An Open Letter to Liberal Democrat MPs – Why Are You Silent Over the Hunger Strikes? Have you lost your tongues as well as your conscience?

Despite Being the Third Largest Parliamentary Group with 72 MPs, only 4 Lib Dems have signed Early Day Motion 2386

An Israeli Calls Israel for What It Is - a State Resembling Nazi Germany

There was a time when the Liberal Party claimed, under Jo Grimond, to be a radical party of the left and a defender of civil liberties. With its marriage to the Social Democrats that went by the board.

In 2010 it got into bed with David Cameron’s Tories in the Coalition government and were virtually eliminated at the 2015 election after having gone back on their promise not to increase tuition fees. They also paved the way for Brexit.

Under Vince Cable, the Business  Minister, the Post Office was privatised and virtually given away to the private sector. Privatisation, which has transferred £200 billion from the public purse to the billionaire class since Thatcher pioneered it, was fully supported by the Lib Dems.

One thing is clear. The Lib Dems are not a left-wing party. Indeed the old adage holds that if you scratch a Liberal you’ll get a Conservative.

Under the lamentable Jo Swinson as leader they joined in the ‘anti-Semitism’ smear campaign against the Labour Left and Corbyn with gusto.  Their two most prominent pro-Palestinian figures – Baroness Jenny Tonge and David Ward MP - were both forced out of the party. The defeat of Swinson at the 2019 General Election by the SNP was the best result on a miserable night.

The Lib-Dems have an appalling record on Zionism and Palestine. They have given full support to the Apartheid, Jewish Supremacist State that has leading Jewish Nazis in the most powerful positions of Finance and Police. They have also been silent over the genocide in Gaza in contrast to Ukraine.

Jeremy Corbyn's Speech on the Hunger Strikes - Labour MPs Laugh as Young People Are Dying

A day ago I wrote to the 72 Lib-Dem MPs asking why only four of them have signed Early Day Motion 2386 calling on the government to intervene in the hunger strikes by 6  Palestine Action supporters to ensure that the Filton 24 are freed on bail. Andrew George was one of the original sponsors and the other three – Layla Moran (herself of Palestinian origin), Alistair Carmichael and Ian Roome signed very late in the day.

The Lib Dems have 11% of the total MPs in the House of Commons yet they only comprise 6.5% of the 62 who have signed. This for a party which purports to take a pride in supporting civil liberties.

The issues are quite clear. All the hunger strikers are unconvicted prisoners, charged with minor criminal offences such as criminal damage and yet they are being held under ‘terrorist’ conditions despite being completely peaceful. Bail has been refused repeatedly and one judge who did grant bail, Bobby Cheema-Grubb, had her decision immediately appealed to the reactionary Court of Appeal and found herself taken off further cases of this nature.

But then Liberals have always had a bad record in terms of basic democratic rights. It was a Liberal government under Asquith that gaoled the Suffragettes and passed the Cat and Mouse Act. MPs, including the wretched Yvette Cooper lionise the Suffragettes today but in their time they too were called terrorists. Indeed, in comparison with Palestine Action they were terrorists.

From 1912 to 1914 the Suffragettes orchestrated a widespread campaign of arson and bombings targeting churches, post boxes, railway lines, and the homes of politicians. This included an attempt to burn down the home of the Chancellor, David Lloyd George.

They invented the letter bomb, which injured several postal workers. They placed bombs on public transport and in crowded places like Westminster Abbey and the Theatre Royal in Dublin while audiences were present. Assaults on politicians and public officials with whips and other objects occurred and a fire at Portsmouth dockyard in 1913 killed two men, and other fires killed two men and several horses in rural Bradford.

According to the definition of terrorism in the Terrorist Act 2000 the Suffragettes were without doubt terrorists. But here is the strange thing. On the very day that the proscription of Palestine Action was voted on in Parliament, the Home Secretary, the vile hypocrite Yvette Cooper appeared in the Commons with other female Labour MPs in the purple colours of the Suffragettes.

And people still say we should respect the law that is passed by crooks and criminals like Starmer, Cooper and Lammy.

Ed Davey the Lib Dem leader is an Establishment politician from head to toe. As Post Office Minister he ignored the scandal of the Post Office workers, initially refusing even to meet Alan Bates their  organiser. Even after he met Alan he took the official view that nothing was wrong.

