The Rag Trade

‘IT has long been the case that most of the ground crew, baggage handlers and security staff at British airports are in fact undercover reporters.

”Dear Ali, weather is crap, food is awful, people are Nazis. Wish you were here”

But it appears that pretty well every other aspect of British life depends upon the dedication and hard toil of this group of unsung heroes.

The police force is just the BBC in uniform, old people’s homes are staffed entirely by work experience staff from the Sun and we all know the Queen can’t get her boiled egg and soldiers in the morning without help from a Mirror journalist.

Now, the hard-working Mirror hacks are at it again, this time landing a job as a security officer in an asylum centre.

And – surprise, surprise – Nick Sommerlad discovers “a culture of abuse, racism and violence that SHOULD appal us all”.

What Sommerlad saw during the seven weeks he worked at Yarl’s Wood, the paper says, mocks the Government’s claim that the £100m centre was providing a “safe and caring” environment for asylum seekers and illegal immigrants.

Group 4 staff described the 60 women inmates as “scum of the scum”, one suggesting that the Royal Navy should sink dinghies used by desperate refugees.

They boasted of “pasting” the inmates during control and restraint procedures and claimed they beat them up out of view of the CCTV cameras.

But at least there was some discrimination in this discrimination.

“The Indians and Pakis are all right,” explained a senior security officer.

“But Jamaicans are drug-dealing pieces of shit. Algerians are the slimiest bastards in the world – all of them. They’re all terrorists, the ones we get anyway.

“And the Chinese are evil little bastards.”

After a month and half working in the centre, Sommerlad was sacked – not for not being sufficiently racist, but because they found out he had lied on his CV.

As news broke of the crackdown (in the wake of Ryan Parry’s undercover reports from inside Buckingham Palace), Yarl’s Wood became like an Italian battlefield with tabloid journalists falling over each other to give themselves up.

In fact, it transpired that only two of the inmates, four of the guards and a cook were not in the pay of some Fleet Street rag. And three of them were freelancers…’

Posted: 8th, December 2003 | In: Tabloids Comment | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed: RSS 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink