British Airways deports LGBTQ refugees, pinkwashes

This 24 July 2018 video is called This is the incredible moment a Swedish student refused to let her plane deport a refugee 👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽

From daily The Morning Star in Britain:

Friday, August 3, 2018

Pride sponsor BA urged to stop helping deport LGBT people

BRITISH AIRWAYS has been condemned for sponsoring Britain’s biggest Pride event as it helps deport people who face persecution for their sexuality.

Activist group Lesbians & Gays Support the Migrants (LGSM) called on the airline to “stop being complicit” with the government in deporting people, as the Brighton Pride event began today.

The open letter claims the presence of firms at the event that “profit off deportations” is an affront to the vision of freedom that Pride represents.

Signatories include shadow home secretary Diane Abbott, Tottenham Labour MP David Lammy, Brighton Kemptown Labour MP Lloyd Russell-Moyle, Green Party equalities spokeswoman Aimee Challenor and British-US actor Andrew Garfield.

It said: “It is an added insult that many of those deported on British Airways are LGBTQIA+ people who should be marching with us at the parade but are instead brutally rounded up and ejected from the UK to face poverty, persecution and, in some cases, death.”

More than 50,000 people have signed an online petition calling on BA to stop helping the Home Office to deport LGBT people and people of the Windrush generation, of whom at least 63 have been wrongly deported, ministers have admitted.

The petition was started by Zita Holbourne, national chair of Black Activists Rising Against Cuts, to urge BA to follow the steps of Virgin Airlines, which announced in June that it would no longer offer seats to the Home Office to forcibly deport people deemed to be illegal immigrants.

That announcement followed a backlash over the Windrush scandal and amid pressure from campaigners in the run-up to London Pride, which Virgin sponsored.

Merchants of death BAE, not fit Pride sponsors: here.

LAWYERS for Glasgow Council are looking at ways to “supersede” the law to help refugees facing eviction, the council’s leader said yesterday. Outsourcing giant Serco, which provides accommodation for asylum-seekers on behalf of the Home Office, plans to evict up to 330 asylum-seekers in Glasgow who have failed to gain official refugee status: here.