983 sub-postmasters were falsely convicted. A quarter, 236, were gaoled. The only thing that can be said in Davey’s defence is that the Judges who sentenced the sub-postmasters never once asked how it was that there were so many dishonest postmasters still less questioned the ‘computer is right’ law that led to their convictions. At least 13 involved in the affair took their own lives.

Secret tape reveals Paula Vennells was told of faulty Horizon software | ITV News

However the Lib Dems have denied any responsibility at all. After all Ministers were lied to by their officials and that absolved them of any need to have made further enquiries.

One thing that the Lib Dems emphasise is that unlike the Conservatives and Starmer Labour, they are committed to civil liberties. Policy Paper 44 on their website is titled ‘Protecting Civil Liberties’ and it has this to say:

Liberal Democrats believe that everyone, whoever they are, should have civil liberties. Civil liberties are rooted in freedom of speech and expression, freedom of association and freedom of movement. They depend on equality of treatment before the law.

Yet this a lie. We have seen the Police banning demonstrations, rerouting them away from the BBC on the pretext that a synagogue was nearby, on the assumption that Jews support Genocide, and it would now seem the Met are banning repeat demonstrations with legal powers that they don’t have.  We have seen the Police conducting dawn raids on Palestine solidarity activists on the pretext that they have supported a proscribed organisation, Hamas. Yet throughout this wave of repression the Lib Dems have said nothing.

When it came to the proscription of Palestine Action, the first protest group to be classified as a ‘terrorist’ group the Lib Dems excelled themselves. The official party position was to abstain but 6 MPs Andrew George, Tom Gordon, Tessa Munt, Manuela Perteghella, Al Pinkerton, and Luke Taylor voted ‘yes’ and ‘no’. Their reason for doing so was that Starmer Labour, in its normal dishonest way, bundled the proscription with two neo-Nazi groups thus depriving MPs of the opportunity of voting for each group specifically.

Of course the principled thing to do would have been to vote ‘no’ to the bundle, as the purpose of the proscription wasn’t to outlaw groups which don’t even operate in the UK but to proscribe Palestine Action. But this is typical of the Lib Dems. When it comes to radical or uncomfortable groups they abstain or simply go absent.

It is clear that there has been political intervention at the highest levels in this matter. We know for a fact that the Israeli Embassy has intervened and been consulted on the whole question of Elbit prosecutions and on the banning of Palestine Action.

We also know that The Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre and the Proscription Review Group were both against the proscription of Palestine Action. So the internment of the hunger strikers and the Filton 24, because that is what it is, is completely unjustified yet the Lib Dem MPs have sat on their hands.  Why?

Because the Lib Dems are committed as a party to supporting the Apartheid State of Israel. Israel is a state that has an official policy of using torture against Palestinian detainees, which is in illegal occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. Israel is at the present time incarcerating nearly 10,000 Palestinian prisoners, a third of them without even a trial, before a military court. The military courts themselves have a 99.74% rate of conviction.

Even the Nazi Peoples’ Courts, which were explicitly political, acquitted more defendants than Israel’s military courts. The acquittal rate in 1940 was 7.3%. It then fell to around 5% until 1944, when it rose to almost 12%. This is the state that the Lib Dems support uncritically, a racist police state and a Jewish supremacist state with ethno-nationalism at its heart.

That above all is why the Lib-Dems have been silent over the Genocide in Gaza and the Hunger Strikes in particular.

Tony Greenstein

The meaning of the decision of Labour’s Right to support Arms to Saudi Arabia

It is time to deselect the 98 Labour MPs who believe Saudia Arabia is our ally

What do you call Peter Kyle - Hove's gay Progress MP sees nothing wrong in supporting the alliance with Saudia Arabia where being gay can be fatal?

On the face of it, it is a strange issue on which to stage the biggest revolt since Jeremy Corbyn was re-elected as Labour leader.  Even the Lib-Dems, who were up to their ears, in the sale of arms to Saudi Arabia in the last government, voted against. 

On Wednesday a Labour motion which had already been unacceptably watered down to call for a UN Inquiry into ‘all sides’ of the Saudi Arabia’s attack on Yemen was met with a concerted abstention by nearly 100 Labour MPs.  It was wrong of Jeremy Corbyn and Emily Thornberry not to move a clear and unambiguous motion calling for the cessation of arms shipments to Saudi Arabia. 

