While ministers are assuring us that the whole civil liberties debate is a lot of unnecessary fuss, it may be worth mentioning that 100 people are reported to be on hunger strike in Britain at this moment.

According to today’s Evening Standard (no link available) they claim to have been subjected to “violence and racist abuse by guards”. One says that “we are on hunger strike because of how we are treated. They slap you, strip your clothes off and watch you having a shower.”

They are asylum seekers in one of the state’s network of detention camps, so not a lot of notice is paid to this situation. White prisoners in a regular jail would attract more attention if they went on hunger strike against brutal treatment.

And these are not criminals. They are refugees from some of the most deprived and war-torn countries in the world. Those quoted above do not wish to be returned to the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Their treatment intersects with a wider campaign to spread fear amongst the migrant community. In my work for the T&G we regularly receive reports of poorly-paid workers being arrested and threatened with deportation – the result of collusion between employers and the Home Office usually. No doubt such behaviour is part of the price we must pay for keeping our famously flexible labour market flexible. Employees with the threat of imprisonment and deportation hanging over them are unlikely to stand up for their rights at work.

I would suggest that of all the threats to the freedom of people in Britain today, the monstrous apparatus of coercion, monitoring, harassment, detention and deportation trading as the immigration service is the most serious. Its depredations are not a cloud across our future, but actual in the here-and-now, and the source of untold (literally) misery.

Since its victims are foreign and mostly black there is not a snowball’s chance in hell of either government or opposition taking this seriously, at least while heading off BNP votes is the issue of the moment. But since Charles Clarke is ultimately responsible for the fate of the detainees presently starving themselves, it would seem to me good if those taking part in the civil liberties discussion here contacted him at the Home Office to demand that he lift the threat of deportation from the detainees and, if he will not scrap the whole wretched system immediately, at least ensure that the service is purged of racist and violent misanthropes.