 At the time of this interview, Yarlswood's detainees have been on hunger strike for a week and a half and their demands include a fair wage for the work they do in the immigration detention centre itself like cleaning and catering. It also includes an end to indefinite detention, a recognition of sexual violence as a form of torture and also an end to deporting young adults who are brought here as children who are culturally British. So after a year of trying to get permission to visit Yarlswood, you and Charmie Tracrobati were able to visit just last February. Can you tell us a bit about what you saw? Well what we saw was not a very desperate women. The Home Office spent a year trying to stop me visiting and then even the day before we were due to visit they were saying I couldn't meet any detainees which struck me as completely ridiculous but I thought I'd go down anyway and if they stuck to this line about not meeting any detainees I would just walk out. But we got there and what the detainees did was they knew I was in the building because they'd seen it online and they simply blocked one of the corridors and wouldn't allow the Home Office and and due for us and so on to go with me to go past. So in the end I got to meet with about 40 women and it was very moving. One of the things they raised was the very poor medical treatment and that's a long-standing issue at Yarlswood. One of the other things they raised was the lack of support for LGBT women. I met at least two LGBT women who were very frightened because news of them being in Yarlswood and also news of them being LGBT had leaked out in their home countries Uganda and Nigeria and they were being threatened with death. We met women who'd been subject to sexual violence and trafficking who are in Yarlswood and the government's given an undertaking that if you're a victim in sexual trafficking you shouldn't be in detention. So things at Yarlswood are not good at all and those women are desperate. As you mentioned despite the government's introduction of the adults at risk policy which advises that if a person is vulnerable and is likely to be retraumatised by the experience of detention that they shouldn't be locked up. Since the policy was introduced 85% of the new intake at Yarlswood are survivors of sexual violence or gender-based violence. So what can Labour do while in opposition to effectively hold the government to account for its failure to uphold its own standards? I raised this in parliament the week after I visited Yarlswood and I asked for Amber Rudd to meet with me to discuss these issues and she's agreed to so we're chasing her up on this meeting because I think there are issues when that contrary even to their own undertakings on this issue about women who are subject to sexual violence not going into detention and of course what I remember because I've been in an MP a few years is when immigration detention was introduced the idea was that people should only be held for a matter of weeks 28 days and I met people on my last visit who've been there for nine months a year this isn't a system which works even in its own terms it is very expensive and it doesn't act as a deterrent to asylum seekers of course the point about being an asylum seeker is the awful pressures and the push factor which leads you to seek asylum. Most migrants can't claim benefits due to no recourse to public funds but even if they were able to that would still be about £4,000 cheaper than the cost of immigration detention and what's more deportations cost about £15,000 that's not including legal fees for appeals is this simply an unsustainable system from an economic perspective? It's both a cruel brutalising and deeply traumatic system for women that are held but it's also very expensive for the British taxpayer as you've said a lot of these women were released back into community anyway once they're asylum issues are cleared up and I think we need to look at better ways of managing the system the Labour Party is already committed to ending indefinite detention and I think we need to look at a system when we go back to what MPs were originally told that people would only be held for a matter of weeks and I do think we need to consider closing Yarswood all together. So what kinds of alternative systems to large-scale immigration detention would you be exploring? One of the things that we're looking at is people simply going to court and being bailed on assurity the other thing you could do if you really think some of these women are a flight risk is you could tag them tagging is not desirable but much better to be at home with your family and in your community than being stuck in Yarswood which is hugely traumatising there are better there are cheaper and there are more effective ways to manage the immigration detention system than by putting them in places like Yarswood which has a horrible history going all the way back to when it was built. I mean it's a good point that you raised there because I think a year after it was opened up by David Blunkett there was mass rioting in a fire which decimated about half of the site and at that time David Blunkett had vowed to deport 2,500 migrants per month which is an intensely expedited system of deportation and really cast doubt on due process and trust in the home office. So as someone who has not traditionally had faith in the Labour Party for these reasons what kinds of guarantees can you offer to assure people who come from that kind of anti-racist perspective that this iteration of the Labour Party will have philosophically an entirely different approach to treating migrants in this country? I think you will see that both Jeremy and myself have a very philosophically different attitude to issues of immigration. We were raising the problems that Yarswood all the way back to when there was a fire. I visited Yarswood in 2003 right at the beginning when I was at backbench and so on because I'm so interested in this issue. You have got to have a more effective and a more humane system when it comes to migration and asylum and Jeremy and I are very committed to a more humane system which sits with all the things that we've said about these issues over the past decades. My very first speech as an MP, my maiden speech, was on immigration and I look forward as Labour's home secretary to try and construct a system which reflects my values and the values of the leader of the party. So one of the women who I spoke to last week who was on hunger strike said that one of the reasons that there was such intense mistrust in medical provision at Yarswood was because the G4S medical staff were operating as an extension of the home office. This is a direct quote from her and we know that Theresa May's so-called hostile environment immigration policy is about so much more than immigration detention so our doctors in the NHS, our teachers in our schools and even homeless charities are compelled to collect immigration data and then share that data with the home office. What will the data collection