Merseyside Against Detentions (2002)

Merseyside Against Detentions was established following a meeting Liverpool in spring 2001, with Tony Richardson speaking, from the Campaign to Close Down Campsfield, in Oxford. Tony's son Joe Coxhead was a link to students at John Moore's University. There were also people from the SWP and Liverpool Trades Council in the room.

          The roots of the campaign lay in a previous initiative dating back to autumn 2000, a Merseyside Coalition to Defend Asylum Seekers, in which the key activists had been Anne Alexander, Greg Dropkin and Ros Merkan, among others. This earlier movement ran out of steam, but the idea of a campaign to defend refugees was around. One other group to mention is People not Profit, a loose anti-capitalist network. They were already beginning to work with refugees in North Liverpool, and I remember going with Greg to meet Kurdish refugees in the Landmark. So when Tony suggested that we helped jailed asylum seekers, we could see that the ideas was specific, there was an audience, and it could work.

            Following our first meeting, there was a demonstration of 50 people outside the gates of Walton. People came from the groups I have mentioned, the university and the Socialist Alliance. Then in June, we organised a second public meeting, to which I think 23 people came. Theresa Hayter was the main speaker, another Campsfield veteran. Anne Alexander chaired. To our intense surprise, the Liverpool Echo ran a story publicising our meeting.

Around this time, the group decided to begin visiting refugees at Walton, and the first such visit was organised for the end of the month. I remember that the first day we visited, there seemed to be about a dozen different checks between us entering as visitors, and meeting the detainees. We were told not to take pens or bring money for the people we were seeing. There was even a palm-print device, to check that no-one was smuggled out.

As a member of MAD, I took part in some of the visiting, meeting one student from the Cameroon, who had lived for ten years in London. His mistake had been to follow his friends' advice and contact the Home Office direct (without a lawyer) to ask for help with his case. Within 24 hours he was being held in a detention centre, and within a week he had been sent all the way to Walton. He told me that of the one-hundred or so detainees being held, around one a week attempted suicide. In most cases, the warders were able to hush up these events, without even passing the information along the management hierarchy.

Having been there to see for myself, I knew that the conditions inside Walton were terrible. Refugees complained that they were being held for 23 hours a day, with no real access to television or social activities. It was clear that there were often three or four people to a cell, sharing bunk-beds, a table and a bucket as their only toilet. Victims of torture were being held, contrary to government policy. The private companies providing medical facilities were so hostile, the detainees were not even asked what if they fell into that category. People were denied access to newspapers, phones, pencils or pens to write. Everyone we spoke to complained of racism from the prison guards.

At the end of July, around 100 detainees went on hunger strike. By then I was on holiday in Germany. And at the end of August, I left Liverpool for good. So I was not around when the campaign was at its height. But hearing of what people had done, it seemed to me that the hunger-strike was an act of extraordinary bravery. I am sure that MAD helped. The people I visited told me that the campaign had given the detainees a sense that they were not alone.