The position of Emily Thornberry, Labour’s Shadow Defence Secretary, was pathetically weak.   She is quoted in Labour List as saying that:

‘while Saudi Arabia will remain an “ally” in the region, the UK would suspend its support for Saudi forces in Yemen until “alleged violations” of international humanitarian law in the had been independently investigated.

She added that she would not want to see support resumed “until the children of Yemen have received the humanitarian aid that they so desperately need.”

The idea that we will resume support for Saudi Arabia after humanitarian aid to children has been let in, so that Saudi Arabia can continue to kill and maim children and civilians is nonsensical. 

The facts are quite clear.  Saudi Arabia which has no business meddling in Yemen’s civil war has killed at least 10,000 Yemeni civilians with US and British arms.  Only a few weeks ago Saudi Arabia planes killed 140 people in a funeral party.

Raif Badawi is due another 950 lashes of the 1,000 he was sentenced to in Peter Kyle's paradise kingdom

What needs to be  challenged is the idea that Saudi Arabia is an ally in the Middle East.  It is a barbaric state which has one of the highest execution rates in the world, primarily of poor migrant workers.  Its attitude to women, who are forbidden to drive or go out without a male chaperon, makes the Iranian state seem positively progressive in comparison.  Flogging dissident bloggers, executing children, torture etc. should make anyone who is serious about human rights abuses steer a million miles from giving this detestable regime an ounce of support.

Couple this with the export of the Wahabbi brand of Islam and the aid and financing of the very groups – ISIS and Al Qaeda – against which the West is allegedly waging a ‘war against terror’ and we see the hypocrisy magnify.  The fact is that there is moral basis for the alliance with Saudi Arabia, which together with the Gulf Sheikdoms, is in a close alliance with Israel in policing the region.

Saudi Arabia has no business interfering in Yemeni’s civil war.  Its blockade and merciless bombing, with British and US weaponry, has caused a human rights catastrophe.  One can but compare the crocodile tears shed over Russia’s aerial bombardment of Aleppo with the support given to Saudi Arabia to note that Western foreign policy in the Middle East doesn’t have a shred of moral legitimacy.

Saudi King Salman - John Woodcock's comrade in arms

Naturally Labour’s pro-Trident John Woodcock defended his decision to support Tory party policy in Saudi Arabia (which is what an abstention means) on the basis that the “last thing the Middle East needs is more gesture politics from the comfort of British dining tables and withdrawal by those who have the capacity to play a constructive role.”  In other words it is acceptable to supply arms to Saudi Arabia from London’s dinner tables but not to oppose their butchery.  If it is ‘gesture politics’ to halt arms sales to Saudi Arabia  then it is the kind of politics we need.

The question therefore remains why did Labour’s Right choose this issue?  It is clear that the fundamental issue which divides Corbyn from the Labour Right is over the alliance with the United States.  Saudi Arabia is the US’s closest ally, despite its funding for terrorist groups.  Ipso facto Britain must tag along. The extent of this alliance was shown when the Serious Fraud Office was getting close to British Aerospace’s use of bribes to obtain Saudi arms contracts in the Al-Yamamah arms deal.  Tony Blair vetoed the prosecution.

One of the quaint customs that John Mann and Peter Kyle have no problem with

The alliance, if one can call it that, with the Saudi Arabian ruling family, is the lynchpin of US and British policy in the Middle East.  The other key ally of course is Israel and it is no surprise that Israel and Saudi Arabia are extremely close politically.

Labour’s Right is therefore saying that whatever Saudi Arabia’s human rights abuses and whatever its support for Jihadi groups in Syria, the necessities of the Western Alliance override the interests of the Saudi and Yemeni people.  Old fashioned imperialism and self-interest dressed up in the language of mutual interests and ‘anti-terrorism’.

It is one of the political weaknesses of Corbyn that instead of espousing an anti-imperialist  position that rejects per se support for Saudi Arabia in the region, it is dressed up in a pacifism which in the end is watered down to remove even an arms ban.

It is noticeable that the Chair of Labour Friends of Israel, Joan Ryan, was one of the abstainers, along with Ann Clwyd, the hypocrite who supported the Iraq war because of Saddam Hussein’s undoubted atrocities but was more than prepared to turn a blind eye to those of King Salman.  Other luminaries include the ‘anti-Semitism’ liar John Mann MP and of course our very own Peter Kyle.  Peter is a very great advocate of gay rights yet he was happy to support Saudi Arabia which reserves the death penalty for gays.  The same was true of Ben Bradshaw.  Keith Vaz and another Zionist Mike Gapes also abstained and Vaz actually spoke in the debat.

