On the margins

The chief constable of Cambridgeshire says she needs more resources to deal with migrant-related crime. The rightwing press are in a frenzy. But are the Latvians, Lithuanians and Portuguese more likely to be victims than perpetrators? Patrick Barkham investigates

Wednesday September 26, 2007
The Guardian


Cabbage fields are stretched taut to the horizon, and drainage ditches march across black, peaty soil. There is something stubborn and unchanging about the flat, bleak landscape of the Fens. Villages with names such as Three Holes and Tipps End straddle lumpy roads that threaten to deposit careless drivers into ditches. Hand-painted signs are propped outside bungalows: "For sale - lop-eared rabbits" and "Eggs - duck & goose".
Everything seems as it ever was in this uncompromising agricultural land. But Fenland's farms and food factories are now powered by Portuguese and, for the past few years, Latvian, Lithuanian and Polish labourers. Rural life has probably not changed this rapidly since the agricultural revolution. And in the past week, an appeal by Julie Spence, the chief constable of Cambridgeshire, for extra resources to tackle crime associated with migrant workers triggered a predictable panic in the right-wing press. "Migrant workers importing crime, says police chief," said the Daily Telegraph. "Migrant influx pushes us all to the limits," screamed the Daily Mail.

Some local people endorse this picture of a countryside ruined by foreign criminals who have imported drink-driving, knives and blood feuds along with their cheap labour. Others are more positive about the migrant workers. However, in Wisbech, the working market town known as the "capital of the Fens", everyone can agree on thing: the migrants and the long-term residents are not rubbing along happily.
"You think you're in Russia," says one local about the Sunday market on the edge of Wisbech. Around a cavernous warehouse are cars and vans with trestle tables laden with plastic toys, dusty grey plastic hi-fis, snakes of old electric cable, bikes, paving stones, cat food, toby jugs and children's clothes. Most of the stallholders are British; the language of the buyers is Lithuanian, Latvian or Polish.

It takes a few days in Wisbech for the significance of the Sunday market to sink in: it is the only obvious moment of large-scale interaction between the settled locals and the mostly eastern European migrants. One woman with little English negotiates to buy a CD player. The seller opens both hands. "Ten pounds," he says. The woman brandishes one hand back and smiles winningly. "Five pounds." It's hers for a fiver. "If it's got a plug on it, the migrant workers will buy it," says Darren Martin, 27, a Welshman who settled in the Fens after serving at nearby RAF Marham.

If the kneejerk position of the right is that immigration is uncontrolled and newcomers don't integrate, then the default setting for the metropolitan left is that rural communities are intolerant, inbred monocultures. But the Fens actually have a long history of absorbing outsiders. They may have been the last corner of England to succumb to William the Conqueror but by then they had already absorbed the Romans, the Angles, the Saxons and the Vikings. The asylum-seeking Huguenots and large numbers of Dutch settled here in the 17th century. Even after the Fens were drained and the sea pushed back, Wisbech was a sizeable - and outwardlooking - river port. Locals such as Evan Hawkins, 79, who worked in Wisbech docks for 40 years, remembers boats from Russia, Germany and Holland regularly visiting the town. The Portuguese arrived in significant numbers a decade ago. Since the accession to the EU of the Baltic states in 2004, East Anglia has attracted Lithuanians, Latvians and Poles. Two years ago, there were up to 80,000 East European migrants estimated to be working in the region.

Although it might be wise to leave it overnight, because I may not be getting the full meaning of what Jon is saying, (either tiredness from work, or a beer or two), I really can't understand what he's saying.
''Walk a mile in their shoes''?

I understand this concept, and think I have done it too. Has anyone else spent hours hanging around at the downtown LA Geryhound (bus) station?
And seen the line of Mexican agriculturial workers, lining up for busses heading for the California San Joaquin Valley? I mean, even elderly men, in white ''cowbow'' hats.
I have.

