Has New Labour and its supporters lost all moral authority?

Over the Christmas period we and other volunteers from the Unemployed Centre were contacted to help leaflet planes at Gatwick Airport which were leaving with asylum seekers being deported to Zimbabwe.

Despite some deportees winning last-minute injunctions and some airlines (notably Virgin Airlines) refusing to carry deportees against their will, a number of other dissidents were sent back to Zimbabwe to face almost certain torture and possible death.

We find it amazing, with all the publicity that has been given to the appalling human-rights situation in Zimbabwe, the torture and shooting of journalists, the bombing of the only independent newspaper, the intimidation and murder of farmers, farm-workers, trade unionists and others, that the Home Office could consider it a country to which asylum seekers could be safely sent.

We wrote to both the Home Office Minister responsible, Lord Jeff Rooker and all three local Labour MPs.

Not one of them had the courtesy to reply, still less to speak up about what was happening in their name.

When the Conservative Government was in power, New Labour didn't hesitate to speak out against the deportation of dissidents and asylum seekers to dangerous countries.

Now they are in power, our MPs seem to have lost not only their voices but their principles.

Perhaps Des Turner, David Lepper and Ivor Caplin could explain exactly where they stand in relation to the deportation of asylum seekers to countries that use torture as a routine method of interrogation and whose secret services actually control the airports to which they are being deported?

-Tony Greenstein, Secretary, Shanti Haft, Welfare Rights Worker, Brighton Unemployed Centre, Hollingdean, Brighton