British state racism: Labour offers no solutions
- Details
- Created: Sunday, 25 March 2018 15:07
- Written by Tom Vickers

In February 120 women in Yarls Wood Immigration Removal Centre went on indefinite hunger strike, the latest in a long list of acts of resistance from within Britain’s racist immigration prisons. The strikers launched a set of demands that included: an end to indefinite detention; amnesty for everybody who has been living in the UK for over 10 years; an end to the employment of detainees to carry out menial tasks within detention centre for £1 an hour; ‘an end to charter flights and the snatching of people from their beds in the night and herding them like animals’. (The full list of demands is available at: https://detainedvoices.com/2018/02/25/the-strikers-demands/) Labour’s Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott and Shadow Attorney General Shami Chakrabarti were given permission by the Home Office to meet with some of the striking women. They expressed their solidarity. Yet in practice Labour is putting forward its own racist plans for how they would run the racist British state.