The Home Office Building in Marsham St in Westminster is perhaps the only government building in London from the past 50 years of any real architectural interest – quite a contrast from the boring blandness of those blocks on Victoria St or the terribly twee pipes of Portcullis House. It’s also a building that creates its own environment, and on hot days the water and the grass make it some kind of an oasis in Central London.
The light too is often luxurious, a kind of glow combined with the dappled sunlight that produce such a sheer pleasure that I sometimes find it hard to concentrate on making images.
It’s hard perhaps to reconcile this meliorating atmosphere surrounding the building with the inhumane starkness of some of the actions decided on inside, in particular over the hounding of migrants in this country and the decisions that are made and the evasion of justice that occurs, allowing – if not organising – pre-dawn raids in which doors are kicked down, people rounded up, forced onto planes and sent back, often to countries they have fled because of persecution, and where they may well face imprisonment, torture and even death.
Of course in theory this doesn’t happen, but too often it does in practice, with too many politicians and officials who just don’t care – or are frankly racist in their assumptions and actions.
It’s a building no one with a conscience can look at without feeling shame, and embodying the strange and awful paradox that those who are responsible for making and applying the laws often choose to ignore and short-cut them.
Cleaners at SOAS, School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London, are largely migrants from Latin America. Lime most places, SOAS outsources its cleaning to save money. And as is always the case this means that these cleaners are employed under conditions SOAS would not contemplate for its own staff. Outsourcing is only ever cheaper because the workers are exploited; it’s a tighter screw which gives them less for doing more, adds a profit for the shareholders and delivers the contract at a price that an ethical organisation couldn’t match. If we ever get a socialist government in this country its a practice they would make illegal – just as we’ve outlawed practices like sending children up chimneys.
Recently, cleaners in London have been getting organised, with the help of the trade unions and others, and demanding a living wage. The cleaners at SOAS had just achieved that, and in retaliation the contract firm employing them brought in the Immigration Police, kitted up in riot gear, to a meeting of cleaning staff at 6.30 am one morning.
The cleaners were detained and questioned without being allowed trade union or legal representation. Not surprisingly there were some who were not carrying papers stating they had a right to work here. Some may have been in this country legally but under our draconian legislation caught by the law that denies them the right to work. None of them were doing anything harmful, all of them were doing useful work, doing a cleaning job with unsociable hours and low pay that no British worker wants to do.
Nine were arrested and taken to Immigration Detention Centres – prisons for people who have not been convicted of any crime. Most of the nine have already been forcibly put on flights back to their native countries, although it is possible that some had a right to remain here, and some have all their friends and families here.
This demonstration was another of those occasions when I felt ashamed of my country and its lack of humanity. But at the same time proud that there are people like those at this demonstration who are fighting for human rights and such campaigning does sometimes bring results.
One of the speakers was a civil servant and trade unionist, who asked us not to blame the civil servants who are just doing their job. Its tough, but if your job demands that you are racist or unfair, then you should fight and take the consequences (in the Civil Service probably a transfer of another department.) Its a lesson the twentieth century should have taught us.
You can see the pictures on My London Diary.