policy be like under a Labour government and will people have the right to access data that is retained by the home office? I don't believe that doctors and teachers and other people in the public sector should act as immigration officers on wheels. The home office needs to sort out the system, deal with properly, effectively and quickly and not cut across people's civil liberties in terms of collecting data which is then used against people. I think the hostile environment has caused more misery than almost anything else in recent years because it's gratuitous. Just sort out the case. Don't let teachers and doctors feel they have to pass on information. Lots of people watching this might then say well look these systems are barbaric, they're inhumane but essentially they can be reformed and migration overall is not something that is desirable in this country. One of the foundational assumptions of this is that migration depresses wages and that's something which you hear a lot on the left as well as the right. You do hear it and it's nonsense. Migration does not depress wages. There are some surveys which show that fractionally at lower levels of wages that migration might have an effect but the truth is what causes low wages is the weakness of trade unions, globalization and predatory employers. So we should be focused on those things, restoring trade unions rights and freedoms and trying to create a fairer climate for workers to blame immigrants for being exploited is contrary to reason and the other thing you hear is what a drain immigrants are on the system, immigrants should drain on the health service and so on and so forth. My mother was that generation of West Indian women that came here in the 60s and what I would say and have often said from platforms without immigrants we wouldn't have the NHS we have today. In terms of effective strategies for pushing back on these myths what do you think are lines which stick in the public imagination because sometimes I feel really frustrated that you make an economic case and it sounds dry and heartless or you make a moral case and you sound like a bleeding heart so how do you message this? We've done some polling which shows one message that people are open to is the fact that the Tories are blaming immigrants to cover for their failure to invest in NHS and housing so I think that's a good message which people will listen to but I think you have to keep coming back to the facts you cannot frame immigration policy around urban myths like immigrants, depressed wages which as you said some people on the left say I've never said it so you have to come back to the facts because in politics in the end you do have to come back to the facts but I think that as I say framing it in a way that is the Tories scapegoat immigrants that does have some cut through even in parts of the community and parts of the country where there's a degree of anti-immigrant feeling. It's also the case though that if Labour doesn't scapegoat immigrants and has a more positive message this has an effect overall if you remember Ed Miliband who's a really nice man I'm an Ed Miliband fan really but he made two long speeches on immigration we had a party political on immigration we also had a mug and he had the immigration controls mugged he didn't do him a blind bit of good we had none of that under Jeremy Corbyn because Jeremy Corbyn doesn't believe in any of that and we've got 30 extra seats it's like welfare rights it's a similar issue you need Labour to take a positive stand and that helps frame public opinion if we try and outdo UKIP on immigration it's a political dead end for us. I think it's quite instructive to look back at new Labour and some of those immigration policies because BNP councillors at the time were saying we can't believe our luck Labour have become obsessed with the asylum issue which means we're going around knocking on people's doors with the mainstream issue of the day and so being perceived as being tough on immigration was a real hallmark of David Blunkett's time as Home Secretary but while you certainly saw over a two-year period the number of successfully granted asylum applications being halved during that time you saw a doubling in temporary working visas and the reason why I'm providing all this context is to ask you post Brexit how will a Labour government protect the rights of migrant workers while at the same time holding some of those far right narratives at bay concretely how will you achieve that? Well when you spoke about new Labour policies one of their policies they brought in at the height of the anti asylum seeker fervour was no actual benefit food vouchers and a lot of us said this was very wrong and they had to withdraw it because it was too cruel it didn't work and it didn't have the effect that they thought of bringing down levels of migrants. Jeremy gave a speech on Brexit a week a few weeks ago and the first thing he said in the sexual immigration was he talked about the rise in racist attacks after Brexit because it was very important to him and to me actually that we contextualised whole issue of immigration he then went on to say that Labour will not be scapegoating migrants I made a speech I think the week after on immigration where again I was framing the issue very differently Jeremy and I are committed to leaving behind the sort of punitive approach to asylum see she doesn't work actually I mean the home affairs select committee made it clear that immigration targets are counterproductive so we are committed to leaving behind that punitive approach and trying to have a much fairer system including managing the immigration detention centre population very differently. Can we see a drastic reduction of the population of people in detention? We have to it's expensive and it's not working and Yarlswood from the very beginning when as you said the detainees try to burn it down has got a terrible reputation particularly in relation to health care we can't carry on like this those women are not prisoners they've committed no crime they're human beings and as I said in the House of Commons the other week we owe them a duty of care it's time to step up to that duty of care. So I've got one last question and it's a broad one so you come from a very rich tradition of anti-racist organising you came into parliament with that intake that included figures like Bernie Grant and for people of my age and a bit younger we grew up without that anti-racist movement so if you had to recommend thinkers and political figures that we in 2018 should all be checking out to get that kind of base level of understanding who would you be recommending? Well there's a great book by somebody close to two in age Rene Edo Lodge which is why I've stopped talking to white people about race I'd recommend that to anybody to read and she has quite a bit about the history of anti-racism in it so that would be a good start yeah it's a phenomenal book. Friend of the show Rene Edo Lodge thank you so much for joining us it's been a real pleasure