most are permanently on call and get little sleep. None of them interviewed during the last year said they have any day off. Some 96% report that to prevent them running away they are never allowed out unsupervised.

The stories I heard from escaped women at Kalayaan were shocking. "Anna" was brought in by a Nigerian family she already worked for: she is from another African country. But they returned and handed her on to their son's family, who took away her passport and paid her no wages, which she had previously been sending home for school fees for her three sisters. She was sometimes thrown out on to the doorstep in winter until morning. She worked unpaid in the family's shops and restaurant while cleaning and caring for the children. She ran away, with one plastic bag, speaking only French, and asked for help from the only person she knew – the children's schoolteacher – who kindly took her in and directed her to Kalayaan. Now she inhabits a limbo where so many end up, with no passport, no visa, and no work. Kalayaan says embassies are rarely helpful when employers have withheld passports, taking the side of the rich and powerful with political influence back home.

"Maria", from Indonesia, was brought to London from Dubai by an Arab family who beat, half-starved and threatened her. She escaped and waited in Victoria coach station until she heard someone speaking her language, who helped her. But under the new visa system Kalayaan has little to offer. Cheated, abused and brought in under false pretences, Maria could be designated as trafficked, but that doesn't help. The National Referral Mechanism would offer 45 days of accommodation with the Salvation Army for a period of "recovery" and then she would be sent back. Legal aid cuts mean these people have no right to representation – they will be deported, then vulnerable to the same trafficking and exploitation again.

Workers on these visas now know that there is little point in reporting abusive employers to the police: they will just be deported for breaking the terms of their visa.

In the last year many fewer people have turned to Kalayaan, knowing there is nothing they can do to sue their employer, get their passport and missing wages or help settle them with another job now that changing employer is illegal. Revenue & Customs only has 100 officers to police the minimum wage across the whole country – and they don't go looking in rich foreign households where domestic worker visas are registered. So thousands vanish underground, where they are prone to every kind of exploitation – while undermining local pay rates. It would be better by far to regularise them and arrest their abusers, thereby protecting others in their vulnerable situation and deterring slave employers.

David Cameron spoke at the opening of an anti-slavery exhibition in the House of Commons last month, designed to warn MPs of hidden slaves brought in by gangmasters, the trafficked children who vanish and the plight of these domestic serfs. Immigration minister Mark Harper was among 100 MPs gathered to hear the PM say: "Modern-day slavery comes in many forms … we have to have a really concerted approach … to make sure that we look at the rights of those who are affected, and take a criminal approach."

You wonder how he can speak the words, knowing what his new visa has done to make slavery a near-certainty for thousands every year. I doubt many people hearing the stories of women like "Anna" and "Maria" would consider creating a growing underworld of the exploited a wise immigration policy.

Polly Toynbee

Jimmy Mubenga inquest: he was asking for help and did not get it, wife says

Tue, 14 May 2013 23:31:18 +0000

Mubenga, who was being deported to Angola, died on a plane at Heathrow airport after being restrained by security guards

The wife of an Angolan man who died as he was being deported from the UK broke down on Tuesday as she told an inquest how he had been asking for help during his last moments.

Adrienne Makenda Kambana, the wife of Jimmy Mubenga, sobbed as she told the court how she had spoken on the phone to her husband as he waited on a plane at Heathrow airport – just a few minutes before he died.

"He did not deserve this kind of death. His death is painful and sad. We feel sad for him because we have been told that he was asking for help and he did not get it … he died asking for help and thinking: 'What have I done to deserve this?'"

An inquest at Isleworth crown court heard Mubenga, 46, had died on the plane after being restrained by three G4S detention custody officers. He had been due to be deported to his home country of Angola.

Kambana said his death had devastated the couple's five children – aged between three and 19 years old.

In a statement read out by her legal team she added: "Our children deeply miss him, they miss the fun they used to have with their father, especially Blessing [the couple's three-year-old] … she never had the chance to get to know him and or call him dad – all she has is pictures of him."

The court heard that Mubenga lived in London with his family and had been in the UK since 1994. He was convicted of actual bodily harm in 2006 and a decision was taken to deport him at the end of his sentence.

Kambana said her husband had been "in the wrong place at the wrong time" when he had got caught up in an argument and said it was the first time he had been in trouble with the police.

"[He] was a good father. He was doing everything a good father should do. He would take the children to school and he would play football with them … he provided a lot of joy in their lives. He was a good husband and he treated me well."

