Muhammad Idrish must stay! National march and rally, Saturday October 8. Assemble 11am, Booth St Recreation Ground, off Soho Racist laws are a union issue!

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Road, Handsworth, Birmingham, and march to city centre for rally.

Officially supported by the local authority workers' union NALGO FOR THE first time ever a British trade union has called a national demonstration in support of one of its members faced with deportation. The union is NALGO and the member is Muhammad Idrish.

Muhammad's case is a classic example of unfeeling state racism. He came to Britain from Bangladesh in 1976 to take a one year course at Bristol Poly. While there, he met and started living with a Scottish woman:

They did not marry immediately because she was waiting for the divorce from her previous husband to come through.

They married two and a half years later and Muhammad Idrish applied for permission to stay. It was granted for one year.

Then the Home Office began the process of "checking that the marriage was genuine'' Official came round at 6 am to see if they were in bed together. There were repeated interviews, several of them at work.

They suggested to Carol Idrish that must be very odd living with an Asian man, with a Muslim: and didn't all that smell of curry make her feel sick?

At the end of 12 months Idrish submitted his application to stay permanently. There was a long delay. Then the Home Office claimed to have lost the form, and asked him for another one.

Now the whole process of interviews began again.

Not surprisingly, all this took its toll on their relationship. After five years of living together and two and a half years of marriage, the couple split up - although they have not divorced.

Within a fortnight of the split the Home Office ordered Idrish to leave the country. His appeal was rejected by the Home Office-appointed adjudicator and the Immigration Appeal Tribunal refused to hear his case.

Lawyers acting for the Defence Campaign are now appealing to the High Court on the grounds that the Home Office has acted unreasonably.

Friends

Friends. and workmates of Muhammad Idrish began to organise a Defence Campaign in Bristol where he had worked as a voluntary social worker in the Bengali Community.

But by this time he was working at Dr Barnardo's in West Bromwich where he helped found the NALGO branth, so a further Defence Committee was set up in the West Midlands.

Since then, both committees have explained his case, held public meetings and organised pickets.

But our most successful work has been in NALGO.

In February the union's National Executive supported Idrish's right to stay and NALGO is underwriting his legal expenses:

But the big breakthrough came in June at the union's Annual Conference, where emergency resolution, submitted by several branches, was passed.

It instructed the Executive to organise a national demonstration in Idrish's support and to ask other unions (such as the CPSA, SCPS and TG WU] whose members have to do the deporting to refuse to expel Muhammad Idrish. Conference decided to organise a national day of industrial action, within a month of a deportation order being served.

The bureaucracy did . not oppose the resolution openly. The motion was passed almost unanimously.

The question now is: will it be implemented? A poor turnout for the demonstration would give the NALGO leadership an excuse to ditch the rest of conference policy.

A bad sign is that though a large number of (quite reasonable) English language leaflets and posters have been produced, the promised Asian languages leaflet is yet to appear. Little attempt seems to have been made by the union leaders to mobilise districts and branches.

But energetic efforts have been made to build for the demonstration in London, the North West and the Midlands. It is up to all of us to see that this work is spread throughout the country.

One problem the campaign has faced is that most Labour MPs regard themselves as part-time social workers, rather than political leaders, when it comes to immigration cases.

They plead with Waddington, the hard-line Tory immigration minister, instead of helping to organise a political struggle against the immigration laws in Parliament, in the labour movement and in the community.

But Clare Short, the Labour MP for Ladywood, has agreed to raise the case in the Commons. A paper is being prepared for submission to the NEC's Human Rights sub-committee, and an emergency resolution is being put to Labour Party Annual Conference. It condemns the NEC's* failure to support the demonstration.

The Defence Campaign and Idrish himself have rightly stressed that we do not regard him as a special case, but as one more victim of racist laws.

Every deportation case that is won is a nail in the coffin of these laws. It is not just a question of the 250 people, who are Muhammad Idrish forced out of Britain every month.

Immigration laws hang over every black person in Britain -threatening those who stand up and fight for their rights at work and in the community.

They should be seen in the same light as Prior's and Tebbit's anti-union laws, as another attack on the ability of working class people to organise.

The Muhammad Idrish Defence Campaign says 'Stop the Deportations" ; "Repeal the Racist Laws". • We ask supporters of Socialist Organiser tr join us in our struggle.