Or so it would seem:

Some 2,000 Iraqis may be flown to Britain from next month to start a new life under a £25m government programme.

Very good news on the face of it although details are scant and I don’t like the look of that may. Let’s hope this is for reasons of these people’s safety and an unwillingness to upset core-vote Tories and their cheerleading newspapers rather than yet more political fudge and backsliding. This is worrying as well:

A Home Office spokesman said it was still at the very early stages of assessing eligibility but suggested the number of Iraqis given indefinite leave to stay in the UK could be up to 2,000.

Could be? May? And anybody with half an eye on this issue could tell you that the measures to help the Iraqi interpreters and employees have been in place for nearly five months. That being the case, why is the eligibility assessment ’still at the very early stages’? Why have only 46 cases been processed?

The post below is by Dan Hardie and is reproduced in full. Please read it, act upon it and, if you have your own blog, spread the word. This truly is a repugnant state of affairs. Thank you.

Do you like reading fine words? Here is the Prime Minister on the subject of Iraqi ex-employees of the British Government, speaking in the House of Commons on October 9th, 2007:

I would also like to take this opportunity to pay tribute to the work of our civilian and locally employed staff in Iraq, many of whom have worked in extremely difficult circumstances, exposing themselves and their families to danger. I am pleased therefore to announce today a new policy which more fully recognises the contribution made by our local Iraqi staff, who work for our armed forces and civilian missions in what we know are uniquely difficult circumstances.

Fine words. What about deeds?

A small number of Iraqis - fewer than a dozen, according to people close to the operation who are in contact with me- were removed from Iraq in the early autumn of 2007. Since the Prime Minister’s admirable declaration of October, how many Iraqi ex-employees have been evacuated from Iraq? According to all the Iraqis that I am in contact with: none.

Here are the words of an Iraqi employee in Iraq, emailing me, today: ‘I am still in Iraq…I hear nothing from your Governmet yet!’

Here is what this man was told on February 3 by a conscientious British Civil Servant, out in Iraq to arrange the evacuation of Iraqi ex-employees and clearly shocked by the lack of progress:

I’m sorry that everything is taking so long to complete. Please note that we are waiting to hear what happens next from London and I can assure you all that I will personally contact you as soon as I receive instructions from London to confirm the next arrangements.

Here is why he is hiding:

They (the militia) keep asking my relatives and my family’s neighbors about me and they keep moving in my family’s street and keep their eyes on our home… they told them: anyone know anything about A__ he should tell us immediately and also they said: we will never give up until we catch A__ .

And here is what the Right Honourable Bob Ainsworth, Minister of State for Defence, wrote to David Lidington, MP, about this same man on 16th January:

Mr Hardie expresses concern over the handling of a claim for assistance by a former employee of British Forces, Mr A_ … Mr A_ is eligible for the assistance scheme, and we have passed his details on to the Border and Immigration Agency who will take forward his request for resettlement in the UK via the Gateway programme. Assuming that there are no problems with Mr A__’s immigration checks he should be able to leave Iraq by the end of January…’

I added the emphasis, and I can also say that I have it in writing from the MoD that there were no problems with Mr A__’s immigration checks.

The Border and Immigration Agency is the Home Office Agency handling the last phase of the operation to resettle Iraqi ex-employees. And it is the BIA, according to every source of information that I have, that is delaying the evacuation of the Iraqis.

It is also supposed to be the Home Office that is co-ordinating the provision of housing to those Iraqis who do get resettled in the UK. In the House of Lords last month there was a debate on Iraq at the request of Lord Fowler, whom I had briefed on Iraqi ex-employees. Lord Chidgey, later backed by the Earl of Sandwich, asked a very pertinent question of the Foreign Office Minister Lord Malloch Brown, and he did not get a good answer: ‘…on the resettlement of Iraqis at risk under the Gateway Protection Programme, the Minister will be aware that its success is dependent on a sufficient number of local authorities participating. There is considerable concern that this is not the case at present. Will he advise what steps the Government are taking to ensure that local authorities will come forward?’

There are many operational and logistical difficulties in the way of an operation: I know that. But the Government has known about these people for at least six months, and has been publicly committed to helping them for over four months. That is enough time to plan for the difficulties- far more time than you usually get in a war.

The Home Office is dawdling while people are threatened with death.This is either incompetence in the face of a crisis, or it is a deliberate policy of putting bureaucratic obstacles in the face of fugitives. Neither is acceptable.