The court heard that by September 2010 the appeals process had run out, and a couple of weeks later Mubenga boarded the plane at Heathrow at around 7.30pm accompanied by three G4S guards – Stuart Tribelnig, Terry Hughes and Colin Kaler.

He was allowed to go to the toilet and use a mobile phone but the jury was told that shortly afterwards a struggle began between him and the guards. Assistant deputy coroner for Hammersmith Karon Monaghan QC said Mubenga was handcuffed using rigid bar cuffs, restrained and put in a seat.

Monaghan said it appeared he was shouting out as this was going on but "fell silent" sometime after the plane began to taxi on the runway.

"At some point he fell silent and unresponsive and it was clear something was wrong," she said.

The guards raised the alarm and the plane taxied back to the stand, where emergency teams were called. Mubenga was pronounced dead some time later.

The court heard the three guards were subsequently arrested "on suspicion of criminal offences" relating to Mubenga's death but the Crown Prosecution Service decided not to press charges and no further action was taken.

The court also heard from Det Sgt Steve Baldwin, one of the senior investigating officers in the case. Baldwin said that there had been 146 passengers on the plane at the time of Mubenga's death. He said that although police officers managed to take statements from many of them before the flight was rescheduled others had to be followed up by email as they were overseas.

The court was shown footage of Mubenga being collected from an immigration removal centre by the three guards. Earlier in the day one of the guards at the centre said they had found Mubenga crying in his room because he did not want to leave his family behind and return to Angola.

Baldwin said that throughout the journey to the airport and up to the point they boarded the plane the atmosphere between the guards and Mubenga had been cordial.

The coroner said the inquest – which is set to last eight weeks – would be a "full, fair and fearless investigation" that dealt not only with the immediate circumstances surrounding Mubenga's death but also constitute a broader inquiry into the actions of all the parties involved including the government and G4S.

Matthew Taylor

Agricultural workers from Ukraine may be needed in future, May told

Tue, 14 May 2013 11:08:03 +0000

Home secretary must consider bringing in more eastern European workers or face job losses in Tory heartlands, migration advisers say

The home secretary, Theresa May, has been warned that she needs to consider bringing in more eastern European workers from countries such as Ukraine and Russia to the UK or face a sharp rise in fruit and veg prices and job losses in Conservative heartland seats.

The official migration advisory committee (Mac) says British farmers should be able to recruit a sufficient number of seasonal fruit and vegetable pickers in the first one or two years after labour market restrictions on Bulgarian and Romanian workers are lifted in December.

But it says there will be a lack of available seasonal migrant labour in the medium term, which will lead to a rise in labour costs and a 10-15% increase in supermarket prices.

Its report, published on Tuesday, warns that shops and supermarkets are likely to turn to cheaper foreign fruit and vegetables, leading to job losses in the British horticultural industry.

The industry is concentrated mostly in Kent, East Anglia and Herefordshire, and local Tory MPs have already issued warnings to the home secretary.

The seasonal agricultural workers scheme (SAWS), which allows an annual quota of 21,250 Bulgarian and Romanian workers to come to Britain for a maximum of six months, accounts for a third of Britain's seasonal agricultural workforce. The scheme is due to close at the end of this year, and the migration experts expect sufficient numbers of Romanians and Bulgarians will come in the short term. But in the medium term of one to two years they would be increasingly likely to move to other permanent, better-paid jobs in the hospitality, care and construction sectors.

The scheme is crucial to the supply of strawberries, salad, apples and other soft fruit and vegetables to British shops and supermarkets.

David Metcalf, the Mac chairman, said migrant workers were not displacing British labour. He said British workers did work in fruit and vegetable picking but wanted permanent jobs and did not want to be tied to a farm living in a caravan or a pod, as required by many farmers.

"We are not saying British workers are lazy," said Metcalf. He said British employers had made great efforts to recruit British workers.

The migration experts say the home secretary should consider replacing the seasonal workers in the scheme with labour from outside Europe – in particular countries such as Ukraine which has a high number of agricultural students.

Metcalf said a decision to replace the scheme in this way would mean the government taking a decision to protect the British horticulture industry as a favoured sector.

The seasonal agricultural workers scheme dates back more than 60 years.

The Mac report says any decline in the supply of seasonal labour could lead to increased pay, increased recruitment costs and a fall in efficiency in production. Supermarkets told the migration experts there was very little flexibility on price for British fruit and vegetables and they were highly likely to switch to imported produce.

Metcalf said: "Growers, operators and workers told us that the labour supply from Bulgaria and Romania will not immediately dry up following the closure of SAWS – but there could be long-term implications that need to be addressed.

