How can it be that in a civilised country like the UK people are used as slaves? Did nobody notice the 24 emaciated men with shaved heads doing building work in Bedfordshire and beyond who were found by police on Sunday in sub-human conditions in Leighton Buzzard?
The UK has its dark places and dirty secrets and it is the most vulnerable among us who are trapped in the dirt and the dark. Those men in Leighton Buzzard, UK citizens among them, would seem to have been homeless, alcoholics, vulnerable and gullible, and therefore easy prey – people the rest of us walk away from, reject, fear. The harder the recession bites, the more such people will join the immigrants and migrants, the destitute asylum seekers forbidden to work, all those with whom we associate exploitation and abuse and who we so easily ignore.
It is thanks to groups like Liberty, ECPAT, Anti-Slavery International and Kalayaan (a charity for migrant domestic workers) who campaign on behalf of this invisible, slave-driven workforce that we know anything about them at all. And thanks to them there have been changes to laws protecting these workers and strengthening the courts' power to prosecute the perpetrators.
A change in the Coroners and Justice Act 2009 made it an offence to hold another person in servitude. In 2007, I met two young women trafficked into the UK for slave labour who had been beaten and sexually assaulted by their employers – apparently law-abiding citizens. It was at a church where one of them was looking after children while their parents worshipped, that she met other trafficked girls. The adults in the church knew what was going on and did nothing. This was before the change to the law.
Since the change, Rebecca Balira, a scientist who lives in Thamesmead, has been convicted after exploiting a 21-year-old Tanzanian, Methodia Mathias. She took away her passport, forbade her to call home and made her work from dawn until midnight seven days a week. At Southwark Crown Court in August, Balira was convicted under the Coroners and Justice Act and it is under the provisions of this act that five people were arrested on suspicion of involvement in the Leighton Buzzard camp.
But, even as this law brings justice to some, another is in danger of being eroded. A week ago, hundreds of foreign domestic workers demonstrated outside Parliament against government proposals which could result in downgrading legal protection which guards against abuse to domestic migrant workers.
Under the legal speak of a UKBA consultation paper – Employment Related Settlement Tier 5 and Overseas Domestic Workers – lurks a threat to remove protection brought in in 1998 for foreign domestic workers employed by diplomats and private individuals bringing in their own servants. At the heart of this is the Government's pledge to cut migration massively by 2015.
Research by Kalayaan shows how those legal changes have resulted in lower rates of abuse since 1998. Reports of being made to work seven days with no break and incidents of physical, sexual and psychological abuse had dropped significantly by 2010. If the Government drops the protection in the law, that abuse will return to its former levels.
On the Today programme yesterday, Andrew Selous, the Conservative MP for South-West Bedfordshire, said: "I'm thinking of all those people who had their drives laid by these victims. They must have been offered a suspiciously low price and seen the condition of the workers... [it] should have made the customers think and report their concerns to the police."
Selous has a point. Not only do we need to join the lobby to keep the laws that protect the vulnerable, we should see who might be laying the paving on our driveways and not collude in the UK's dirty secrets.
melaniemcfadyean@yahoo.co.uk
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