Yasmin Alibhai-Brown: The brutal reality of our asylum policy

Whizzing through emails on Saturday, a name flashes by and draws me back. One Colin Firth says he admires my writing and requests me to write on an issue that moves him to rage. Readers, t'was him, Mr D'Arcy to me, Mark Darcy to my daughter. Like moths we flutter around the computer, so strong is the light of stardom. I told Firth that his name would lure readers to his cause, deeply unpopular though it is - the plight of asylum-seekers and migrants forcibly deported every day to confirm that John Reid is a man of steel.

Reid has declared war on some of the most oppressed of the world. His department operates policies and practices of institutionalised savagery, rebranded as efficiency. On Tuesday, Tough John will tell us his office is deporting more people than the numbers of "bogus" asylum applicants coming in. To get to target, they pick low-hanging fruit - babies, tots, mums, who will go quietly weeping.

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Today a planeload - 23 adults and 19 children - will be on charter flight XLA4334 to the Democratic Republic of Congo where, since 1998, more than four million people have been murdered, many in internecine battles tacitly encouraged by western powers for whom African countries become more easily penetrable if fragmented and corrupt.

In January, New Labour politicians marked Holocaust Memorial day promising yet again "never again", while sending off black people to be incarcerated or obliterated.

Is there an adequate world in English to describe such fraudulence? These postures are repulsive to Firth: "Blair likes to talk about an 'epochal struggle' between the forces of progress and darkness. Looking at our asylum policies, one wonders which side he's on."

Firth is queasy about becoming another Bono, and expects to be dismissed as a champagne do-gooder. No matter, to be silent now would be to consent to an abomination. His mother, Shirley, (a Middle Englander) is president of the Southampton and Winchester Visitors' Group (SWVG), supporting asylum-seekers who are demonised even more than Muslim men, who do have vocal campaigners on their side.

Who speaks for disbelieved and despised asylum-seekers? Nobody in politics, a handful of religious leaders and journalists, and some ordinary Britons of conscience, too few. The national mood is toxic, and even nice liberals now choose to believe that the majority who flee here are scum or cunning terrorists. These newest recruits to Close Britannia have never met a single asylum-seeker in person, which is why their generic condemnation is so guilt-free.

Shirley Firth knows the deportees she fights for. On today's flight is a man she's helped for five years. Pierre (a pseudonym) was a nurse in the Congo when militiamen ordered him to inject political nuisances with excessive morphine. He refused, was imprisoned and tortured until a bribe freed him and he fled here. Dr Isabel Casson, a psychiatrist who has worked in Africa, has assessed him; SWVG has commissioned research to prove that Congo and other countries are pits of anarchy and insecurity. British embassies do not accept NGO assessments. Places they advise Britons not to visit are deemed havens for deportees.

Our Government has in effect torn up the Geneva Convention. It embodied the repudiation of barbarously efficient Nazis who believed some were born less human than others. That barbarism is back again. Can we stop the flight of shame tonight and save ourselves? Lord Macaulay once described Britain as "the sacred last refuge of mankind". That is the heritage we must reclaim from the bully boys of New Labour.

A tender glimpse of England

Venus, the film scripted by Hanif Kureishi, is the best, completely the best thing he has ever done. He is undoubtedly talented, but there was always something too hard and edgy in his novels and films - they lacked heart. The script in this film is sharp but not cynical, funny yet tender, and exquisitely tuned into sweet human frailties. Peter O'Toole is very good as the dear old lech, but it would a pity if he was the one getting all the glory. Leslie Phillips is just as brilliant, and the young Jodie Whittaker so convincing you couldn't make her up. But it is Kureishi, left, who deserves the greatest accolades. Like Ishiguro, he has lyrically affirmed human connections in strange old England where silences mean more than words, and the mean turn tender by the seaside.

Jade Goody and Celebrity Big Brother have finally departed from the scene, but here comes the maker of them, the irascible Peter Bazalgette, smooth and pleased as double cream. And who can blame him? The last Celebrity Big Brother went from a dull domestic to global drama and the cash rolled in and in and in.

* Jade Goody and Shilpa (great friends now) have had their fortunes boosted and fame assured for a while. I bet Jade's week in rehab generated more dosh for the poor thing. And the shareholders of Bazalgette's company must be dancing.

Some easily pleased folk in the UK also think the ejection of Jade marks the end of racism in Britain. It still isn't enough for Peter. The dude wants us to take him and his abysmal programmes even more seriously to heart. He says that Celebrity Big Brother demonstrates "innovation" and gives us "educational value".

Next stop, the Lords, perhaps? Lord Bazalgette of Peckham, bringing innovation and educational value to those who most desperately need it?

y.alibhai-brown@independent.co.uk

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