This is why the attitude of the Momentum leadership and Jon Lansman, that the Labour Right can be appeased and brought to accept Corbyn’s leadership is so off beam.  They will never accept the dominance of the Right in the party and that is why the Left has  to be campaigning, not only to reselect these people but to gain control of Labour’s civil service and dismiss Crooked Iain McNicol, Labour’s General Secretary.  Instead Corbyn has said that he has no quarrel with McNicol continuing in office so that he can continue the witch hunt of people on the Left.

In the past month the elected Brighton & Hove Labour Party Chair Mark Sandell has been expelled from the Labour Party and we heard last week that Greg Hadfield, the elected Secretary, has been suspended.  The witch hunt goes on and Momentum and its unelected leadership keep silent.  Indeed we have news of Momentum intending to hold a long awaited conference in the New Year.  Apparently it involves internet voting which suggests that they aren’t intending to hold a meaningful physical conference.  The sooner Lansman’s baleful grip, together with his cronies, is lifted from Momentum the better.  The membership of Momentum, which is now over 20,000 has to decide who their officers are.

The Labour MPs who abstained on a bill to withdraw support from Saudi Arabia’s murderous war in Yemen

see also The Labour rebels who didn’t back the Yemen vote have blood on their hands

How Britain's party of war gave the green light to Saudi in Yemen

Peter Oborne

Friday 28 October 2016 11:15 UTC

This week's Yemen vote demonstrates something apparent since the vote to invade Iraq: the party of war holds a majority in the Commons

Last month, Jeremy Corbyn was re-elected as Labour leader. It was his second victory by an overwhelming majority in a year, and it should have given Corbyn uncontested authority.

Yet he is still regarded with mutinous contempt by a significant proportion of his own side. They flatly refuse to accept Corbyn’s leadership.

I have reported politics from Westminster for almost 25 years and can recall few more shocking parliamentary events

This became clear on Wednesday night, when more than 100 Labour MPs failed to support a three-line whip on British policy towards the Yemen. It was disloyalty on an epic scale. 

Corbyn cannot be faulted for calling a debate on Yemen. For the past 18 months, Britain has been complicit with mass murder as our Saudi allies have bombarded Yemen from the air, slaughtering thousands of innocent people as well as helping fuel a humanitarian calamity.

Corbyn clearly felt that it was his duty as leader of a responsible and moral opposition to challenge this policy. He nevertheless bent over backwards to make sure that the Yemen vote was uncontroversial. The Labour motion therefore stopped short of calling for the suspension of arms sales to Saudi Arabia which has been demanded by many charities and campaign groups.

This is because Corbyn and his foreign affairs spokeswoman Emily Thornberry were mindful that some Labour MPs represented constituencies where local jobs depended on the arms industry. So they contented themselves with demanding an independent United Nations inquiry into crimes committed by all sides – not just the Saudis – in this terrible and bloody conflict. They reasonably suggested that Britain should suspend support for the Saudis until this investigation was completed.

Green light to Saudi

This is the position taken by the bulk of the international community, by all reputable aid agencies and, as far as I can tell, by almost all ordinary Yemenis. In her excellent speech on Wednesday afternoon, Thornberry set out the reasons why the Saudis could no longer be trusted to investigate their own affairs. 

But for Labour abstainers and absentees, Corbyn’s motion would have been carried and parliament would have voted for an independent investigation

Yet more than 100 Labour MPs – not far short of half the Labour Party - defied Corbyn. As a result, Labour’s call for an independent inquiry was defeated by 283 votes to just 193, a majority of 90. But for Labour abstainers and absentees, Corbyn’s motion would have been carried and parliament would have voted for an independent investigation.

The vote is bound to be interpreted by Saudi King Salman as a vote of confidence in his deeply controversial assault on the Yemen. 

It will also lift pressure on the Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson as he resists a growing international clamour for Britain to throw its weight behind an independent UN investigation.  

To sum up, on Wednesday night, the British parliament sent the green light to Saudi Arabia and its allies to carry on bombing, maiming and killing. I have reported politics from Westminster for almost 25 years and can recall few more shocking parliamentary events. 

