This was followed by a letter in reply to MP Tom Brake’s defence of the Lib Dem’s role in ‘ending child detention’ – without actually ending it in The Guardian on 18 November.

The Media Show on Wednesday 24 November featured an interview with Clare Sambrook on the ECDN media campaign and winning the Foot and Bevins prizes for investigative journalism. Clare also published a long feature on the history of the End Child Detention Campaign, Children seek the final exit from house of nightmares, in today’s Times (Saturday 27 November) [requires subscription].

A discredited policy ... Yarl's Wood immigration removal centre. Photograph: Sean Dempsey/PA

Simon Parker, The Guardian, Comment is Free, Thursday 25 March 2010, 15.00 GMT.

Phil Woolas’s response to a further damning report on Yarl’s Wood immigration removal centre by the chief inspector of prisons shows that the government has to resort to scare tactics and lies to defend a policy that has been condemned by several royal colleges of medicine, the Faculty of Public Health, the former children’s commissioner for England, many leading Christian and Jewish faith leaders, all the major children’s charities, and 121 MPs — including 49 members of Woolas’s own parliamentary party.

It is simply untrue to assert, as the immigration minister does, that the only alternative to imprisoning children in high-security detention facilities such as Yarl’s Wood is separating them from their parents and putting them into local authority care. Australia and Sweden maintain families in the community even when their claims for asylum have been declared unfounded, and both countries have managed to achieve higher voluntary return rates than the UK’s as a consequence.

What is more worrying, however, is that Woolas appears to be backtracking on his own government’s commitment to seeking alternatives to immigration detention, such as the current community-based pilot scheme in Glasgow that is being run in conjunction with the local authority and the Scottish government.

In the runup to the general election it is increasingly clear that New Labour want to “out-nasty” the Tories when it comes to denigrating asylum seekers and refugees. Woolas described those detained in Yarl’s Wood as “illegal immigrants” even though he knows full well that the vast majority made perfectly proper and legal asylum claims. The fact that over half of the families in Yarl’s Wood are later released, as Dame Anne Owers points out in her report, completely undermines the minister’s claim that their removal has been properly decided by the independent courts. In fact hundreds of families who pass through Dungavel and Yarl’s Wood are subsequently granted indefinite leave to remain or refugee status because on closer inspection their claims turn out not to be “illegal” or “bogus” but well-founded.

An increasing number of families are being held in Yarl’s Wood under the “detained fast track” system – ie while their cases are still being determined by Home Office officials – a practice that has been condemned by the European commissioner for human rights and the European courts, but that the Leader of the House of Lords, Lady Royall, describes as “an unavoidable necessity for the DFT process”.

Woolas and his government are in clear breach of the council of ministers directive, which “provides for the special vulnerabilities of asylum-seeking children and minimum standards for arrangements for their welfare, treating the best interests of children as a primary consideration”. The directive came into force in UK law in February 2005 and requires states “to make special arrangements for the accommodation of children to meet their needs and best interests. This does not equate to detention”.

The Home Office’s increasing resort to scare stories about child trafficking follows on from a similar piece of nonsense that junior minister Meg Hillier came out with on the BBC’s Daily Politics show on Friday. She suggested that if the government stopped locking up children then childless asylum seekers would have an incentive to acquire a “get out of detention free kid” from a passing child trafficker.

The government’s constant talk of “illegal migrants”, “would-be child traffickers” and “frivolous” and “vexatious” abusers of the judicial system is intended to deflect attention from its own failed policies in treating asylum seeking families fairly and humanely, and to foster a climate of disbelief and contempt in relation to those who seek the sanctuary of our shores. No country can call itself civilised if it engages in the persecution of the persecuted, however popular the contempt for them may be among the public at large or how many votes a government that is desperately clinging to power thinks it may salvage.

Rosarno, Calabria from where African migrants were evacuated following attacks by locals

BRUTAL attacks on African migrant workers in the southern Italian town of Rosarno in recent days prompted the Pope to make a rare comment on contemporary events. Condemning the racial discrimination against and exploitation of immigrants in Italy, Pope Benedict XVI said, ‘Every migrant is a human being different because of provenance, culture and tradition but a person to be respected and having rights.’

But even in Italy, where the unashamedly xenophobic and racist Northern League enjoys widespread support, the President of the Lower House of Parliament, Gianfranco Fini whose party has its roots in neo-fascism, has proposed that migrants be allowed to vote in local elections, that migrants’ children born in Italy should have the automatic right to citizenship, and that the waiting period for adult citizenship be shortened.

By way of contrast, children who have been born in Britain and who know no other country than this one can be arrested in dawn raids by a dozen uniformed security guards, transported in locked vans for hundreds of miles (in some cases without either of their parents present), forcibly photographed and finger-printed, allowed only to take the few possessions permitted, and locked-up without time limit in a high-security prison surrounded by electric fences and razor wire.

Unless a successful campaign or legal challenge can be mounted, child detainees are subsequently deported to whatever fate awaits them. The British government does not track or monitor the children who it claims will suffer no persecution even when deporting them to a country whose language and customs the child has no knowledge of and where perhaps only one of the child’s parents were born.

‘Failed asylum seekers’ may not vote in local elections, are not entitled to any public funds or to access any services supported by public funds such as  homeless shelters or women’s refuges. It is an imprisonable offence to offer such people a job and the fines that can be imposed on the employer are intended to be cripplingly huge.

The UK government believes that the waiting period for acquiring British citizenship is too short and intends to double the time it takes for working migrants to apply for citizenship from five years to ten years. Those who have been granted indefinite leave to remain will only have until next year to exercise their right to citizenship under the existing rules.

The British immigration minister is Phil Woolas, a former president of the National Union of Students, a one time activist in the Anti-Nazi League, and former head of communications for the GMB trade union.

Woolas says the immigration system ‘… has been too lenient and I want to make it harder’, and boasts that, ‘I’ve been brought in to be tougher and to change perceptions’. Woolas has certainly done that by shifting the Labour Party’s immigration policy further to the right than any other country in Western Europe, including that of Silvio Berlusconi’s Italy.

The Labour Party continues to call itself ‘a democratic socialist party’ while boasting that New Labour intends to enforce strict penalties against immigrants or their employers if they break the rules, including the establishment of new partnerships between local authorities and enforcement agencies to gather intelligence, disrupt illegal activity and track down illegal immigrants and failed asylum seekers.

What New Labour’s website does not tell you is that the agency charged with removing record numbers of asylum seekers is the same agency that gets to decide on the merits of the asylum case and which hands out large bonuses to its managers for achieving its ambitious removal targets.

In Terry Gilliam’s film ‘Brazil’ the sinister and smiling interrogator, played by Michael Palin, returns home after a gruelling day extracting confessions from suspect terrorists to hug his young boys and embrace his charming wife. I am always reminded of this scene when reading former Immigration Minister Liam Byrne’s touching defence of child detention (New Statesman, September 2008.)

‘I know our contract staff in removal centres provide care with the utmost sensitivity and compassion in really difficult circumstances, because I have studied the situation at first hand. When I’ve spent time with immigration officers involved in removing families – often young public servants with families of their own – I have seen how physically draining the job can be. That is why it is a task conducted with such sensitivity and thought.’