IMMIGRANTS LANGUISH IN BRITAIN'S JAILS

While Tory ministers adopt high moral postures over Ugandan President Idi • Amin's 'inhumane' treatment and expulsion of Asians, shameful skeleton is rattling its bones in their own cupboard.

It is a skeleton with which anyone who happened to be at Bow Street magistrates' court last Tuesday would come face to face.

In a matter of seconds Mr Cheng Tzu-tai, the man the US government is seeking to extradite to face a 32-year prison sentence for his alleged part in a murder bid on Chiang Kai-shek's son, was hustled into the court, told to reappear on October 17, and hustled out again.

For nearly a month Cheng has been confined cell at Pentonville Prison since police took him, un from a New York bound craft at Heathrow.

Cheng will be brought before a magistrate every seven days until his case comes up at Lambeth on November 21, when American officials will give reasons why he should be handed over to them.

He is one of up to 200 men and women in Britain's prisons who have committed no crimes but who are imprisoned awaiting deportation.

The majority are coloured Commonwealth citizens whose visitors' permits have run out and which, under the new stringent immigration controls, have next to no chance of being renewed.

They are normally issued for anything from a month to six months and renewed to take into consideration, for example, college courses.

But they are not work permits and since 1967 when immigration controls were generally drastically tightened the number of these issued has been minimal.

According to Mrs Mary Dines, general secretary of the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, where permits are issued it is to skilled people and, she claims, almost exclusively white.

While it imprisons innocent people for periods of sometimes up to a year until all appeals procedures are exhausted, the Tory • government has publicly fallen over itself to be as charitable to the displaced Ugandan Asians as possible.

We are, of course, not opposed to that. Anyone should have the right to enter and work in any country they struggle against the masters of Evidence continues to mount that we were right.

In two speeches in the space of a week Tory Home Secretary Robert Carr has stressed both the desirability of aiding the underdeveloped world and the moral necessity of extending a compassionate hand to Asians expelled from Uganda.

The same man is responsible for imprisonment of Britain's illegal visitors. were five years ago—a direct response to savage Tory immigration policies.

More seriously, unlike the bureaucratic laxity which is said to have prevailed in the 1960s, today Home Office officials pounce almost immediately perm is expire.

For any who are caught illegally overstaying their visit bail is rarely given and although all possible avenues of appeal are permitted to be explored, the majority end up being deported.

The prime complaint These conditions apparently vary because, according to a spokesman for the Cheng Defence Committee, he is not allowed to work and as a result stays in his cell for up to 22% hours a day.

INNOCENT A large number of illegal 'visitors' are returned to Ireland and America but the bulk of them come from the Indian sub-continent West Indies and (Ceylon), the flies flatly in the face of the government's basically whites-only immigration policy, they are being allowed into Britain in large numbers.

Not only are they being allowed in but service houses are being made available to them, top-line hotels have offered accommodation, and a property developer at Stockton, Teesside, has slashed the price of luxury flats by up to £2,000 for any Asian who can afford them.

All this is commendable. There is absolutely no reason Tory ministers adopt high moral _postures over the arrival of expelled Ugandan Asians (above) while over 200 immigrants remain confined in Britain's prisons for breaking immigration controls.

backlash the Tories might have expected and perhaps even hoped it would.

Tenants in overcrowded and slum-infested North Kensington-where Associated Hotels have offered rooms-are complaining. So are families in Stockton. And so are people