Under the Floorboards: The C Word’s Most Loathsome.

Spring glanced at the garden this week, brought out the plum blossom, magnificently white and sweet smelling, and the ‘pond’ filled with amorous frogs, shrieking, giggling and splashing ecstatically at all hours of the night and VERY early morning. Now it’s rumoured to be freezing again. Apple blossom still shy, but I remain optimistic.
Such is the miracle of even the most hesitant moments of spring because along with the ecstatic frogs and absurdly pretty plum blossom came the most horrifyingly appalling infestation of flies. Some tiny and creeping, crawling into and on to and under and inside things I didn’t even know had an inside or an underside; some enormous vast and loathsome, mutating monstrous beasts, lumbering along the walls and carpet like the vile progeny of sexually disturbed helicopters.
Then I remembered. Something, I thought, had died. Some weeks ago this was, but not so long that I couldn’t remember the nauseating stench of what I suspected at the time was a dying or dead rodent, somewhere wholly inaccessible and invisible: something for which I chased and searched and hunted and stalked, until, eventually the stench became a smell which became a distant memory and finally vanished. Then came the flies. Whatever it was is producing these creatures at rate equalled only by our esteemed government’s capacity to turn refugees into criminals. Could it, horror of Hitchcockian horrors, be the rotting corpse of the The C Word’s most loathed, his Royal Loathsomeness, the Minister for Immigration, Borders, Detention camps and the Gulag: The Miserable Byrne. Had someone finally done for him, and in some unspeakably cruel twist of fate, dumped his vile twitching remains under MY BATH? Was it now my task to count his crimes which swarmed pitilessly around my bathroom and kitchen, yea unto the very fruit bowl containing the garlic meant to ward off such hideous evil?
Well, the refugees running the shops down the road provided all manner of toxic spray, the migrant workers running the shops in Green Lanes came up with the most viscously sticky fly papers imaginable, unspeakably disgusting but highly effective, and the asylum-seeking dancing-pal came and blocked up the holes in my bathroom thus excluding further invasion by the vile progeny of Byrne.
Who shall we expel, the Home Office Minister or the Immigrants?
No contest really.

The Workhouse

Next in line for reintroduction, also with a nice flavour of the mid Eighteenth Century is the Workhouse.
I live in Tottenham, an unlovely part of the North London Borough of Haringey. I love it, because I like my neighbours. But it is bleak. It has no centre and little soul and fairly bristles with workhouses. People migrate here from numerous different countries, but in the lattice of streets where I live, the population is mainly Kurdish, from Central Turkey. They are not PKK and need asylum as much to escape unwelcome and violent attention from that organisation as from the equally violent and unwelcome interference from the Turkish Gendarma, the military police. A mixture of studied ignorance and institutional brutality from the Home Office has resulted in large numbers of what can only be called Ignored Asylum Seekers. These are the ones who cannot be deported because their case for asylum is too good. So the HO has instead adopted a policy of first ignoring them and then criminalising them by refusing to allow them either to work or to claim benefit. They have to survive, so they work illegally and are exploited to the limits of their endurance.
So we have in Tottenham a critical mass of criminalised workers, who, as my friend Jamal did, work standing up for at least 14 hours a day with no break, (stop and think about that for a second), no day off and no holiday. He worked like this, without a single day off, for six years, rarely seeing the light of day, because mostly he worked nights. He is one of hundreds, possibly thousands. Jamal worked at the front of the shop, he met the customers; we all knew him. Most of the women, however, especially in the kebab and pizza shops, are at the back, in the kitchens. You wont see them. Our local economy is more or less dependent on these people. Remove them and we lose our entire local community. Welcome to Britain’s workhouses.

The Slum Landlord

Hogarth would be proud of our next candidate: The Slum and its cohort, The Slum Landlord. This comes complete with Gin Lane, or, more accurately, Cider Close.
Our local newspaper, ‘The Haringey Independent,’ excelled itself on Friday march 7th, ‘Migrant workers’ slum cleared out,’ it howled. Turned out a bunch of Polish men had set up camp under the arches next to the car park near Seven Sisters Tube station. The paper said about thirty people had been there for four weeks, but a small number have been there for some months, certainly since last summer. Directly related to this is the reintroduction of Lord Land-Scumbag, or The Slum Landlord. These are the buy-to-let vermin who bought up properties on the cheap, and let them to ‘asylums’ and migrant workers at extortionate prices. In order to pay the COLLOSSAL rent, a two bedroom flat, such as the one next door to me, will house anything up to twelve people. Two in each room including the living room, sleeping the day shift, and another two in each for the night shift. The charmless Goksun Guest House on the corner of my street also does this. After he’d finished his shift at the shop opposite, Jamal went to his bed which had just been vacated by Mehmet, only minutes before. Mehmet would then come downstairs to do the day shift.

The Servant Class and The Criminal Class

So we have the peasant, the slum dweller, the pitiful immigrant and the pitiless landlord. We are carefully reconstructing a labouring class from the people who have migrated here from the EU, and who work under restrictions. Romanians and Bulgarians can do only labouring work, no matter what their qualifications. ‘You keep the good jobs for the people from the rich countries,’ scowls Tavi, ‘You want people from the poor countries to do your shit work for you.’ We seem to have created a whole new ‘servant class’ from the Eastern European countries. These are the ‘respectable working class’ now. Those from outside the EU, with slightly darker skins and dodgy religious practices, like Jamal and Mehmet are the criminal classes. They’re the lucky ones though, relatively speaking. They have family here, and can avoid the worst excesses of Home Office Enforcement.

Consider Hasan, 20 years old, from Uzbekistan, here on his own, and without proper legal representation. Now electronically tagged, (a form of post modern leg-iron), he and his housemates are subject to relentless ‘visits’ from the Home Office at strange times of the night. Yet they wont deport him, or Samira, from Iran, who has so far managed to avoid the tagging, but only because she does have a good lawyer and a very politically aware brother to defend her. They both work the endless hours, and they’re both stuck forever in the Eternal Waiting Room while the HO also waits- to see who’ll blink first. Utterly guileless, Jamal is mystified by the refusal of his asylum claim: ‘I think the Home Office just don’t understand,’ he puzzles, trying to defend this institution of the democracy he loves. They understand alright, that’s why they make no active attempt to detain or deport him. They’re just trying to starve him out along with the others. I do sometimes wonder if ‘the workhouse’ is really the right word for this, in bleaker moments it seems more like a ghastly parody of the Gulag.

Strangers in Citizens

The obscene spectacle of a LABOUR GOVERNMENT adopting a policy of restricting some workers, criminalising others, recreating a ‘servant class’ and a ‘criminal class,’all to stop those frightful foreigners from coming to England to do the jobs no one else wants to do, was adopted to please the editor of the Daily Mail, who apparently, oh, you’re going to love this, REPRESENTS THE REST OF US AND OUR INTERESTS. Do you feel represented? Thought not. Taking action starts
Here. Strangers into Citizens has a pathway to citizenship proposal which would enable the Ignored Asylum Seekers to work legally and pay taxes and eventually to apply for citizenship given good references and so forth. S to C are working on a shoe string at the moment, and need help with their website among other things... if anyone has a few hours to spare....in the summer perhaps, that would be the business and The C Word will love you forever.