And Jon, I don't get your oppositon to raising issues that 80% of the people that I live amongst, have opinions, and talk about.

What the hell is this about?

That Zippy doesn't have a clue what this is about, tells its own story.

Oh good another thread for the idiot to post in and everyone else can ignore.

What the hell is this about?

If you think I'm going to respond to a daily mail quote, you're sadly fucking mistaken.

In 2004 groups of Pakistani residents clashed with Afghan and Iraqi asylum-seekers in running street battles which saw cars and houses set alight and windows smashed.

Up to 200 youths went on the rampage and police officers from across the county were drafted in to separate the warring factions.

A Kurdish refugee had his home firebombed and Lithuanian Dainius Kigas was murdered in nearby Wisbech.

Race relations have improved since then and the new, Eastern European arrivals who are here legally are respected for their desire to work hard and earn money for their families. But their sheer number – with a further 69,000 people expected to move to the county by 2016 – creates its own problems.

Peterborough's head of police, Chief Superintendent Paul Phillipson, said: "Once you have that immense growth then every community will bring a small percentage of criminals with it.

"We are working as hard, as sharply and as efficiently as we possibly can. There's no more money to pay for more officers.

"This city is growing exponentially. If we are going to put the lid on crime then we need more money to keep up with that growth."

But I'm out of time now here in the library.

Obviously just Daily Mail wank. But did these events not happen? I live and work amongst people who read the sun and the Daily Mail. (I know: how terrible )
Outside of the fantasy world of ''Start your own revolution and cut out the middle man'' (dancing in the isles like Sarah lady) version of politics, the places we live in are far from ideal.

But I'm out of time now here in the library.

That you needlessly start pointless threads, refer to most posters in 3rd person, and begin sentences with half-hearted and meaninglessly futile prefacing, is all pretty fucking annoying.

I think the replys to this story [...] have been quite illuminating.

instead of basing every race related assumption on a holiday you took, damon, you really need to 'walk a mile in their shoes'.

take a year off and become a migrant, then come back with something other than a link to somebody else's thoughts that you want to assimilate as your own.

September 28, 2007

Crime gangs 'expand sex slavery into shires'
Immigration from Eastern Europe has brought a supply of women deceived into thinking good jobs await them. Instead they are sold to vice gangs for £500 and forced into prostitution. An investigation by The Times has found that one rural force has identified 80 brothels this year.

What is less expected is that the brothel where she was kept as a sex slave is not in London, Birmingham or one of the metropolitan centres. This brothel was in the cathedral city of Peterborough and is one of 80 that have been raided by Cambridgeshire police this year.

Senior officers have been staggered by the discovery of off-street brothels – “sex prisons” in the words of one detective – in towns such as Wisbech, March, Huntingdon and Cambridge. They believe there are many more operating across the county.

Cambridgeshire is not alone. Around the country police forces are realising that human trafficking, a hugely profitable business run by organised criminal gangs, is no longer a big city problem.

In towns as seemingly unlikely as Cheltenham and Leamington Spa, police have moved to shut down brothels. “If you can find it Cheltenham, you can find it anywhere,” said Tim Brain, Chief Constable of Gloucestershire and a national police spokesman on the issue. “I’m expecting we will uncover a lot more.”

Dr Brain said that the key to defeating the traffickers was to deprive them of the huge profits they were making from the trade in human beings.

The increase in sex trafficking appears to have gone hand-in-hand with the surge in immigration in East Anglia that led Cambridgeshire’s Chief Constable, Julie Spence, to demand more money to police a rapidly increasing population. Last week Mrs Spence said that ministers were not taking account of the effect that a rise in immigration was having on policing. She said Cambridgeshire had become a staging post for immigrants, partly because farm work was readily available.

