Labour’s persistent failure to address its electorate’s salient concerns is behind the protest vote, asserts DIANE ABBOTT
A US firm that ran a Texas prison where inmates were kept in tents that burned to the ground in a 2015 riot are in charge of the Manston migrant detention centre in Kent, where inmates are housed in tents. It is just one of the firms profiting from migrant misery at Manston.
US outsourcing firm MTC ran several US prisons and migrant detention centres — a number have very grim records. The British government is so keen on outsourcing that it is one of several firms running the largely privatised centre, which has held up to 4,000 asylum-seekers.
At Manston, migrant families, including children, are detained in tents behind razor wire — it is a detention camp. Manston was supposed to only be a short-term processing centre for migrants, but MPs who visited this week found “families who had been sleeping on mats on the floor for weeks” inside the marquee tents.
PCS members face dangerous working conditions in crumbling buildings while the Common Platform IT system obstructs rather than streamlines operations — and Labour’s promised wave of insourcing has not materialised, writes SHARON McLEAN
Calls have been made for the return to Venezuela of a two-year-old girl currently being held in the US, after being separated from her family by immigration officials, reports SUSAN GREY
Despite Labour’s promises to bring things ‘in-house,’ the Justice Secretary has awarded notorious outsourcing outfit Mitie a £329 million contract to run a new prison — despite its track record of abuse and neglect in its migrant facilities, reports SOLOMON HUGHES