And beyond that, the policy itself is being used to keep out Iraqis who can prove that they worked for British forces, and who can prove that their lives are at risk as a result. One man, Hamed, worked for British forces on Shaibah Logistics Base for over two years, as the Government accepts. He was threatened by the militias, and gunmen went to his house, so he moved his family to Syria and slept on the base’s floor. He continued to work for the British. Hamed finally was given ‘notice to quit’ Shaibah when the base closed, and fled to Syria, where he cannot legally work and where he and his family are safe (so far) but hungry. The British Government knows who Hamed is. A British Army NCO who knew him has confirmed every detail of his story to me, saying that he knew that Hamed had reported the threats against him to the military authorities. The Government has written to Hamed to reject any claim for help, since he was ‘not directly employed’ by the military.

Another man, Waleed, was directly employed by the military, in 2005 and 2006. He worked as an interpreter for one Army unit for its six month tour, during which time he was fired upon and chased by militiamen as he made his way to the base; he started work for a second unit, after which he received a threat on his mobile phone detailing where he lived, what he did, and what would happen to him if he ‘collaborated’ any more. He was also hunted in Iraq, and has also fled to Syria. A British Government letter, which I have seen, informed him that he would not be assisted since he had not worked for the twelve-month period specified by the Government’s policy- which, alas, the militias do not seem to respect.

We got the Government to admit to its moral responsibilities. Now we have to get them to match their deeds to their words.

Please write a letter to your MP. His or her address is The House of Commons, Westminster, London, SW1A 0AA. If you don’t know who your constituency MP is, go here and type your postcode in. When you’ve sent a letter, follow it up with an email: his or her address will normally be SURNAMEINITIAL@parliament.uk - for example BROWNG@parliament.uk

Two or three days after you have written the letter, call the Parliamentary switchboard on 0207 219 3000 and ask for your MP’s office. Repeat your concerns to the secretary or research assistant you speak to (and be nice: most of these people work damn hard for little reward), check that your letter has been received, and politely request that the MP ask questions of Ministers and reply to you. In your email, your letter, and your phone calls, you must be courteous: insulting an MP or a research assistant will discredit this cause. Talking points for the letter are below:

• The Prime Minister announced a review of British policy towards its Iraqi ex-employees, due to the threats of murder they faced, on August 8th 2007, and he announced a change in that policy on October 9th, 2007. The Foreign Secretary made a more detailed policy statement on October 30th, 2007.
• Nearly four months later no Iraqis who have applied under the scheme have been evacuated from Iraq.
• Not one Iraqi ex-employee living as an illegal immigrant in Syria or Jordan has been resettled under the scheme.
• A debate in the House of Lords on 24 January 2008 contained several references to resettlement being blocked by the failure of the Home Office to provide housing in the UK. The Home Office has had between four and six months to plan for this eventuality: it is inexcusable that they have not done so.
• Would the MP please put down written Questions to the Home Secretary asking why the Home Office is unable to live up to the Prime Minister’s publicy expressed commitment to rehouse Iraqi ex-employees whose lives are at risk for having worked for British forces?
• Would the MP please write in private to the Home Secretary, and to the Immigration Minister, Liam Byrne MP, asking what provision their department has made to implement a policy decided in early October, and further asking them if they are aware that lives are at risk and that rapid action needs to be taken?
• Would the MP also please write to the Foreign Secretary and the Defence Secretary asking how many Iraqis who are ex-Employees of their departments have been resettled, and asking why Iraqis who are at risk for having worked for British forces are being abandoned for having ‘worked for less than 12 months’?
• Can the MP please forward these letters to the Prime Minister, who personally approved the change in policy.
• And finally, can the MP please reply to you with details of any Government response.
• If you want: you can give your MP my name and email address (danhardie.blog@gmail.com ) and tell them that I am in contact with a number of Iraqi ex-employees inside and outside Iraq, none of whom have received help from the Government, and that I would be happy to brief them with confidential details of these cases, either by telephone, email or in person at their Parliamentary offices. They should feel free to contact me.
• When you get a reply to your letter, email me (again, at danhardie.blog@gmail.com ) -it’s very important that I know which MPs are sympathetic and what the Government is telling them. And email me if you have anything else that needs saying. Thank you.