Mrs Spence said the effect of immigration growth seeped into all areas of policing. Foreigners got into difficulties because they were unfamiliar with traffic laws; investigations into crime could involve trips abroad to interview relatives; police had also noticed a growth in prostitution, driven by the influx of large numbers of single men. She said bills for interpreters employed to help police to process suspects and question witnesses had shot up.

Immigration has been one of Britain's great triumphs. But, for no good reason, the welcome mat wears dangerously thin. The myth of the feckless welfare sponger is countered by the stream of would-be Britons paying, on top of their taxes, £34 a go to sit (or resit) their settlement exam and £80 for a citizenship ceremony.

The spirit of Britishness Gordon Brown wants to formalise can only be distilled from the raw materials on offer, whether they be warmth, cohesion or a gang of Fenland youths slamming a Polish man's head into a shop wall. Intolerance wreaks far more damage on Britain than any minor inconvenience posed by incomers. There is no immigration scandal, nor any doomsday scenario of over-population. Bogus fears are incubating a greater crisis. We are witnessing the brutalisation of Britain and the severance of human bonds.

I don't care who or how many people come to live in Britain, but we have to build the infrastructure to cope.
Like millions of houses are needed right now.

Many of those leaving were "long-term migrants" and not British citizens.

Long-term migration into the UK, meanwhile, was 574,000. The figures show the UK population grew to 60,587,000 - an increase of 349,000.

In the late 80's / early 90's, the Tory party sold thousands of Council Housing under the Right To Buy scheme and local councils sat on the money and never reinvested in 'replacement' housing.

Cramped housing conditions with high fire risks have become one of the key concerns of councils with growing immigrant populations, according to today’s surveys.

The report argues that many landlords are exploiting new migrant communities by allowing them to live in dangerously crowded homes in a state of disrepair.

In other cases these workers are living in cramped accommodation provided by their employers but sometimes they are subletting their own rooms to gain extra cash. Fire services are frequently being called out to multiple-occupany houses where families are crammed into one or two rooms with poor facilities.

“Many of the properties lack fire precautions and adequate facilities for washing and drying clothes,” Lancashire Fire and Rescue Service is reported as saying. “Fires have been caused by drying clothes in front of gas fires that have been left unattended, smoking, alcohol and arson committed by people who have negative attitudes towards new migrants,” said the report.

In Hull and East Riding, local people have complained that Polish workers are monopolising computers at the local library and failing to use refuse collections properly. Residents are also concerned that in the longer term migrant workers may do better economically than local employees.

East Coast yuppies mocking George Bush is not necessarly sophisticated politics.
Sniggering at Jon Stewart's Daily Show is so easy.

Italy set to deport 5,000 Romanians after murder

Saturday November 03 2007

Italy began rounding up thousands of Romanian immigrants for deportation yesterday after passing a new "public order and security" law.

Masgras Neculai (30), a petty thief, was named as the first Romanian who would be expelled under the new law, which allows anyone who is considered "dangerous" to society to be sent home.

The law was rushed through the Italian cabinet on Wednesday after huge public outcry following the savage murder of Giovanna Reggiani, a 47-year-old Italian woman, allegedly by a Romanian man.

The decree was officially published yesterday and came into force immediately. Police began combing immigrant ghettos and arresting Romanians without permits.

Government ministers have vowed to return 5,000 Romanians to their home country in the next few weeks.

The move appeared to have the blessing of the European Union. Franco Frattini, the European Commissioner for Justice, Freedom and Security, said: "What has to be done is simple. Go into a nomad camp in Rome for example, and ask them: 'Can you tell me where you live?'

"If they say they do not know, take them and send them home to Romania. That is how the European directive works. It is simple and safe. Romania cannot say they will not take them back, because it is an obligation that is part of being a member state of the EU.''

He also urged Italy to pull down the camps to prevent any Romanians from returning.

