Hazel Blears, 20th October 2005.

“It is regrettable that any families with children have to be detained at all but it is sadly the actions of the adults in the family that make this necessary.” Hazel Blears, 13th August 2003

Ms Blears, as well as being Minister of State for Crime, Security and Communities, is the constituency MP of Olive Mukarugwiza, a Rwandan asylum seeker who, after living in the UK for three years, without warning found her home raided by police at 6am last Tuesday morning. She and her three children were packed off to Yarls Wood detention centre pending their deportation. On Friday they were bundled onto a plane in such a distraught state that the pilot refused to fly.

Harry’s Place has evidently received the same emails from the campaign to get her a decent review as me. More here and here.

This particular case appears to have received precisely no newspaper coverage. A google search for Olive comes up with precisely nothing. I can neither confirm nor deny the truth of this one. Nonetheless, a mother and her three children – the eldest of which apparently has offers from three universities as she prepares for her A-levels – hardly sound like a threat to national security. But in Labour’s brave new world, asylum seekers are merely statistics – and the more they can refuse and deport to placate the anti-immigration crowd, the better.

Edited: It would appear Olive’s surname was spelled wrong in the email I originally received. Now corrected. Still practically no Google presence though.