Police officers: Feeling betrayed and angry at Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition’s shameful failure to rally to your just cause and help save you from the vindictiveness of the government?

Now you know how those Iraqis employed in Basra by our government feel.

Remember a few weeks ago when someone out in the Middle East put ‘where to apply for the assistance to iraqi locally engaged staff’ into the Yahoo! search engine and found Alex Harrowell, the Yorkshire Ranter?

Well, it’s just happened to me as well.

This morning, someone in Dubai googled ‘application for the iraqi interpreters worked with uk army in basrah‘ and found me. I came higher in the rankings than Foreign Secretary David Miliband’s own blog and the actual Foreign Office instructions for Iraqi employees are nowhere to be seen in the list.

The instructions (such as they are and aren’t link to from Miliband’s blog) are here and here. I’ve been meaning to put the links up - if I’d done it sooner the person Googling today would have found them.

Anybody any ideas how we get those Foreign Office links pushed up Google’s rankings?

Imagine you are an Iraqi former employee of the British government. The death squads with their power drills might be on your doorstep at any minute.

Frantic, you turn to the internet, the Yahoo search engine of all places, and type ‘where to apply for the assistance to iraqi locally engaged staff’.

Do you find the British Foreign Office website? A dedicated website offering reassurance, advice or hope? No, you find the blog of Alex Harrowell, The Yorkshire Ranter. Now, Alex is a stand up bloke - one of the good guys - but he can’t help you.

Is help coming or is this issue, like so many unfortunate Iraqi employees, dead? Or is the plan to dawdle until there’s nobody left to rescue?

UPDATE: As Philip points out in the comments, Early Day Motion 2057, which MPs were asked to sign in support of the Iraqi Employees, has gone. Google cached it on October 19 so it’s disappeared some time in the last four days. Anyone able to provide any information?

UPDATE UPDATED: It’s back. A “technical problem” apparently. Write to your MP and ask them to sign it.

Still not fully fit and will hopefully blog on this in more detail soon (in the interim, see Dan, Davide, Robert, Sunny, Daniel, We Owe it To Them and all the other s) but need to point to this:

1. David Miliband’s written statement outlining the Government’s woefully inadequate scheme to assist its Iraqi employees past and present is here.
2. Dan Hardie has a list of talking points for another round of letters to MPs here. Ask your MP to sign Early Day Motion 2057.
3. David Miliband has written about his statement on his blog and is taking comments here. I urge you to get across there and have your say. Please be polite. I enjoy saying horrible things about government ministers as much as the next blogger but insulting them on government forums will only be harmful to this campaign.

We’ve got a foot in the door on this, we just need to keep pushing.

Mark Brockway will be appearing on Channel 4 News tonight to speak about the Iraqi Employees campaign.

Mark is a former Warrant Officer in the Territorial Royal Engineers, who ran the British Army’s Quick Impact Reconstruction Projects in 2003, when he hired a great many Iraqi staff in 2003. Mark has been in close contact with them since and knows of at least one who has been recently murdered.

To say that many of us campaigning are less than impressed with the Prime Minister’s paltry offer is an understatement. Dan Hardie spells it out: this announcement abandons people to the threat of torture and death.

Gordon pipes up at last:

Mr Speaker, I would also like to take this opportunity to pay tribute to the work of our civilian and locally employed staff in Iraq, many of whom have worked in extremely difficult circumstances exposing themselves and their families to danger.

And I am pleased therefore to announce today a new policy which more fully recognises the contribution made by our local Iraqi staff who work for our armed forces and civilian missions in uniquely difficult circumstances.

Existing staff who have been employed by us for more than twelve months and have completed their work will be able to apply for a package of financial payments to aid resettlement in Iraq or elsewhere in the region, or - in agreed circumstances - for admission to the UK. And professional staff — including interpreters and translators — with a similar length of service who have left our employ since the beginning of 2005 will also be able to apply for assistance.

We will make a further written statement on the detail of this scheme this week.

I’ll wait for the details until commenting further as I’m sure will most people. I have to say though that I really, really, really don’t like the look of that ’staff who have been employed by us for more than twelve months and have completed their work‘ proviso. Don’t put that champagne on ice yet.

See you tomorrow?

UPDATE: And this shouts out as well:

And professional staff — including interpreters and translators — with a similar length of service who have left our employ since the beginning of 2005 will also be able to apply for assistance.