Outcasts: Italy turns on its immigrants in wake of a murder
These are the first victims of a brutal Italian crackdown on immigrants. As thousands await deportation without trial, are we entering a new era of intolerance across Europe?
By Peter Popham in Rome
Published: 03 November 2007
They sat forlornly on the banks of the Tiber yesterday while the shantytowns they had called home only hours before were demolished. Already outcasts from the mainstream of Italian life, now they have been banished from whatever impromptu shelter they had found. And the city rejoiced at their misfortune.

Three small kittens and a hungry-looking mongrel are the last remaining inhabitants of the Roma squatter camp on the northern outskirts of Rome. The camp is yards from Tor di Quinto station on a commuter line from central Rome, but, screened by trees and creepers and huddled in a narrow gully, it is invisible until you part the creeper and step inside. Then you find the first of a line of flimsy huts, put together from scrap wood and fabric and cardboard but neat and cared-for. Inside some of them have rugs on the floor, tiny gas cooking stoves, dressers with ornaments, a double bed, a broken down chair; outside is a mouldy old sofa, a moth-eaten beach umbrella shading an old coffee table: la dolce vita for Italy's poorest and most marginal residents.

The camp is empty because on Wednesday a naval captain's wife, Giovanna Reggiani, 47, returning home from a shopping trip to central Rome, was attacked and robbed near here, and dumped in the gully. Last night she died in hospital. It was a vicious crime, and fed into a mounting national mood of anger and exasperation about immigration. Suddenly Italy's political system, normally so sluggish, sprang into life.

Within hours Italy was doing what millions of people around Europe – whipped up by populist politicians and a xenophobic media – would like to see their own governments doing: taking quick, dramatic and draconian action to teach the immigrants a lesson they won't forget.

Italy tells Romania: We don't want your Roma


1,000 migrants a month arrive in Italian capital. £20-a-week wages mean few are likely to go back

Tom Kington in Rome
Tuesday June 26, 2007
The Guardian


Tourists gazing down from Rome's third-century BC Milvian bridge get a glimpse of an idyllic, tree-lined stretch of the Tiber winding its way into the heart of the city. But if they look closer, they can make out a cluster of well-hidden shacks on the river bank built by homeless Roma migrants - many from Romania, a new EU member.
Desperate families sleep under elevated roads that ring the capital, in suburban woods and even, in the case of 14 Romanians discovered by police last month, in a Roman cistern along the Appian Way.


Now, however, amid the surge in immigration - 1,000 Roma arrive from Romania every month - Italy's politicians are starting to take decisive, but controversial, action. Rome's mayor Walter Veltroni flew to Bucharest yesterday to urge the government to discourage its people from leaving in the first place. He has also announced the construction of four huge new camps in the suburbs of the Italian capital to house the arrivals.
"We need to contain the flow from Romania and part of that involves working with child welfare groups to improve conditions and convince parents to stay put," said a town hall official travelling with Mr Veltroni. The party will visit the mayors of three towns - Craiova, Calarasi and Turnu Severin - from where the majority of Rome's new arrivals hail.

There are now around 7,000 Romanian Roma in the Italian capital. "Of those only 1,500 are living in council-run facilities, the rest are in shacks or in the open," said town hall spokesman Enrico Serpieri.

"The crime of one person cannot be visited upon a whole nationality and one group, in this case the Roma.

"The Greens, who have stood for open borders within Europe and the free movement of people in Europe must oppose all signs of xenophobia and racism and this new law in Italy shows all the symptoms of being a knee-jerk reaction to the mob.

The Roman Catholic charity Caritas puts the number of Romanians in Italy at 556,000 - less than 1% of the population. Yet, according to the interior minister, 5.6% of those arrested for murder are Romanian.

Since June last year 76 murders have been committed by Romanians.

The mayor of Rome, Walter Veltroni, says that 75% of arrests for murder, rape and robbery in his city this year can be attributed to Romanians.

Fagin-style criminal gangs from Romania are making vast amounts of money from trafficking children into Britain to work as pickpockets and beggars, it is revealed today.

