Officials plan to hold refugees who turn up for routine meetings at immigration service offices. They will be transferred to detention centres. Photograph: Benjamin John/Alamy
The Home Office will launch a surprise operation to detain asylum seekers across the UK on Monday in preparation for deportation to Rwanda, weeks earlier than expected, the Guardian understands.
Officials plan to hold refugees who turn up for routine meetings at immigration service offices and will also pick people up nationwide in a two-week exercise.
They will be immediately transferred to detention centres, which have already been prepared for the operation, and held to be put on later flights to Rwanda. Others identified for these flights are already being held.
It is thought the launch of the operation has been timed to coincide with Thursday’s local council elections in England, to boost Rishi Sunak’s claims he is cracking down on illegal migration.
One thing about an incoming Labour government looks great: taking the railways into public ownership. But we won’t actually own the trains, warns SOLOMON HUGHES
LABOUR’S plans to renationalise the rail firms by taking over the train operating companies (TOCs) as their contracts come to an end is a big deal.
These are privately run but very heavily publicly subsidised companies that want to pump cash out of the government and passengers and then pump it into their investors’ hands. They are so keen to get the cash that they are rubbish at running the railways. Renationalising them is a good idea.
But if you want to know how some rail privatisation will continue even after Labour’s plans — and how it will continue to squeeze private cash out of public services, it’s worth having a look at the annual accounts of Eversholt UK Rails Ltd, which were published to zero media interest at the end of last month.
The newspapers weren’t interested in the company’s accounts, even though they showed the movement of millions of pounds from the taxpayer to a Hong Kong billionaire’s company. Passengers also won’t generally know Eversholt even exists, which is part of the trick of privatisation.
When the nationally owned British Rail was privatised in the 1990s, it was broken up into three main parts. The track was privatised and handed over to Railtrack, which had to be renationalised in 2002 after the firm did such poor maintenance that passengers started dying in crashes and train speeds were cut to a crawl.
Different regional TOCs were given contracts to run the services on this track. Labour will slowly renationalise these. But TOCs don’t own the trains: the “rolling stock,” the actual engines and carriages were sold off cheaply to three private rolling stock companies or “Roscos.”
