Around seventy turned up this lunchtime at Sheffield Town Hall to rally against proposals to award controversial company G4S (Group 4 Security) a contract to organise accommodation for people from abroad seeking sanctuary in the UK.
Start of the anti-G4S asylum rally today in Sheffield
Commercially-run G4S operates detention centres, prisons and 675 court and police station cells in the Britain alone, with countless similar interests across the globe. The firm is described by its opponents as being “the world’s largest private security army” and, for example, has a £100 million contract to supply 10,000 guards at the 2012 London Olympics.
According to today’s event organisers, G4S’s involvement will mean and end to local authorities providing temporary housing in council dwellings. The demonstrators say that families will be ejected from their homes and potentially uprooted to other parts of the UK. There are also fears that using the same company already contracted to deport asylum seekers means conflicts of interest will arise.
The G4S proposal is due to be decided upon by Government at the start of next month. There will be a march to the local UK Borders Agency office on March 1st meeting outside Sheffield Town Hall at 12.30pm.
Robert Spooner of ASSIST was a co-organiser today and briefed economicsurvivor.net on the issues:
And David Price of South Yorkshire Migration & Asylum Action Group, another co-organiser, gave further insightful observations::
According to anti-G4S asylum campaigners, “Now G4S and other security companies hope to get £135 million of our money – to privatise the housing of people seeking asylum and put them in slum housing of hostel accommodation”.
Surely one measure of civilisation is how well or badly we treat the poorest and most vulnerable among us?
There’s an online petition calling for supermarket chains Sainsbury’s and Waitrose to stop selling food made using ingredients contaminated with Monsanto’s Genetically Modified Organisms.