I might be wrong but I’m guessing that excludes teenage laundry workers.

Urgent news for anyone coming to the meeting at Parliament tomorrow night (Tuesday October 9). Hope to see you there:

Over to Dan Hardie:

And another announcement: the meeting on Iraqi Employees will take place on the same day (Tuesday 9th October) at the same time (7-9pm) with the same speakers in a changed venue very close to the original one: the Attlee Suite in Portcullis House (MPs’ own office block, opposite Parliament). The long-suffering and highly efficient Mette Kahlin will be standing outside the door of the old venue (Committee Room 14 in Parliament) pointing the way to the new venue, which is the Attlee Suite in Portcullis House. How do you get there? Walk to Parliament and it’s the very ugly building at the corner of Bridge Street and Victoria Embankment, facing Big Ben (or St. Stephen’s Tower, if you really must). If you get lost, which you won’t, ask one of the police officers, who are actually very helpful, or just look round for the biggest eyesore. It is unmissably hideous.

Poor Mette had the job, a couple of hours ago, of telling me that - despite the fact that she booked the room back in the first week of September, despite the fact that not double-booking rooms is a task open to the simplest person capable of using something like Outlook, despite the fact that a struggling provincial hotel could manage to avoid doing something like this- a Cabinet Minister claimed that she had previously booked the room and so we were bounced out. Oh, imagine my joy. It quite took the pleasure out of learning that I was a qualified physician.

Salt in the wound: the Cabinet Minister in question is Hazel Blears. Silver lining: we can get TV crews in to film in the Attlee Suite, which we couldn’t in Committee Room 14. That’s Committee Room 14, our old venue. And of course our new venue is the Attlee Suite in Portcullis House.

If you saw The Times yesterday, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the campaign has been a success and we could all go home:

Hundreds of interpreters and their families are to be given assistance to leave Iraq, where they live under fear of death squads because they collaborated with British forces. Those wishing to remain in Iraq or relocate to neighbouring countries will be helped to resettle.

However, there has yet to be a formal announcement and the word is that the Foreign Office doesn’t know about this change in policy. As we’ve seen this week, stories spun to the media shouldn’t necessarily be taken at face value.

The speaker meeting at Parliament on October 9 (this coming Tuesday) is still going ahead. It’s still not too late to invite your MP along. The tireless Dan Hardie has all the details of what you need to do.

UPDATE: Dan Hardie: Wait and see

I have always said, when writing to Jacqui Smith and other Ministers, that to pre-announce asylum for Iraqi employees before they’d actually been taken to safety would increase the risks to them and to the British soldiers who would have to evacuate them. I hope desperately that this won’t happen. I also hope that we will see a genuine promise of resettlement for all who are identified as being seriously at risk for having worked for the British in Iraq.

It’s still not too late to get involved in the Iraqi Employees campaign. Dan Hardie, who has worked incredibly hard on all this, has some tips and a form letter for inviting MPs to the speakers meeting at Parliament on October 9 next week:

…

There will be a meeting at Parliament on Tuesday October 9th, to call for the British Government to recognise its responsibilities and give shelter to the Iraqis endangered by their work for this country’s troops and diplomats. You can invite your MP. And if you care about these people, you should.

The more MPs we get in the meeting, the better. They are not going to listen to Mark Brockway, who is getting desperate emails from the Iraqis he hired, and walk away indifferent; they are not going to listen to Richard Beeston of the Times and decide that they can ignore this. We are going to make it impossible for the Home Office to carry on with its delaying tactics.

This is how to invite your MP:

1) Find your MP: type your postcode into They work for you.

2) Copy-and-paste or better still, adapt this form invitation below (and make any changes you want, but we have to keep these letters courteous). Also; make sure that your address and postcode are on the letters

3) You can then either email it to your MP (email addresses for MPs take the form surnameinitial@parliament.uk- thus Gordon Brown is BROWNG@parliament.uk ) or you can post it to ‘MP’s name, The House of Commons, Westminster, London, SW1A 0AA.’ If you have the time, printed letters are better than emails: and it’s not that hard to write a letter, is it? If you get a bounceback from an MP’s email address, get in touch with me (danhardie.blog@gmail.com ) as I have a bunch of alternative contact details now, or -better still- write the print letter and post it. Please make sure that your address and postcode are clearly written on either emails or print letters, so that the MP realises they are dealing with one of their own constituents.

