You won’t have a name when you ride the big aeroplane

“Send ‘em home!” one drinker shouted, turning to his mates as if he’d cracked the greatest joke in the world.
It wasn’t the greatest. The greatest involves necrophilia and I’m not recording it here.
The man had come to the door of a pub in the centre of Cardiff to see what the fuss was about. There was a bit of shouting and chanting, and a group of around 250 people or so turning into High Street.
At the head of the march was a banner with the words ‘Defend The Right To Asylum’ in English and Welsh.
Last week the UK government came a cropper with its policy of sending people back to Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.
But it is still returning people to other troublespots. Check the figures – they are easy to find on the net. In the first half of this year 515 asylum seekers were ‘removed’ to Afghanistan and 395 to Iraq.
The march was about stopping these deportations and repealing Section 9 of the 2004 Immigration Act, which removes the right to benefits for asylum seekers waiting to appeal.
People fighting for their right to asylum are being made destitute and having their children taken from them.
It’s a double whammy: make them seem like ‘scroungers’ while they are here so stop their benefits at the earliest opportunity (and starve them out of the country).
Then, to make it seem like foreign policy in Afghanistan and Iraq is working, return them to their ‘newly liberated’, ‘safe’ homelands.
The tribunal into the Zimbabwe deportations was shocked to find the Home Office could provide no evidence about the safety of the deportees.
They’d been sent home, alright. But to what?