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SLAVE LABOUR?: Loloahi Tapui

NOT SINCE Enoch Powell spewed his venom on immigrants, calling for compulsory repatriation, have issues of immigration so dominated the political landscape.

So intense is the debate that it threatened to displace the Labour Party conference from the top of the national agenda.

Firstly, the gathered throng of Afghanistan’s children at the French border were dispersed by state violence and brutality of a kind that I have never witnessed in the 50 years since I arrived in the UK.

These children are here because the British Army are visiting upon their country tons of bombs and bullets.

The same goes for Iraqis who risk their lives sliding beneath lorries in an attempt to gain entrance to the land which justified the military invasion, claiming to rescue those citizens from the rule of Saddam Hussein.

The chickens are coming home to roost.

The British Army have been quietly recruiting citizens from far away places like Tonga, from the Caribbean islands which are not yet republics – St Vincent, Grenada, Jamaica, St Lucia – to fight and die in the poppy fields of Afghanistan.

While the dead bodies of British soldiers are returned here in splendour, those bodies of dead soldiers from these tiny island states are shipped to their respective homes as cargo. No bugles, nor eulogies to their bravery.

It is a truism that the refugees from these theatres of violence head for those countries from which the invaders have come, and so too do citizens from those countries from which soldiers are recruited.

The islanders from Tonga who make their way to the shores of the UK do so because their sons and brothers, uncles and cousins have died in the war, fighting on the side of the British.

Enter Loloahi Tapui, the former housekeeper of our Dominican-born Attorney General, Baroness Scotland, who introduced the most vicious laws to keep out immigrants who seek refuge.

Many more like Loloahi can be found beneath the stairs of hotels in central London, where they toil each day for a pittance, and as we now know in the homes of the ruling classes, to which Baroness Scotland has been promoted. And some are treated like modern-day slaves.

It is in this context of slaves and slave masters that Loloahi met the border guards who used battering rams to terrorise the married Tongan woman, who works for £6 per hour.

The Labour Party conference was almost eclipsed by this hugely publicised case. The issue is simple, did Baroness Scotland photocopy the immigration documents which the Tongan must carry about her person wherever she goes – whether to seek work or to shop with the £6 per hour wages.

After the upcoming election, Baroness Scotland will slip away into the political wilderness and Loloahi will settle quietly in north London, where she will send remittances to her extended family.

And the anti-immigrant campaign will move relentless forward, dragging in its wake families, friends and neighbours in all the immigrant communities in this land.

Be sure of one fact, white labour, now demoralised in northern towns, will never return for jobs beneath the stairs for £6 an hour.

Nor will the children and grandchildren of immigrants who came here from the Caribbean, India or Pakistan.

Published: 05 October 2009
Issue: 1392

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