4) If you are in London on the evening of Tuesday 9th October, please come along to the meeting in person. Go to St Stephen’s entrance, facing College Green (the police tend to be helpful here) and ask for admission. There will be at least one campaigning blogger at the entrance, ready to point you in the right direction: remember the meeting starts at 7pm.

Thank you- and, hopefully, see you there.

FORM INVITATION:

Iraqi Employees of British Forces – Parliamentary Speaker Meeting, Tuesday October 9th

Dear NAME

As your constituent, I am writing on behalf of ‘We can’t turn them away’, an online campaign for resettlement for those Iraqis threatened by death squads for their work with British forces. We would like to invite you to a meeting in Committee Room 14 of the Houses of Parliament on Tuesday October 9th from 7 to 9pm .

As you may well have seen in The Times, Iraqi citizens who have worked as interpreters for British forces are being tortured and murdered by death squads for having worked with the occupying forces.

Speakers will include:

Mark Brockway (a former Warrant Officer in the Territorial Royal Engineers, who ran the British Army’s Quick Impact Reconstruction Projects in 2003, when he hired a great many Iraqi staff in 2003. Mark has been in close contact with them since and knows of at least one who has been recently murdered;

Richard Beeston, senior Foreign Correspondent for ‘The Times’ newspaper.

Ed Vaizey MP, Shadow Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport.

Lynne Featherstone MP, Liberal Democrat spokesperson for International Development.

A senior Labour MP.

A number of reporters from television, the national press and BBC Radio will attend the meeting.

This is a cross-party, moral issue, on which both opponents and supporters of the Iraq war can agree. Whilst the Government has said that it is reviewing the policy, no change has yet been made, and further delay is likely to leave Iraqi employees at the mercy of the local death squads. Attendance at this event certainly does not imply any agreement with the aims of our campaign: you are welcome to come and ask searching questions, or to send a Researcher to represent you.

If you cannot come to the meeting, I would also ask that you write to the Home Secretary, and to the Immigration Minister, Liam Byrne, asking for an explanation of why policy has not changed despite the announcement of an ‘urgent review’ of the matter on August 8th this year.

Thank you very much for your time.

…

I’ll just add two things: A personalised letter goes a lot further than a cut and pasted letter (which often just go in the bin). By all means use the excellent points from Dan but do try to tailor your letter. Secondly, you can also email your MP using WriteToThem,com.

Also a new precedent has been set. The British government have been given a lead in saving these people’s lives:

Late last night, to the amazement of refugee advocates, the Senate approved by unanimous consent an amendment by Senator Kennedy to a defense bill that will make it easier for America’s Iraqi friends to be admitted as refugees to the United States. The Administration lobbied against it this week—the talking points included complaints about infringement on executive-branch authority—but Kennedy’s office agreed to a number of compromises, and won the support of holdout Republican senators.

Hope to see you on October 9.

UPDATE: The Facebook event.

October 9 2007.

Excellent piece by Sunny on Comment is Free about the Iraqi Employees campaign, the spot of bother with Mr Usmanov, and what it all means for blogging and activism.

If you’d like to get involved with the Iraqi Employees campaign, here’s a few things you can do:

Dan Hardie was on Five Live’s Pods and Blogs slot on Monday night along with Mark Brockway, a former solider who had hired Iraqi staff while stationed out there. It was an excellent piece and Unity is hosting an MP3 of the full exchange - get over there and give it a listen.

Disturbingly, Mark Brockway tells of Iraqi employees who have managed to escape to other Middle East countries being tracked down and murdered by militias. It seems refugee status is offering no protection.

If you’d like to help, here’s what you can do.

From today’s Times:

A man said to have been an interpreter for the British Army in Basra has been killed by militia gunmen on the very day that his wife learnt she was pregnant with their first child.

Nine or ten masked men went to the home of Moayed Ahmed Khalaf in the al-Hayaniah district of Basra and beat him in front of his wife and mother, four sources told The Times. They then dragged him away, telling the frantic women that they would bring him back shortly. Khalaf’s body was found on Al Qa’ed Street later that night. He had been shot multiple times, according to Colonel Ali Manshed, commander of the Shatt-al-Arab police station.

A cousin, a close friend and two other interpreters all told The Times that Khalaf, 31, had worked for the British at their Basra airport base. Colonel Manshed said that everyone questioned by the police had said Khalaf was an interpreter, adding: “He was a good man, everyone liked him and there was no other reason to kill him.”

