Brown apologises after being caught calling voter “bigoted”

Photo: Remy Steinegger/Copyright: World Economic Forum

Gordon Brown has personally apologised after he was caught on microphone describing a voter he had just met as a “bigot”.

His apology was broadcast live on BBC Radio 2’s Jeremy Vine show. Apparently not realising the radio interview was also being filmed, Mr Brown sat with his head in his hands listening to the tape being played back. He left the studio abruptly after the interview ended.

The incident began when Mr Brown was confronted on the campaign trail by Gillian Duffy, 66, of Rochdale. He had been issued a microphone after requesting one from Sky News 24. He spent almost five minutes answering her questions and ended the conversation saying: “It’s been very good to meet you.”

He then got into a waiting car, where the microphone picked up Brown telling an aide: “That was a disaster – they should never have put me with that woman. Whose idea was that? It’s just ridiculous …”

When asked what Mrs Duffy had said, he replied: “Ugh everything! She’s just a sort of bigoted woman that said she used to be Labour. I mean it’s just ridiculous. I don’t know why Sue brought her up towards me.”

Mrs Duffy said it was “very upsetting” hearing what Mr Brown has said.

“He’s an educated person, why has he come out with words like that? He’s supposed to lead this country and he’s calling an ordinary woman who’s just come up and asked questions what most people would ask him – he’s not doing anything about the national debt and it’s going to be tax, tax, tax for another 20 years to get out of this mess – and he’s calling me a bigot.”

She said she would not now be voting in the General Election. When asked if she thought Mr Brown would remain at Number 10, Mrs Duffy said:”I’m not bothered whether he does or not now. I don’t think he will.”

Gordon Brown returned to Rochdale this afternoon to personally apologise to Mrs Duffy at her home.

He spent more than 40 minutes inside, and emerged to state that he had misunderstood Mrs Duffy.

“I am mortified by what has happened. I have given her my sincere apologies,” he said.

“I misunderstood what she said. She has accepted that there was a misunderstanding and she has accepted my apology.”

Published on STV Online Election Coverage 29 April 2010.

STV’s dedicated 2010 election website launched

STV has launched their 2010 General Election website today, with extensive written and multimedia coverage and a focus on local and national issues.

Reporting on general election news can be found on the front page of the site. Local information, from parliamentary prospective candidate biographies to news stories from your locale, can be found by clicking on the ‘your battleground’ link.

Four-year-old refugee latest victim of broken vows by Westminster

Felicite and Arouna Gaye

At the age of just four, little Arouna Gaye has the unpleasant distinction of becoming the 21st refugee child this year to disgrace the Westminster government by being taken into custody at Dungavel Detention Centre despite promises by the Home Office to end the reviled practice of incarcerating families and their children in Scotland.

Arouna and his mother Fatou Fecilite Gaye, 38, were awoken by immigration officials in the early hours of Thursday and taken to the Lanarkshire immigration removal centre for the third time in two years. The incarceration belies the Westminster government’s commitment to end the detention of children of asylum seekers and the distressing deployment of dawn raids which feature heavy-handed immigration officers bursting into family homes and often cuffing those targeted for detention.

The practice of dawn raids and the imprisonment of families, under the threat of deportation from Britain, has been damned by Holyrood, but as immigration is a devolved issue Scotland’s call for the detention of children to end once and for all is in the lap of the Westminster authorities. And so, Arouna is the latest casualty of London’s failed promises.

His mother spoke of her and her little boy’s distress at their third imprisonment. “We are not doing well,” she told the Sunday Herald from behind bars. “Arouna is crying a lot. He wants to go home, he wants to see his friends. We are very stressed. The Home Office needs to stop coming to houses and taking people. I thought they did not detain children anymore. Arouna is the only child in the family unit. He is all by himself with no one to play with.”

Arouna suffers from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder as a result of his multiple detentions, and is receiving counselling. Fecilite also receives counselling from the Medical Foundation for the Victims of Torture. She fled Ivory Coast following the disappearance and probable murder of her husband amid civil unrest and armed uprisings. She was unable to escape before being subjected to multiple rapes by rebel soldiers.

Friends at St Rollox Church, where Felicite volunteered at a project to help other asylum seekers, speak of a “woman of integrity eager to help others”. The local minister Rev Frank Murray went to her house after Felicite was taken into custody. He said: “It’s the snapshots of what went on that morning when she was raided that are so harrowing: the front door dented by a ram, the half eaten breakfast, the lights still on, the unmade bed, photos of Fecilite and Arouna hanging on the wall.”