Party of War

Shocking – but not surprising. The Yemen vote demonstrates something that has been apparent ever since the vote on 18  March 2003 to support the invasion of Iraq: the party of war holds a majority in the Commons.

It comprises virtually all of the Conservative Party and the Blairite wing of Labour. As Nafeez Ahmed wrote in July, there is a clear and demonstrable connection between the vote for war in Iraq, opposition to an Iraq inquiry, support for the calamitous intervention in Libya, and opposition to Jeremy Corbyn. 

For the past 15 years, parliament has been governed by a cross-party consensus in favour of war 

Ahmed showed the majority of those who tried to unseat Corbyn last summer were interventionist. Some 172 supported the motion of no confidence in Corbyn’s leadership. By coincidence or not, exactly the same number of MPs have supported Britain’s calamitous overseas wars. 

Now let’s look at the Labour MPs who put a smile on the faces of King Salman and Boris Johnson by defying Corbyn’s three-line whip and abstaining in Wednesday night’s vote: once again we are at least partly talking about a confederacy of Blairites.

It turns out that Ann Clywd, who made such a sparkling speech in favour of war during the 2003 Iraq debate, has abstained over Corbyn’s call for an independent investigation of Yememi war crimes. So have John Spellar, Gloria de Piero, Fiona MacTaggart, Barry Sheerman, Angela Eagle, Liz Kendall, Luciana Berger, Lucy Powell, Mike Gapes, Stephen Kinnock, Tristram Hunt, Margaret Hodge etc etc.

Even Keith Vaz, who was born in Aden and makes a big deal of his Yemeni antecedents, defied Labour’s three-line whip and abstained. 

It is important to highlight the fact that some of the most prominent opponents of Jeremy Corbyn did traipse through the division lobbies with their leader on Wednesday night. Alan Johnson, Hilary Benn and Yvette Cooper are just three examples. And, of course, the majority of those who abstained on Wednesday were not in parliament for the Iraq vote in 2003.

The Neocons and the unforgiven 

Nevertheless there is a telling pattern here. For the past 15 years, parliament has been governed by a cross-party consensus in favour of war. During that period, Britain has undertaken three major foreign interventions, each one of them utterly disastrous. In each one, military success was swiftly followed by political and, ultimately, state failure. 

Despite the hard-won experience of 15 years, there is still a parliamentary majority in favour of intervention.

There is an intimate connection between politicians who style themselves as moderate and neoconservative policies overseas

Very few parliamentarians opposed all these interventions. Jeremy Corbyn was among them and he has never been forgiven for it.

This brings me to the final paradox of Wednesday night’s vote: the intimate connection between politicians who style themselves as moderate or occupying the centre ground in Britain and neoconservative policies overseas. 

For the past 20 years, the so-called "modernisers", whether Blair’s Labour or Cameron’s Conservatives, have been in charge at Westminster. As has been well-documented (not least by Labour’s Jon Cruddas), they have hollowed out British politics through techniques of spin and electoral manipulation.

It is these same modernisers who have caused havoc in the Middle East, condemning the region to bloodshed and war. They were at it again on Wednesday by sending a signal to the Saudi dictatorship that it was acceptable to carry out its murderous policies in the Yemen. Thirteen years after Iraq, neoconservatism still rules.

- Peter Oborne was named freelancer of the year 2016 by the Online Media Awards for an article he wrote for Middle East Eye. He was British Press Awards Columnist of the Year 2013. He resigned as chief political columnist of the Daily Telegraph in 2015.

The Lib-Tory Attack on the Disabled

After 4 Years the Lib-Dems are now Opposed to the Attacks  They Supported!

Every time you hear Nick Clegg talk about how the Lib Dems restrained their Tory partners in the Coalition, just think of the attacks on the welfare state, the NHS reforms and above all the attack on claimants.  The story below, in last Wednesday’s Guardian illustrates the reality of what has happened.  Those who couldn’t protect themselves went without food, had their benefits stopped ‘sanctioned’ and were left to wither on the vine whilst Ian Duncan Smith flattered the Tory’s multi-millionaire donors.

Disabled Man Dies -  Guardian

In all of this the Lib-Dems have been complicit.   The    poor have paid the bankers’ bills as Clegg and Cable smiled on what was happening.   Only now have the Lib-Dems discovered that they opposed the Bedroom Tax all along!

speaks for itself

What can be done?