However Major Mike Shearer, a spokesman at the airport base, said that the army could find no record of Khalaf having worked for the army.

Here’s more links. A Radio 4 Fact The Facts documentary (RealPlayer required - a text transcript is here); a Facebook group.

I’m grateful again to my MP Celia Barlow, who has forwarded to me another response she’s had, this time from the Home Office. There’s no need to transcribe it because it is exactly the same as the responses received by Garry and Tim. Go see if you have a love of boilerplate.

(I have to add that, while I’ve had my reservations about Celia Barlow, on this matter she has been excellent. She has also said she will be attending the meeting on October 9.)

Hope to see you on October 9. If the Government would only get their act together, they could make the event redundant for any reason other than a celebratory drink.

…security force chief tells interpreters for British Army:

Iraqi interpreters working for the British Army have been advised to leave Basra or be killed.

The warning was issued by a leading member of the city’s security forces after militiamen attacked and destroyed the home of one interpreter and narrowly failed to kidnap another. There were unconfirmed reports yesterday that a third had been killed.

“All the interpreters have to leave Basra because these militia will never let them rest. They will kill everybody they know [who worked for the British],” Colonel Saleem Agaa Alzabon, who leads Basra’s special forces, said. “The interpreters have to leave. They have no choice.”

(via Dan)

Unfortunately, another escape route has been closed:

Officials of the United Nations Refugee Agency in Damascus have sounded the alarm over Syria’s new visa rules for Iraqis after a survey found the border “virtually empty” for “the first time in months, if not years.” Before Sept. 10, no visa was required to enter the country.

“The regulations effectively mean there is no longer a safe place outside for Iraqis fleeing persecution and violence,” Ron Redmond, a spokesman for the agency, said.

A spokeswoman for the U.N. High Commissioner For Refugees told Radio Free Europe that fleeing the country is now “difficult if not impossible” for many Iraqis, especially the poor.

(via Jamie)

The UK government have a moral responsibility towards these people.

Update: Garry:

Still, I’m sure the militias mean get out or die after the Prime Minister’s trilateral ministerial review to consider the options has presented recommendations to Ministers in late September. At this stage, surely the militias realise that it would not be appropriate to pre-empt the recommendations…

I’m grateful to my MP, Celia Barlow, for forwarding a letter from the office of Foreign Office minister Kim Howells on the subject of the Iraqi employees living under the shadow of the power drill.

To save me the time of typing out his response for your delectation, I’ll merely point you towards the boilerplate text received by Tim Ireland and Curious Hamster from the Home Office, the two being almost identical in content.

It’s good to see that all the various government departments working on this matter have managed to come up with a unified message for public consumption if not, you know, an actual plan for saving these people’s lives.

So, as you were. See you on October 9.

The campaign keeps rolling. If you’ve already written to your MP, write or email him or her again and this time invite them to a speaker meeting at Parliament on the second day of the new session, Tuesday 9th October.

Via Dan:

If you haven’t already written to your MP, please do so: outline what’s happening and why we should be concerned, ask them to contact the relevant Ministries (particularly the Home Office but also the Ministry of Defence and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office) and also invite them to the meeting. Talking points for both letters are here. Any blogger who has participated in this campaign is invited as is any blogreader who successfully invites their MP. Just email Dan Hardie at danhardie.blog@gmail.com and an invitation will be heading your way.

Stress to MPs that mainstream print and TV journalists will be present: that is the kind of thing that tends, for some reason, to attract them. And stress that this is the first blog-based campaign in the UK. This is how politics is going, and they need to see what it looks like.

Dan spoke to an ex-Royal Engineer yesterday who told him of an Iraqi employee murdered since this campaign began. Now that the British contingent has withdrawn to Basra Airport, we can probably expect more power-drilling, cigarette-burning and shooting of Iraqi employees. These people are dying right now. The pressure needs to be maintained on MPs and the various ministries involved.

Hope to see you on October 9.

Updated list is here.

Update: Tim and Garry get responses from the Home Office. Of a sort.

