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Anger at proposed Campsfield expansion plans

Larry Sanders, Green Party parliamentary candidate for Oxford West and Abingdon has sent Cherwell a strongly worded statement about the proposed plans to expand the Campsfield House Immigration Removal Centre in Kidlington.

Proposing to more than double the capacity for incarceration, from 276 to around 600, expansion plans for Campsfield House would turn it into what Sanders calls a “mini-Guantanamo”. He also says that: “Locking up 300 more asylum seekers without charge or hearing or crime proved is contrary to British traditions of justice and meaningless in face of the total mess created by the Home Office.”

Striking out against the Conservative & Lib Dem government’s plan, Sanders says that it’s “an expensive part of its attempt to win votes back from UKIP” whilst Bill MacKeith, of the Campaign to Close Campsfield calls it “wrong, inhumane and unnecessary”.

Student societies such as Amnesty International also voice their condemnation of the plans. Paul Ostwald, Amnesty International Press Officer, said “Larry Sanders is right in proposing that the solution is not constructing more cells, but enabling a more effective judicial process for asylum seekers”. Whilst Vera Wriedt, on behalf of OMS (‘Oxford Migrant Solidarity’) believes that “the expansion of Campsfield means the expansion of a racist regime which excludes, incarcerates and even kills those who are deemed not to belong… Campsfield should be closed down, not expanded.”

Larry Sanders is not alone in the local political sphere in standing up and vocally opposing Campsfield and the plans for expansion. Conservative MP Nicola Blackwood clearly demarcates her position by posting on her website that “doubling the size of Campsfield would be wrong for Kidlington and wrong for detainees”.

Ending his letter sent to Cherwell last week, Larry Sanders said: “The Green Party wants all the Detention Centres closed and for the refugees to be with their families while waiting for speedy and fair hearing.” Concerning his constituency and voters as a whole, he believes that “taxpayers don’t want to waste tens of millions of pounds on the building plus tens of millions every year while the Government says there is no money for an adequate NHS or affordable housing or even food for the thousands queuing at Food Banks.”

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