We should note ahead of this article that the form of slave labour being discussed is not like the chattel slavery on the past in which the slaves were the property of their owner, but a system of tied labour in which the employee is nominally free but it entirely controlled by the employer, often paid subsistence wages, unable to leave and look for better paid work in fairer conditions because the employers operate as a cartel and share information, including the names of people who try to escape the system, and feel they cannot complain to the authorities because they are told their status as illegal immigrants will result in imprisonment and deportation if the police or immigration agency become aware of them.
North West Leicestershire MP Andrew Bridgen (Conservative) told Sky News on Monday that the Leicester city government has failed in its duty to citizens by allowin thousands of workers in the city’s textile factories to be exploited by unscrupulous employers. As we reported yesterday they problem has been exacerbated by large numbers of illegal immigrants mainly from backward areas of Pakistan, India and Bangladesh being at the mercy of bosses because they live outside the British welfare system and being largely uneducated with poor literacy are unaware that they can get help from certain agencies.
On the same day as Bridgen dropped this bombshell at the feet of lefties who think the most important issue facing the nation right now is dealing with alleged crimes of people involved in the slave trade 200 years ago, a study conducted by the Centre for Social Justice and the anti-slavery charity Justice and Care today published its report which warns that the UK government’s job retention scheme for the duration of the Covid-19 pandemic has served to exacerbate matters.
The report stated that the scheme had been “exploited by criminal networks, who have claimed furlough payments for victims of slavery who were forced to work within their businesses.”
The authors concluded that, after the data from the areas studied is extrapolated to the broader UK population, there will be at least 99,469 victims of slavery, in cases that are reported to police. However, this does not include the hidden majority of victims, who have yet to be identified.
The report also expressed the opinion that apart from the human cost, there is also the severe economic damage this type of slavery brings by driving wages down for low paid workers who struggle to survive on the minimum wage in a high cost of living society such as the UK. In 2017, the UK government estimated that the financial cost of slavery to the country was up to £4.3 billion, based on figures ranging from 10,000 to 13,000 victims.
Multiply that figure by ten and the detrimental effect on the UK becomes significant. It is a result of leftist influenced politically correct thinking and virtue signalling by senior politicians of both Labour and Conservative governments over the past twenty years.
Although the problem of illegal immigrants working in the Leicester clothes manufacturing industry has been known of for years it has come to the forefront of news recently after Leicester became the first British city to be put into local lockdown when a spike in new coronavirus cases defied the national trend as restrictions were eased. The renewed outbreak was linked to garment factories in the city where people, mostly Asian women,) work in crowded and unhealthy conditions in rooms with inadequate ventilation.
Whistleblowers in the city’s textile industry say some factories almost doubled their staff numbers to handle online orders during the initial national lockdown – in some cases, with no social distancing measures in place. However, Leicester City Council said health officials had informed it that no evidence had been found to tie the increase in Covid-19 cases to the sites. This should be taken with a pinch of salt in view of the fact, reported yesterday, that police, the Health and Safety executive and the Department of Work and Pensions all turned a blind eye to violations of laws and regulations, fearing accusations of racism if action was taken to force ethnic -Asian factory owners to comply with British law.
(NB in the UK we are obliged to refer to people from the Indian sub continent, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bhutan, as Asian because Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslims object to being grouped with Hindus as Indian.)
Leicesters’s mayor, Sir Peter Soulsby, has strongly criticised the government’s handling of the lockdown, particularly the long delays in releasing available Covid-19 data.
Speaking on BBC Breakfast, Soulsby said on Monday, “It was clear from discussions we were having last week with them [the UK Department of Health] that they haven’t yet got a clue how on earth they’re going to measure what constitutes success in this.”
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