The MPs’ responses so far stand at:

Conservatives (7):
Mark Field
Michael Howard
Anne Milton
Patrick Mercer
James Paice
Ed Vaizey
Theresa Villiers

Labour (19):
Diane Abbott
Charlotte Atkins
Celia Barlow
Hugh Bayley
Alistair Darling
Wayne David
Frank Dobson
Jim Fitzpatrick
Ian Gibson
Helen Goodman
Patricia Hewitt
Sadiq Khan
David Lammy
David Lepper
Tony Lloyd
Chris Mole
Andrew Smith
Dr Rudi Vis
Paul Truswell (via Ian Clenshaw)

Lib Dems (8):
John Barrett
Malcolm Bruce
Lynn Featherstone
David Howarth
Don Foster
Greg Mulholland
Robert Smith
Stephen Williams

The campaign to help secure safe haven for the Iraqi employees of the British forces in Southern Iraq moves on apace. Thanks to the tireless Dan Hardie, Lib Dem MP Lynne ‘The letters, eh? We have all been having a lot of them and we’ve been writing to the Home Office about it’ Featherstone and Conservative MP Ed ‘My support is unconditional‘ Vaizey have agreed to co-host a at Portcullis House in October (date to be confirmed). Mr Vaizey has also offered to make public statements on behalf of the campaign.

More responses from MPs are coming in. And Philip Challinor received this from the Home Office via his MP:

Thank you for your letter to the Home Secretary of 26 July on behalf of Mr Philip Challinor. I have been asked to reply.

Mr Challinor asks us to grant asylum in the United Kingdom to locally engaged staff who have helped the British Forces in Iraq. we are extremely grateful for the service of locally employed staff in Iraq and take their security very seriously. We recognise that there are concerns about the safety of locally employed staff. We keep all such issues under review and we will now look again at the assistance we provide. The total number of Iraqis who have worked for us since 2003 with a claim to assistance could be at least 15,000. We therefore need to consider the options carefully in this genuinely complex area.

The Prime Minister has commissioned a trilateral Ministerial review to consider the options. The Home Office, Ministry of Defence and Foreign & Commonwealth Office are the members of the review group, which will present recommendations to Ministers in late September. At this stage it would not be appropriate to pre-empt the recommendations. I hope this reassures you that we are taking seriously the issues that have been raised surrounding locally employed staff working for the UK in Iraq.

(Signed) Tony McNulty, pp Meg Hillier.

The MPs response so far stand at:

Conservatives (1):
Anne Milton

Labour (15):
Celia Barlow
Hugh Bayley
Alistair Darling
Wayne David
Frank Dobson
Jim Fitzpatrick
Ian Gibson
Helen Goodman
Patricia Hewitt
Sadiq Khan
David Lammy
Chris Mole
Andrew Smith
Dr Rudi Vis
Paul Truswell (via Ian Clenshaw)

Lib Dems (4):
John Barrett
Lynn Featherstone
Don Foster
Robert Smith

Lastly, with thanks to Chris Brooke, there’s this.

The Times, August 23: Britain ready to back down on asylum for its interpreters in Iraq
The Government has accepted privately that interpreters who face persecution and death for helping British troops in Iraq must be given sanctuary in Britain.

A collection of media coverage so far of what’s happening to the Iraqi employees and their families is below the fold. (Thanks to Chris Brooke). People should feel free to cut and paste the list into their own blogs if they like.

The campaign is continuing. Please remember that this is about a wider group than the 91 interpreters that the media has largely focussed on.

If you’re able to help, here’s a few things you could do:

1. Watch the video.
2. Write to your MP. Ask them to refer your concerns to the Home Office, Foreign Office and Ministry of Defence.
3. Let us know if you get a response.
4. Join the list of supporters.
5. Spread the word. If you have a blog, why not help yourself to one of Unity’s lovely blog banners?
6. Sign the petition.

The responses from MPs currently look like this:

Conservatives (1):
Anne Milton

Labour (14):
Celia Barlow
Hugh Bayley
Wayne David
Frank Dobson
Jim Fitzpatrick
Ian Gibson
Helen Goodman
Patricia Hewitt
Sadiq Khan
David Lammy
Chris Mole
Andrew Smith
Dr Rudi Vis
Paul Truswell (via Ian Clenshaw)

Lib Dems (3):
John Barrett
Lynn Featherstone
Robert Smith

If you’ve received a reply from your MP, blog it, let me know and I’ll link to you from the list. Anyone not having a blog can send the reply here and I’ll reproduce it if you like.

More from Dan: Two teenage quislings.

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