The UK is the only country in Europe that routinely locks up asylum seekers and Campsfield House, just outside Oxford, is one of 11 centres in the UK where they are imprisoned. Today’s demonstration to close this and all immigration detention centres, marked 24 years since the first detainees were brought here. Since then over 30,000 people have been locked up here without time limit. Some are kept for just a few weeks, some for many months, without charge and without proper legal representation.

When the government puts the management of a detention centre out to tender (they are all run by private companies for shareholder profit) one way of winning the bid, i.e. reducing the cost, is to get the detainees themselves to do some of the work of running the centre. In Campsfield they are paid £1 per hour to cook and clean.

In 2001 I volunteered to visit a detainee here every week for nine months. He was Zimbabwean, fleeing persecution under Mugabe. I’ve lost touch, but I wonder whether he now feels safe to go home. I somehow doubt it.