Murray and his wife Christine took clothing to the mother and child at Dungavel – they hadn’t been given time to take anything with them. Christine said of Dungavel: “It’s very obviously a prison. The doors are locked and opened by guards, and we were fingerprinted as well. Arouna seemed shell-shocked. He frequently came to check on his mum, because she was quite upset and crying. He was really sad and not sure of how to comfort her.”

The Murrays also brought a friend that Arouna had made near where he lived in Sighthill in Glasgow. “As they were taken away from us at the end of the visit, Arouna’s wee friend screamed and ran after them. He is only four, but he knew that something was at an end. When we went to Fecilite’s home earlier, he had stood in the living room saying ‘Arouna’s disappeared, Arouna’s disappeared’.

“This does not just have an effect on the child of an asylum seeker, but also on other children. Arouna is a member of Sighthill Primary and there are another asylum seeker children there. What impression do they get – ‘is this going to happen to me, are people going to come and take me away?’ This is obviously having a psychological effect on him and other children.”

Published in the Sunday Herald May 15 2009.

Ministers renege on Dungavel child pledge

 

Photo: The Unity Centre, Glasgow

 

19 youngsters admitted to detention centre this year

Last Tuesday, Sulaiti Wahuyo and her two-year-old son Gabriel were fingerprinted, photographed, issued with a number and an identification card, which must be carried at all times – and then imprisoned.

While not convicted of any crime, as failed asylum-seekers, she and her child were incarcerated in Scotland’s notorious Dungavel Immigration Removal Centre. Their plight is an indictment of the UK government which promised the people of Scotland last year that no more children and their families would be held like prisoners behind barbed wire.

Wahuyo and her son are just one of many mothers and children to be held in Dungavel so far this year, the Sunday Herald has learned.

Wahuyo is no stranger to detention. Suspected of supporting a rebel group in her native Uganda, she was arrested by soldiers, and held incommunicado for two years from October 2006 without trial. She eventually escaped to the UK with her infant son.

During her incarceration Wahuyo was repeatedly raped and tortured. She did not see her son Gabriel until her escape in October 2008.

On Thursday, Wahuyo and her child were taken from Dungavel to Yarl’s Wood, in Bedfordshire, another holding centre, where she awaits her forcible removal to Uganda this Wednesday.

The Unity Centre in Glasgow, which supports refugee families, said: “Sulaiti is a law-abiding woman who is absolutely terrified of being sent back to Uganda. As a victim of torture and detention, it is unjust of the UK Border Agency to return Sulaiti.”

 

The Unity campaigners say this mother and child’s incarceration flies in the face of the UK government’s pledge to provide an alternative to the detention of families.

On October 23, 2008, Secretary of State for Scotland Jim Murphy announced the introduction of a pilot scheme which would see up to four families at a time housed in former council flats in Glasgow, allowing them access to basic facilities for two weeks before being repatriated.

Murphy, a father of two, said: “One of the first things I did was to see whether we could bring this process forward. I would hope for it to be launched at the start of the new year.”

Six months on, nothing has changed. The Unity Centre has recorded at least 19 children being detained with their families in Dungavel since the beginning of 2009.

According to the Centre, since January 1 at least two single parent families with four children have been detained.

Alice Lithgow, a volunteer at the Unity Centre, said: “Detention is supposed to be the last resort for children and only used for families considered to be a high risk of absconding. Of all groups of detainees, single mums with young children are the group least likely to abscond.”

The Children’s Commissioner for Scotland has threatened to report the UK and the Scottish government to the UN, as the continued confinement of asylum-seeking children under the age of 16 contravenes the Convention of the Rights of the Child.

While the Scottish government has no authority to intervene in Dungavel, as asylum matters are reserved to Westminster, the Scottish Government and local councils are responsible for ensuring child welfare.

A spokesperson for the UK Border Agency could not confirm any time frame for implementing the new policy, stating that details were yet to finalised.

A spokesperson for Glasgow City Council echoed that uncertainty: “It is hoped the project will become operational in the near future.”

Concerns have been raised about the negative impact of imprisonment on children.

Following a surprise inspection at Dungavel in 2008, Chief Inspector of Prisons Anne Owers said: “The plight of detained children remains of great concern. An immigration removal centre can never be a suitable place for children.

Any period of detention can be detrimental to children and their families.”

