Nothing demonstrates the both the inequity rife in Blair's Britain and the true blight of “asylum” seekers than the death of a 47-year-old man in a basement rubbish room of the Café Royal in London. For two years, while the rich dined in opulent splendour upstairs the man lived in the bowels of the hotel behind the rubbish bins.
When his naked and badly bruised body was discovered, police first though he had been murdered, before it was established that he lived naked due to the heat generated by the basement boilers and a post-mortem found that his injuries were consistent with a fall. The man had been an immigrant worker employed by an agency – one of thousands without papers who are forced to work for a pittance in hotels across London.
A House of Lords recently described such workers as a new “ethnic underclass”. However, its findings will never be acted upon because the Government knows such workers undertake the cheap, menial and dirty jobs without which central London would grind to an expensive halt. Unregulated and hidden from view, these workers are forced to work in appallingly unsafe conditions for poverty pay. The sad lonely death of a man far from his home underlines the reality; market-driven casualisation continues to kill and always will – until we stand together for real change.
The sad lonely death of a man far from his home underlines the reality; market-driven casualisation continues to kill and always will – until we stand together for real change