Well these children are living 'on the margins' how ever you try to spin it.

Refugees abandoned on our doorstep

Exclusive report from Calais reveals war refugees blocked by Britain

Gordon Brown’s government is complicit in the misery of tens of thousands of refugees attempting to flee the “war on terror”.

Many of these “non-people” are trapped in the French port town of Calais. They risk their lives trying to enter Britain.

Socialist Worker visited Calais and spoke to refugees. They were from Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and Eritrea. We found Kurds fleeing sectarian and ethnic hatred and educated women forced out of Eritrea as the “war on terror” washed up on their shores.

It's the problems and the issues that arise from it that interest me.

Laura María Agustín’s provocative new book, Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry, really does what it says on the back cover: ‘[It] explodes several myths: that selling sex is completely different from any other kind of work, that migrants who sell sex are passive victims, and that the multitude of people out to save them are without self-interest.’

Agustín warns that ‘what we say about any given subject is always constructed, and there are only partial truths’. But you can disregard the book’s many postmodern caveats: this is an honest, complex and certainly convincing read. Agustín knows what she’s talking about – she has researched and worked with people who sell sex for over 10 years, including in Latin America and the Caribbean.

It is precisely the fact that Agustín has complicated the ‘discourse’ around trafficking, migration and sex work that seems to get the backs up of those who volunteer and are employed in what she terms the ‘rescue industry’.

It starts off like this: ''Controversial author Laura María Agustín tells spiked that those dedicated to combating the sex industry have criminalised migrant workers''.
Hmmm, I don't reckon pink shay is going to like that.

Well this is certainly a case of 'on the margins'.
Oh, it's just some Spiked woman (Nathalie Rothschild) talking to the author of a book called 'Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry'
I was wondering how some Billy Bragg forum members would think of a book (or interview) like that.
And then I thought that since hardly anybody would read it, not much.

And Jon: it's obviously not one for you.

You can't be an armchair feminist
Reclaim the Night is 30 tomorrow. Julie Bindel, who knows all about the joys of direct action, will be there

Some of the best fun I have ever had involved standing outside sex shops, taking photographs of men entering the premises and then shouting at them when they came out. There have been other joys too, like pouring cement down the toilet of a cinema that screened nasty pornography. And then there was the time when I and a few fellow feminists spray-painted half of Yorkshire warning that rapists would be castrated.
Public protest and direct action like this is not as popular as it once was. But we may be set for a revival. The annual Reclaim the Night march, which celebrates its 30th anniversary when it takes place in London tomorrow, is enjoying a surge of interest, probably due to the horrifying UK rape statistics released recently. The organisers say they have received a flurry of calls from women keen to take part.

As Germany's sex industry gears up for the millions of men arriving for the World Cup, fears are growing that thousands more women will be forced into prostitution. Julie Bindel investigates

With just 10 days to go until the first matches kick off, shops across Britain are heaving with World Cup merchandise: football shirts, whistles and scarves. And then there are the condoms. At 500 branches of Superdrug, there is a range of condoms tailored for England supporters. They are emblazoned with the slogan "Lie Back and Think of England" and decorated with the cross of St George.
It may seem reassuring that football supporters travelling to Germany are being encouraged to be sensible, but there is a pernicious side to the connection between the 2006 World Cup and sex. Alongside the beer tents and burger bars catering for a massive influx of fans to Germany, entrepreneurs are preparing to sell a product already openly on sale throughout Germany: women.

Germany has legalised its sex industry - Cologne opened the world's first drive-in brothel in 2001. But with three million foreign football fans about to descend on the 12 cities hosting the tournament, entrepreneurs are laying on special facilities. In Berlin, for example, a 3,000sqm mega-brothel has been built next to the main World Cup venue. It is designed to take as many as 650 customers at any one time. Wooden "performance boxes" resembling toilets have been built, with condoms, showers and parking all laid on.

