Lolohai Tapui has been jailed for four months. If we jailed every illegal immigrant for four months, that would constitute over 300,000 prison man years. The Independent story is entirely condemning of Tapui and exonerating of Scotland.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/baroness-scotlands-housekeeper-jailed-1985126.html
But who was really exploiting who here? £6 an hour, for God’s sake! In the heart of Central London? Anyone who has had an 0207 phone number knows that anyone over the age of 18 who will work of £6 an hour is an illegal immigrant. I am not nearly as rich as Baroness Scotland, and we pay our student babysitters £8 an hour.
£6 an hour = illegal immigrant. £6 an hour = cruel exploitation. The wrong woman is in prison.
£6 an hour in Central London is disgraceful.
Like you, we pay our – legal immigrant – sitters £8 an hour plus a bit extra, anything less would be unthinkable.
£6 an hour, the tossers at Goldman Sachs would faint. Still, Arbeit Macht Frei as IDS said yesterday.
I particularly liked the fact that Scotland “failed to take copies of the documents”…
She – as an employer – didn’t take copies of the woman’s proof of eligibility to work, and paid less than the government’s minimum wage?
And we’re expected to believe that she had no idea she was employing an illegal immigrant?
Actually 7p above the minimum wage for 2010 and about 20p more for 2009. [sarcastic] So actually she was paying more that she needed to , how generous! [/sarcastic]
I don’t swear on the internet but the word I would use to describe her (Scotland) is something I was called a couple of post ago 😉
Actually it’s nowhere near enough anywhere nevermind “Central London”!
Wonder what cleaners get paid at Goldman Sachs, anyone know?
I totally agree, Craig. I just covered it at mine:
http://madammiaow.blogspot.com/2010/05/how-rich-stay-rich-baroness-scotlands-6.html
BTW, I think you’ll find she was sentenced to EIGHT months, not four. She overstayed her student visa by four years.
Apologies, for some reason I thought the MNW for £6.50 for over 25’s.
300 000 man years. Nearly a third of a million years. Fifty times recorded history. Thirty times the span from the last ice age.
But that’s still less than the cost of Trident at £6 per hour.
What about a petition on the No 10 website calling for a debate on the subject of changing the law to penalise the exploiters of illegal immigrants.
The wording should be non-vituperative and non-personal but in terms which would mean that Baroness Scotland’s case and that of Lolohai Tapui (both guilty of different crimes, sharply different verdicts) were obvious “recent examples”.
She claims she was duped, not very astute for an attorney general, I guess you just can’t get the staff these days. Is there a working visa for Tongan maids ? The baroness should know.
She did get a fine so we can say ignorance was no excuse, but the degree of ignorance in one who held such a high position is serious cause for concern. Perhaps someone should go over her CV with a fine comb and check she didn’t overstate her credentials.
Here in Japan there are many people working illegally, including white Europeans, shock horror, when they are caught the standard procedure is to lock them up in the detention house for a couple of months while the police check they haven’t done anything else illegal, then kick them out and forbid them from returning for 10 years.
I like that Clarky – and the ludicrous Trident waste of £billions will certainly jerk the cosiness of the coalition shortly if we are to believe in the autonomy of Lib Dem principles.
‘Is there a working visa for Tongan maids ? The baroness should know.’
Absolutely. Baroness Scotland helped,in her capacity as a Home Office minister, to destroy one of the few bits of our immigration system that actually worked, the ‘working holidaymaker’ scheme. It worked because it was based on reciprocity; Aussies/Kiwis et al could get 12 month work visas over here , in return young Brits could get temporary work visas to ‘old commonwealth’ countries on the same basis. Trevor Phillips at the CRE said these arrangements were ‘discriminatory’- so the UK, unilaterally, opened up its ‘working holidaymaker’ scheme to all members of the commonwealth, with easily predicable results (rampant fraud, and the temporary suspension of all visa issuance to young males from countries like Nigeria & Sri Lanka).
Baroness Scotland was a disgrace as a minister, and is a disgrace as an exploitative employer.
BTW on a previous thread I was accused (by ‘technicolor’ I think) of showing a lack of compassion for illegal immigrants. Lolohai Tapui is certainly one illegal immigrant I have compassion for; her conviction stinks, and her sentance is excessive.
Baroness Scotland simply has to be lying when she claims to have seen these “fake documents”, even though she “forgot” to make copies as required by her own legislation. We’re being asked to believe that she saw fakes of such high quality, that the attorney general couldn’t see a problem with them.