Today there is no movement against the attacks on claimants.  Small groups like Brighton Benefits Campaign exist but they are more concerned with their own sectarian differences than campaigning on the coal face.  The attack on benefits affects those in work as well as those who are unemployed.

These attacks are designed to keep wages   down, even at a time of nominal full-employment.  In this they have succeeded.  We have a recovery without any increase in the price of labour.  The trade union movement has unfortunately sat idly by doing little or nothing.

There is a desperate need for a mass campaign on the lines of the anti-poll tax movement to shake up those in power and reverse the cuts.

Tony Greenstein

Barnardos Profit Out of Child Detention At Pease Pottage Detention Centre

Lib Dems Congratulate Themselves on Breaking Promise to End Detention of Child Refugees

Courtesy of Barnardos - the Money Grabbing  'Charity' that began its life kidnapping children

Black Kids Sell Well - Especially at our Pease Pottage Detention Centre

The actual slogan is 'Barnardos believe in making money out of children

Only the Lib Dems could congratulate themselves on breaking a promise to end child detention

No Child Left Behind -  Unless Barnardos Can Make Some Money From Locking them Up!

HM Inspector of Prisons exposes deputy prime minister’s fabrication to have ended detention of children

Lib Dem Conference

During a 25 minute fanfare at last month’s Liberal Democrat party conference, deputy prime minister Nick Clegg claimed again that the government has fulfilled its promise to end the immigration detention of children.  It has not. It has simply re-branded the detention of children, opening a new detention facility for children at Pease Pottage, run by G4S and Barnardo’s. Yesterday, HM Inspector of Prisons (HMIP) published its first report on this new detention facility for children and families (“Cedars”).

Self-harm, use of force and lack of legal representation revealed by HMIP

Universally Despised Opportunist

• 136 people from 39 families had been detained – 84 children and 52 adults
• Six families had been detained twice, and one three times.
• 49% detained families had no legal representation
• 17 removals failed, often due to a last-minute high court injunction
• 9 families were subsequently released, begging the question why they were ever detained in the first place
• Some families had been subjected to multiple attempts to remove them
• Children had become very distressed during forced removals
• There had been self-harm incidents and one detainee had punched her own face causing her tongue to bleed
• No mental health awareness training for any staff 
• Clinical governance arrangements were only “being developed”
• Some complaints by detainees were found to be partially substantiated
• UKBA kept a record of complaints made but not of outcomes
• Two members of staff had been suspended as a result of inappropriate comments
• The Detention Centre Rules do not apply – “The legal basis for the operation of Cedars should be clear”

Force had been used against six families, including against children
• Two men and woman hade been carried by force in the airport 
• An escort had grabbed a woman by the hair – she made a complaint which had been upheld

A pregnant woman in a wheelchair was tipped up and had her feet held by staff from G4S
HMIP : “Force had been used to effect the removal of a pregnant woman, using non-approved techniques. There is no safe way to do this while protecting the unborn child and it is simply not acceptable to initiate force for such purposes … the risk of injury to the unborn child was significant. There is no safe way to use force against a pregnant woman, and to initiate it for the purpose of removal is to take an unacceptable risk… Force should never be used to effect the removal of pregnant women or of children. It should only ever be used in relation to such vulnerable groups in order to prevent harm.”

Will Barnardo’s withdraw it’s services from UKBA to run this detention facility together with G4S ?
Barnardo’s was adamant it would withdraw if certain "red lines" were crossed. Its “red lines” include disproportionate use of force and the detention of families more than twice at “Cedars”. HMIP revealed that 6 families were detained two or more times and the force used on the pregnant woman as "unacceptable".

Read the Medical Justice update on children in detention http://www.medicaljustice.org.uk/mj-reports,-submissions,-etc./press-releases/1977-hm-inspector-of-prisons-exposes-deputy-prime-ministers-fabrication-to-have-ended-detention-of-children-241012.html

Download the 23/10/12 HMIP report on the detention facility at Pease Pottage
Guardian 23/10/12 :

"Britain's still locking up children" 
Nick Clegg boasts that child detention is over, but the coalition's own figures reveal otherwise

Guardian 23/10/12 : "'Unacceptable force' used by G4S staff deporting pregnant woman"


Disclosure in first report of prisons inspector on UK Border Agency's 'family-friendly' Cedars unit near Gatwick