Chinese Whispers: The true story behind Britain's hidden army of labour, By Hsiao-Hung Pai

Sweatshops and dangerous factories only flourish in countries such as China, don't they? Places without the kind of labour legislation we have in this country. Hsiao-Hung Pai's extraordinary, gut-wrenching exposé of the way that hundreds of thousands of people are forced to work in Britain today answers this question emphatically: no.

Britain is one of the many developed countries that has so far failed to sign up to the 1990 UN International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of all Migrant Workers and Members of their Families, which states that human rights and certain minimum standards of welfare should be extended to all migrant workers, regardless of their legal status. In Britain, "illegals", as the tabloids call them, have no rights. Cockle pickers drown, people die from exhaustion after working 24-hour shifts on production lines, and very little happens. Families receive no compensation and the chains of organisations supporting the trade in cheap labour continue to flourish. There's political capital to be made prosecuting gangs bringing illegal immigrants into Britain, but very little to be had protecting the rights of those "illegals" once they are here.

Hsiao-Hung Pai explains why so many Chinese workers risk their lives to work in Britain, having been driven out of China by economic reforms implemented since it joined the World Trade Organisation (nearly five million workers in state-owned factories were made redundant between 2001-2006 in the north-eastern provinces alone); and demonstrates the ways British consumers benefit from their labour.

How can this go on in a country obsessed with surveillance? In provincial towns, where you can be prosecuted for cutting down a tree or painting your front door the wrong colour? There are obviously some things that people just don't want to see.