Either she’s lying, she’s a blithering incompetent, or fakes of very, very high quality are readily and cheaply available to young women working illegally for £6/hour.
Far more likely is that she saw a chance to exploit someone pretty obviously in a fix, and didn’t care that she was breaking the law.
Perhaps the harshness of the sentence was to deter other illegal immigrants from selling their story and embarrassing their employees.
It is one of those delicious ironies that the legislation which Baroness Scotland breached she had promoted as a Minister in the House of Lords.
So the benefit of employing vulnerable people is not lost on the custodians of our legal system. They are more pliant, more abusable, more threatenable and hence more discreet. What exactly goes on in the Baroness’s home that she would prefer people not to know about?
I suspect that, trying to avoid unfavourable publicity about her private life, Baroness Scotland has incurred the minor nuisance of public embarrassment about her professional judgement. Annoying, but not significantly harmful in the long term.
Maybe the long jail sentence was a firm reminder from the judiciary not to do a ‘what the butler saw’ on the dame. Maybe the dame is not quite as dame-like as the dame would like us to believe. A touch of the Kimberley Quinn way of doing things methinks.
Now what are the chances of that.More evidence we live in a corrupt dictatorship. The police are designed to control not protect, much like religion,…another method of control for the vulnerable
and the punishment for Laws?
but surely the noble baroness was paying her £6 per hour in hand while deducting £2 per hour for tax and NIC which she would no doubt forward to the Revenue… naturally…
The poor exploited illegal got GBP85,000 for telling her story to the Mail on Sunday. Somehow, I find it hard to raise any sympathy for her.
And she had a forged visa.
The Baronness may be incredibly mean, but she has followed the law apart from keeping the photocopy, which was an idiotic requirement that Scotland herself as a member of the government supported.
So wealthy, corrupt politician caught employing an illegal immigrant = £5,000 fine.
Poor, illegal immigrant caught working in order to eat = 8 months imprisonment.
This doesn’t even take into consideration Baroness Scotland’s (Oh God why is there another one with a Scottish connection) intellectual and social abilities, and connections. Surely this highly educated, qualified and well connected individual would have had the resources to understand what she was doing wrong. Or is this simply another example of the arrogance of the well connected.
Surely not arrogance, after all David Laws now ‘apologises’ over his expenses claims, surely that’s not an arrogant man, merely another politician making yet another mistake, an administrative blunder, an accounting error or a political cock up………sorry, couldn’t resist it.
How many more of these incompetent, corrupt, idiotic, apologetic weasels do we have to endure before they realise that their monstrous skeletons open the cupboard door all by themselves.
We all have those skeletons but most of them are confined to a bit of childhood sweet shoplifting, smoking behind the bike-shed’s or, horror of horrors, ‘show me mine and I’ll show you yours’. Some are slightly more sinister and they should be suppressed, we all make mistakes and hide things but provided we don’t revisit those mistakes in adulthood, shouldn’t we forgive and forget?
But of course in the rarefied environment of politics, the rules of the common man don’t seem to quite mean as much as the well connected.
Because someone was too poor to spend £5,000 to avoid an 8 month jail sentence she was/is subjected to penal servitude for cleaning the house of a wealthy politician.
Dear God, please sort this out because it seems no one else can.
Either/or?
Lacks imagination. Both to jail, sharing a cell. So much to talk about.
Nat
“Perhaps the harshness of the sentence was to deter other illegal immigrants from selling their story and embarrassing their employees.”
Certainty not severity of punishment was the policy Robert Peel adopted having found that severity as a deterrent did not work.
I don’t hold any brief for Baroness Scotland, or exploiters in general, but are people here seriously saying that no-one should ever employ ‘illegal immigrants’? And that anyone who does should be jailed? I think that’s crazy.
@Mark, so you have compassion for one ‘illegal immigrant’. Hurrah! I can’t remember accusing you of anything, but if I did, will obviously now take it back.
technicolour
No, I am not saying nobody should pay illegal immigrants. I am saying nobody should pay illegal immigrants exploitation wages.
Craig, no, I didn’t think you were.
Craig
“I am saying nobody should pay illegal immigrants exploitation wages.”
Which would rather undermine the nasty conniving motivation for allowing such an appalling situation to have developed in the first place. If IIs are going to be paid a fair wage, the hotel, restaurant, farming, food-processing, office servicing industries and a raft of other low margin, low added value businesses will be looking for subsidies elsewhere. Not to mention tight-fisted overpaid freeloaders like P. Scotand.