Will they get as much use as everyone seems to think? One man I spoke to in an internet chatroom certainly thinks so. "I will be visiting some lovely ladies between matches, certainly," says George. He tells me he is "looking forward to a bit of exotic". Sam, a chartered surveyor from Leeds, tells me he is travelling to Berlin a week before the tournament, "to get my end away".

But where are all the extra women to come from? In January, the international feminist organisation Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW) launched a worldwide campaign to protest against Germany's promotion and public display of prostitution during the World Cup. The organisation is worried that an estimated 40,000 women will be "imported" into Germany from Africa, Asia and central and eastern Europe. (This figure is based on the number of women needed to fill the additional brothels being set up.)

Trafficking in dubious horror stories
Meet the unholy alliance of Bushies, Christians and feminists trying to convince us that World Cup 2006 is a cesspit of trafficked women and sex-slavery.

World Cup 2006 in Germany has united European left-wingers, feminists, police officers, Christians, the American right and US President George W Bush. But it is not football that has brought these diverse forces together. It is the issue of trafficking and forced prostitution, and a belief that the World Cup tournament is packed with male fans looking to have sex with one of the 40,000 ‘sex slaves’ reportedly trafficked into Germany.

Even before the tournament started we were being fed almost daily reports and horror stories about how the event would be tarnished by drunken fans using and abusing enslaved women. Both the left and right, Christians and feminists, joined forces to argue that Germany would become the temporary home to hordes of uncivilised football fans and victimised women from Eastern Europe.

Nothing better captures today’s anti-humanist outlook than this degraded view of the World Cup. Here we have a tournament which millions of people around the world are enjoying, and all that various politicians, police authorities, religious groups and feminist campaigners can see, often on the basis of unsubstantiated or inflated figures, is an opportunity for degradation and abuse on a massive scale. We should show these scaremongers the red card.

Slightly off topic but I fucking hate the way you keep posting Geoffs pm

I also hate the way you get so pissy and judgemental when people don't read your links. You've said somewhere on here that you would rather work out the best arguments and opinions of people than be active. If you were an author, a philospher, a journalist or someone who's opinions were used for the betterment of society I could kind of understand your reluctance to be active. There is a place for both active and academic people in this crazy fucked up world. You, however are neither. You are just someone who should go out and buy some porn cause you're so obviously frustrated.

pink shay, you don't half talk some shite. You bash around like a bull in a china shop. Do you think that by posting like Sarah lady (when she's in a bad mood) it produces an atmosphere where opinion can be discussed? (I dont).

The thing is, your argument in you last post is poor, and your reference to porn is just plain insulting.
Sexist even

You brought up ''Reclaim the Night'' - so I presumed you supported its politics. Julie Bindel speaks for them.
I showed some examples of Julie Bindel's writing. So why come across with a pissed off tone?

As for your line that you were sick of me posting ''alarmist sensationalist links concerning violence of and abuse against women in other countries'' - that is such a cop out, and again, a diversion.

Why shouldn't I bring up what Julie Bindel said about the World Cup? Because it was in Germany??

Bringing up the case of Du'a Khalil Aswad is sensationalist is it? It was mentioned before in the No Sweat thread: (or actually, posted as a link to a meeting that was to discuss the case of Du'a and that of honor killings in general).
I think you use this brashness as a tactic.

Likening the situation of honor killings in northen Iraq (running at 600 a year) to domestic violence in Britain is wrong. In Britain (as you say) it happens behind closed doors and is nearly always the work of one man, who has no support from anyone.
In Iraq, it can be the work of a whole family, with connivance from the wider society around them.
I'm just stating a fact, but you want to get pissy about it.
Not good.

And can I just make it clear: I don't get annoyed that people don't read my links.
I don't expect it of (hardly) anyone.
I know they are all ''tedious'' (like one forum member said over a year ago), and just ''blah blah blah''.

Whatever they may be.