"If growers cannot get the required labour, evidence suggests that a replacement SAWS would help horticulture thrive in the long run, but it is ultimately for the government to decide if this sector is a priority."

A government spokesman said: "We are grateful for the Mac's report and note its conclusion that there is little evidence the supply of seasonal labour will decline in the next one or two years.

"We shall consider the Mac's advice very carefully. However, in general we want to encourage employers to recruit from the resident labour market where possible," he said.

Alan Travis

Gordon Brown: Conservatives close to being 'Powellite' on immigration

Mon, 13 May 2013 23:05:45 +0000

Brown unveils Labour campaign against Scottish independence declaring that only Labour will protect UK institutions

Gordon Brown has accused the Tories of adopting Enoch Powell-style rhetoric on immigration in their efforts to fight off advances by Ukip.

The former prime minister claimed the Tories had become "very close to being Powellite" on immigration policies as they hardened their stance on Europe and welfare and performed a series of U-turns including on alcohol pricing in a shift to the right of British politics.

Giving his first major Labour party speech since leaving Downing Street in May 2010, Brown unveiled his party's campaign against Scottish independence by aggressively distancing Labour from the Tories, its main partner in the pro-UK Better Together coalition.

In an effort to bolster Labour's message to its core voters and placate its critics in the trade union movement, who are unnerved by its alliance with the Tories in Better Together, Brown said only Labour was capable of protecting the UK's social institutions against both the Tories and the Scottish National party.

He claimed the SNP were obsessed by the "dogma of separation" and prepared to damage Scotland's wider, longer-term interests to achieve that.

Alex Salmond, the first minister, wanted an independent Scotland to keep using the British pound while having no control over interest rates or monetary policy, and give up the UK's "pooling" of resources to support Scotland's heavy pensions burden, he said.

Turning on the Tories, Brown asked: "Where are the positive proposals about the future of the union? [The] one thing they're alone interested in is our relationship with the EU, driven by Ukip as we know. A party which was once pro-Europe is now anti-Europe, a party which was once anti-Powellite on immigration is now becoming very close to being Powellite on that issue.

"The party once for the welfare state now appears to be against it in so many aspects of the welfare state. On almost any issue, you can see the Conservative party doing U-turns. U-turns on alcohol prices, U-turns to legislate on overseas aid, U-turns on gay marriage.

"I suppose the new term isn't U-turn, it's Ukip-turn. I say to the Conservatives, Ukip if you want to, we're going to stick to what we believe in."

Speaking to an audience of Labour MPs, MSPs, trade union officials, council leaders and activists – with the notable absence of his former but now estranged friend Alistair Darling, the chairman of Better Together, Brown said his party would continue to campaign for social justice, wealth equalisation and fairness across the UK.

He said the SNP's policies were incoherent: they wanted to halve corporation tax rates to Ireland's levels in a "race to the bottom" on taxation, while losing the UK's greater resources to support pensions spending now £100 a head higher than the UK average.

Within an hour of his speech, Nicola Sturgeon, the Scottish deputy first minister, was making the opposite case at an SNP event in Glasgow. Signalling an all-out battle with Labour for centre-left voters, she insisted that only independence would allow Scotland to defend the welfare state and use the state's resources to tackle poverty and inequality.

Sturgeon chose similar ground to Brown, attacking the UK coalition government's obsession with austerity and its attacks on the welfare state. She promised a future SNP government in an independent Scotland would scrap the new universal credit benefits system and introduce new benefits paid directly to women.

"Independence will give us the chance to recast our social security system for the future," she said.

"To see it – alongside our NHS and our education system – as the commitment we make to each other in a mutual society, a way of helping people to live full and independent lives, to help people into work, but also to make sure they have a safety net when they can't. A system that supports a growing economy, not one that is written off as a drain on it."

Severin Carrell

Uzbekistan closes borders to refugees

Tue, 15 Jun 2010 04:46:09 +0000

Uzbekistan last night closed its borders to refugees fleeing neighbouring Kyrgyzstan as the numbers killed in the ethnic violence spiralled and aid agencies reported fresh allegations of atrocities from the survivors.

Russia poised to intervene as ethnic violence rages in Kyrgyzstan

Tue, 15 Jun 2010 00:01:00 +0000

The Kremlin edged closer last night to military intervention in Kyrgyzstan as the number of people killed in ethnic violence spiralled and as many as 100,000 refugees flooded neighbouring Uzbekistan.