Published in the Sunday Herald Sunday April 19th, 2009 (Five star rated)

Dungavel detention of children continues despite promise of pilot scheme

Photo: Gareth Harper

“People were shouting. There were crashing noises. I thought I was in a dream. Four people came in my room, told me get up, get ready. I didn’t know how to make myself dressed. I thought, ‘I’m going to wake up and this is a bad dream’.

“In the living room: my father, my brother in handcuffs. My father is crying. My mother is crying. I never saw my father cry. I told the lady, ‘What is wrong with you? I can’t go to detention. I am 13 and I am going to school today, and why are you putting handcuffs on my father? He is a human being’.

“My brothers were too quiet. They grabbed my dad and took him out of the house. Then my brother, Elvis. He is 18 and very quiet, and he did not want to go in handcuffs but they made him. Then they took me, my mother and other brother. I didn’t want our neighbours to see me.

“I want to come home now.  I was excited to go to school that day… I don’t want to be in Yarl’s Wood. We can’t go out. Too many people are sad. My brothers are quiet, my father and mother are too upset. Someone killed himself here.”

“The time is right to remove nuclear weapons from Scotland”

Photo: Gareth Harper

 

Scotland could invoke international law to block the UK government’s desire to maintain a nuclear arsenal, one of the world’s leading legal experts has stated.

In the run-up to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament’s 51st anniversary on February 17th, Judge Christopher Weeramantry, former vice-president of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), told an Edinburgh conference that while defence matters are reserved to the UK Parliament, the Scottish Parliament has international humanitarian and legal obligations that weapons of mass destruction violate.

Weeramantry said: “Gross violations of international obligations aren’t excluded from the purview of the Scottish Parliament. The absence of power in the former area cannot cancel out its responsibilities in the latter.”

Worries that “sledgehammer” legislation will prevent photography

Photo: Bill Joseph

Pressure groups and industry bodies hit out at “sledgehammer” legislation and the potential for police to wield those laws to prevent photography, curtail civil liberties and dampen dissent in the wake of Ian Tomlinson’s death during the G20 protests in London.

Crucial footage has emerged showing a police officer striking Tomlinson with a full-force baton blow. Tomlinson later collapsed and died from a suspected heart attack.

Campaigners hope this incident will highlight the dangers of police suppression of photography in public places under terrorism laws.

Dumpster-diving: Bin there, done that?

Photo: Wikicommons

Veritas gets down in the dumpster in the hunt for free food

With the country now ‘officially’ in recession, after the worst slump in gross domestic product (GDP) since 1980, unemployment is on the rise in all industries with predictions of two million jobless in 2009. Though quarterly student loans means that Scottish students are less affected, a high proportion of Napier’s international students relying on part-time jobs are less lucky.

But instead of focusing on the recession, and predictions that it’s only going to get worse, Veritas has hit the streets in its first instalment of ‘how to live for free…’ This month we look at food and the practise of ‘dumpster-diving’ – where people go through supermarket chain bins filling their fridges with food waste.

Starting back in the mid-‘90s in New York, the ‘freegan’ movement has gathered momentum in the past year in the UK, with research figures revealing a high proportion of the 6.7 million tonnes sent to landfill annually is  ‘avoidable’. The movement in Edinburgh has also grown in popularity, with numerous online forums organising meet-ups as well as positive media attention.

Napier doesn’t make the grade in nation-wide student experience survey

Napier University bottomed out in a UK-wide ranking of universities, according to a survey of students’ perception of their experience at university.

The survey, the second of its kind and commissioned by The Times Higher Education Supplement, placed Napier University at 93 out of 101 universities in a poll designed to showcase universities offering the top student experience.

Wes Streeting, president of the National Union of Students, said: “While some cynics may be quick to dismiss the results as ‘just another league table’, what makes this survey stand apart is that students themselves determine the factors important in delivering a high-quality experience.”

The time has come: remove nukes from Scotland

Photo: Wikicommons

 

Scotland could invoke international law to block the UK government’s desire to maintain a nuclear arsenal, one of the world’s leading legal experts has stated.

In the run-up to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament’s 51^st anniversary on February 17^th, Judge Christopher Weeramantry, former vice-president of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), told an Edinburgh conference that while defence matters are reserved to the UK Parliament, the Scottish Parliament has international humanitarian and legal obligations that weapons of mass destruction violate.Weeramantry said: “Gross violations of international obligations aren’t excluded from the purview of the Scottish Parliament. The absence of power in the former area cannot cancel out its responsibilities in the latter.”