[this article was originally posted here]

Away from the calamity and misery Blair’s government visited upon brown people, have you seen the misery and calamity his successor’s is visiting upon brown people?

How about…

A group of women being held at Yarl’s Wood immigration centre are refusing food for a fifth day in protest over the length of detention and being separated from children… On Monday, day four of the hunger strike, a group of about 50 women tried to move around the centre and were locked in a corridor. The women say they were held there for hours on end without water or access to a toilet. They told campaigners some of them had fainted.

…or…

Claims that asylum seekers are mistreated, tricked and humiliated by staff working for the UK Border Agency are to be investigated in parliament… Louise Perrett, who worked as a case owner at the Border Agency office in Cardiff for three and a half months last summer… alleges that one official boasted to her that he tested the claims of boys from African countries who said they had been forcibly conscripted as child soldiers by making them lie down on the floor and demonstrate how they shot at people in the bush. Perrett… said interviews were conducted without lawyers, independent witnesses or tape recorders. If a case was difficult, Perrett claims, she was simply advised to refuse it and “let a tribunal sort it out”. Only cases raised by MPs appeared to be dealt with properly… One of her cases involved a Congolese woman who had the right to remain in the UK. Perrett says a superior nevertheless decided the woman and her children should be removed…

The BNP’s immigration aspirations are enough to bring people onto the streets. And yet the active and dangerous immigration policies of a so-called Labour government elicits barely a squeak much beyond refugee advocacy groups. It’s time to give less attention to the damage a potential (and impossible) Griffin government might do to refugees and time to start having a look at what damage a very real Brown government is doing to refugees.

Where’s the outrage? Where are the eggs and howling mobs for the people who are actually doing this rather than the the people who will do it if a billion-to-one psephological chance comes to pass? How about taking a little bit of the anger reserved for fools like Nadine Dorries and directing it at the thugs of the UK Border Agency?

You can say a Tory government would be worse than New Labour on immigration and the way it treats refugees but the way New Labour has treated refugees over the last 13 years is one of its deeper shames amongst many. It cracks wide open the big shitty lie of Gordon Brown’s claim of having a ‘moral compass’.

Like I said, where’s the outrage? All I can hear is a Daily Mail silence. A Tory silence.