22.06.1995

State gets away with murder

Killed for being in the wrong place

IN RESPONSE to Joy Gardner’s death, the liberal, anti-racist establishment throws up its hands in horror and cries: “Something must be done!”

An editorial in The Independent (June 15) was typical: “Until the attitude towards illegal immigrants becomes more humane ... the possibility of further tragedy is always there.”

It is beyond question that Joy Gardner’s treatment was utterly inhumane. Resident in Britain since 1987, she was refused the right to remain after her marriage to a UK citizen broke up. One July morning in 1993 police and immigration officers broke into her flat at 7.40am to enforce her deportation. When she resisted, she was tied up and gagged. She suffered brain damage and died four days later, either as a result of asphyxiation caused by the gag or from a head injury incurred during the struggle.

The two police officers involved were found not guilty of her manslaughter.

And what do the bourgeois pundits suggest should be done? Bhikhu Parekh, professor of ‘political theory’ at the University of Hull, writes in the same paper: “Every society has a right to control immigration and to guard against illegal immigrants,” but adds: “Even illegal immigrants are human beings who deserve to be treated as such” (The Independent June 19). So how does our learned professor reconcile the need to enforce controls with his desire to treat the victims more humanely?

He continues: “The Home Office had two alternatives: to deport her with all the brutality that the occasion required, or to take pity on her and allow her to stay on.”

So the two cannot be reconciled! This gets to the heart of the matter. The inhumanity lies precisely in capitalism’s need to keep out low paid workers. The bosses want to control the size of their reserve army of labour - the unemployed, which means keeping the shutters firmly closed on immigrant workers. At the same time they insist on the right to send their capital anywhere around the world and to allow members of their own class complete freedom to travel and live where they please. As a cover for their own crude class interests, the capitalists expect us to unite in their support against the ‘outsider’.

Having inadvertently identified the main problem as national chauvinism, Parekh goes off at a tangent, chasing that elusive animal, racism: “The fact that most forcibly deported immigrants have been black” speaks for itself, he alleges. And the one ‘solution’ he offers? “The language in which we have discussed race relations so far needs to be revised.”

Brilliant. Send yet more workers onto ‘race awareness courses’ and make sure they use the politically correct words. That will stop agents of the state killing us, won’t it?

Racism exists at all levels of society, including amongst police and immigration officers. But a Turk or East European might just as easily have been their victim.

The two acquitted police officers are guilty - of doing the state’s filthy work and treating our fellow workers worse than animals.

For us, no worker is illegal. We demand the right to live and work anywhere in the world.

Alan Fox