Skip to main content
‘Man's Inhumanity to Man*’
Narratives from detained refugees who exist in a virtual lawless world with no fixed sentences
INCOMPREHENSION: Protesters outside the Crowne Plaza London hotel in Heathrow which is being used as accommodation for asylum seekers

Refugee Tales IV
Edited by David Herd & Anna Pincus
Comma Press £9.99

“We were aware of what was going on outside, we heard about coronavirus…lockdown…we said ‘So now everyone in the whole world is in prison, it’s just that our prison is a bit smaller!’”

There is, however, an essential difference. The evidence from all 14 of these “Tales” from detained refugees demonstrates that detention centres, unlike HM prisons, exist in a virtual lawless world with no fixed sentences, offering little or no hope.
 
The Windrush scandal has recently woken public attention to the nature of the Tory government’s notorious “hostile environment,” but the figures speak for themselves.

In 1973, 95 people were indefinitely detained, rising in 2020 to 23,073.

The 95th Anniversary Appeal
Support the Morning Star
You have reached the free limit.
Subscribe to continue reading.
More from this author
nazi nightmares
Books / 2 May 2025
2 May 2025

GORDON PARSONS is fascinated by a unique dream journal collected by a Jewish journalist in Nazi Berlin

titus
Theatre review / 2 May 2025
2 May 2025

GORDON PARSONS meditates on the appetite of contemporary audiences for the obscene cruelty of Shakespeare’s Roman nightmare

Pier Paolo Pasolini as Chaucer in his film of The Canterbury
Books / 16 October 2024
16 October 2024
GORDON PARSONS recommends an ideal introduction to the writer who was first to give the English a literary language
Books / 6 August 2024
6 August 2024
GORDON PARSONS welcomes a graphic biography of George Sand, the most popular French novelist in 19th-century Britain
Similar stories
Poetry Review / 12 March 2025
12 March 2025
RUTH AYLETT recommends two anthologies: one that bears witness to refugee and immigrant experiences, and the other to our political relationship to water
Pier Paolo Pasolini as Chaucer in his film of The Canterbury
Books / 16 October 2024
16 October 2024
GORDON PARSONS recommends an ideal introduction to the writer who was first to give the English a literary language
Book Review / 13 August 2024
13 August 2024
ANDY HEDGECOCK recommends a collection of folk tales, each of which is dazzling flash of human experience, natural or supernatural